In a more sane country, President Joe Biden would not need to form an opinion about the potential sale of U.S. Steel to Japan-based Nippon Steel—and if he did have an opinion about it, it wouldn't matter.
Unfortunately, that's not the reality we currently inhabit.
"It is important that we maintain strong American steel companies powered by American steel workers. I told our steel workers I have their backs, and I meant it," Biden said in a statement on Thursday. "U.S. Steel has been an iconic American steel company for more than a century, and it is vital for it to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated."
It remains unclear exactly what steps the White House plans to take to prevent Nippon, a publicly traded international company that already operates steel plants in the United States, from acquiring U.S. Steel. But Biden's announcement has already harmed the very company he claims to be trying to help: U.S. Steel's stock price tumbled on Thursday and fell again on Friday morning.
That should tell you something about who the winners and losers are in this situation. The deal with Nippon isn't some foreign invasion; it's a mutually beneficial deal executed with the consent of U.S. Steel's leaders. Why should they have to get permission from the president to do business?
Indeed, being bought by Nippon would potentially benefit everyone involved, from U.S. Steel's shareholders and executives all the way down to the workers in its plants. Nippon has announced plans to invest $1.4 billion in reviving U.S. Steel—potentially doing something that neither former President Donald Trump's tariffs nor Biden's blue-collar schtick has been able to accomplish.
"In many ways, the deal is a victory for Biden's attempts to revive American manufacturing," explains The Wall Street Journal. "U.S. Steel would receive an injection of capital and technology. The U.S. and Japan would together take on China's dominance in the global steel market."
Biden's opposition to the deal is partially about performative politics—about using these companies, their employees, their shareholders, their employees, and their customers, as pawns in an attempt to gain a marginal advantage in a contest for power: November's election. That's embarrassing.
It's also a decision likely swayed by cronyism. As the Journal notes, Ohio-based Cleveland Cliffs made an unsuccessful bid to buy U.S. Steel last year, and the company has been lobbying hard to get federal officials to block the U.S. Steel/Nippon deal so it can have another shot at making the purchase. That's gross.
"It's clear that President Biden's decision to come out against the deal is blatantly political," Nancy McLernon, president and CEO of the Global Business Alliance, which advocates for the interests of foreign-based businesses operating in the U.S., said in a statement. "This announcement is a snub to one of America's closest allies. Japan is the largest foreign investor in the United States and contributes heavily to the U.S. economy, providing nearly one million American jobs. Blocking this deal not only contradicts the Biden-Harris Administration's open investment policy but also risks alienating a key economic and security partner."
A few facts worth keeping in mind: Despite its name, U.S. Steel is not an extension of the federal government. If McDonald's rebranded itself as U.S. Burgers And Fries, it would still be a private company, not a part of the government subject to presidential whims.
Here's another: Despite the way the two companies are frequently described, U.S. Steel is not really an American company and Nippon is not really a Japanese one. Both are publicly traded, meaning they are owned by their shareholders, who could be located anywhere in the world. Nippon is no different than Toyota or Nintendo, both publicly traded Japan-based companies that employ Americans and have many Americans as customers. To imply differently is nothing more than politically convenient xenophobia.
Put another way, if Nintendo wanted to sign a promotional deal with McDonald's and the president declared his intention to stop it—that would be obvious government overreach and, well, pretty weird too. It's none of his business. This is the same.
It would be nice if we could chalk this up as a unique situation driven by the combination of U.S. Steel's iconic (and confusing) branding and Biden's desire to court favor with blue-collar voters before the election.
Unfortunately, this seems like part of a disturbing bipartisan trend. Under the guidance of Biden-appointee Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has attempted to block several proposed mergers as she's tried to reshape and enlarge the FTC's role in regulating such deals. The Biden administration's Department of Justice played a big role in blocking a potential airline merger earlier this year.
Meanwhile, prominent Republicans like Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) have signaled support for Biden's intervention in the U.S Steel/Nippon deal and applauded the more activist role of the FTC under Khan's tenure. Vance is reportedly a leading contender to be named Donald Trump's vice presidential pick, potentially giving him an even greater platform to demand governmental control over private businesses' decisions. (Vance, it is also worth noting, represents the state where Cleveland Cliffs is headquartered. Perhaps that's why he's conveniently forgotten that foreign investment in American industries can be a boon for American workers, something he wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy.)
Even the recent, bipartisan attempt to ban TikTok—or to force its sale, possibly to former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin—shares similar elements of government overreach and blatant cronyism that are apparent in the U.S. Steel situation.
This is all madness. Private companies shouldn't need to hire armies of lobbyists to gain approval from the president and Congress before engaging in business deals. While there may be some narrow role for government to play in preventing consolidation that creates monopolies, that's obviously not a factor in the U.S. Steel deal (nor the TikTok situation)—nor is Biden even attempting to pretend that it is. He's simply intervening because he doesn't like the idea of a nominally American steel company being purchased by a nominally Japanese one. That's completely inappropriate.
Biden and Vance are allowed to voice their opinions about the U.S. Steel/Nippon deal, of course, but no one should be forced to give a hoot what they think.
The post The U.S. Steel/Nippon Deal Should Be None of Joe Biden's Business appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Columbus, Ohio, police officers John Castillo and Joel Mefford have been charged with possessing with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine. Mefford has also been charged with money laundering and two counts of possessing with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine. Prosecutors said the men stole cocaine from people they were investigating and gave it to others to sell.
The post Brickbat: There for the Taking appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Ohio law requiring that people under age 16 get parental permission to use social media is unconstitutional, a federal judge held this week.
On Monday, U.S. Judge Algenon Marbley told Ohio's attorney general not to enforce the law against tech industry group NetChoice or any of its members—a group that includes all sorts of major U.S. tech companies, including Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok. While this week's ruling is just a preliminary injunction, Marbley's opinion leaves little room for doubt that the tech companies will ultimately win here.
Marbley's ruling is the latest in a string of federal court orders against state laws intended to limit minors' social media or require platforms to follow special rules for users under the age of 18. Meanwhile, similar measures are still spreading like a bad viral meme throughout U.S. statehouses.
Ohio's "Parental Notification by Social Media Operators" law was passed last summer, following the passage of similar legislation in Utah and Arkansas. It requires many websites and apps to get consent from parents or guardians before allowing anyone under age 16 to sign up. Companies that fail to do this could be sued by the state's attorney general and face fines.
The Ohio law—which was slated to take effect on January 15, 2024—is part of a wave of attempts to childproof the internet through mechanisms like checking IDs for people who want to use social media or visit adult websites, raising the minimum age for opening a social media account, requiring minors to prove they have their parents' consent to use social media, and banning the use of certain social media features for users under a certain age.
Of course, applying specific rules to minors means tech companies must verify the ages and identities of all users. You or I might not need parental permission to use TikTok, but we would need to first prove we are old enough to get around that step.
For a good overview of the issues with online age-check laws, see this series from the R Street Institute's Shoshana Weissmann. She points out myriad downsides and unintended consequences, including the fact that these laws violate privacy, make people vulnerable to hackers and hostile governments, discourage data minimization (even when they sometimes purport to do the opposite), threaten our First Amendment right to anonymity, interfere with parental choice, risk criminalizing kids who try to outsmart them, and sometimes ban features—like algorithms—that actually make platforms more useful and safe.
"Like other States before it, Ohio has unconstitutionally tried to limit certain minors' access to protected and valuable speech on the Internet," argued NetChoice in a complaint filed in January. The group argues that Ohio's parental consent for social media law is unconstitutional in multiple ways.
The law interferes with minors' right to access and engage in protected speech, it "baldly discriminates among online operators based on the type of speech they publish," and its provisions are also "unconstitutionally vague," NetChoice argued. For these reasons, it violates the First Amendment rights of Ohioans under age 16 and the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of tech companies.
The law would apply to online entities that allow users to interact socially, construct profiles, and create or post content when such an entity "targets children, or is reasonably anticipated to be accessed by children"—a rather porous category. "Websites have no way to know what this means," NetChoice argued in its complaint.
Further complicating compliance and understanding, Ohio's legislature exempted sites where "interaction between users is limited" to e-commerce reviews or to comments on content "posted by an established and widely recognized media outlet" that primarily reports news and current events.
These parameters mean review forums focused on products for sale online wouldn't have to get parental consent, but platforms dedicated to other types of reviews would. Likewise, "established" or "widely recognized" media focused on news or current events wouldn't have to get parental consent, but newer, lesser known, or mixed-purpose media platforms would. This exception discriminates against non-news content, "such as literature, art, history, or religion," argued NetChoice. "Thus, 15-year-olds must secure parental consent to join web forums devoted to United States history, but not to comment on contemporary news stories."
Ohio Attorney General David Yost argued in response that the law didn't concern speech at all but the right to contract, and that this fell within the state's authority to regulate commercial transactions.
This is a common tactic with authorities when it comes to speech restrictions involving social media or internet platforms. Rather than outright banning speech, they'll put burdensome restrictions on it and then argue that since the law focuses on contracts, or paperwork collection (as in the case of a new federal porn bill), or product design or some such thing, the First Amendment couldn't possibly apply.
Judge Marbley does not seem persuaded by Yost's argument. After issuing a temporary restraining order prohibiting enforcement against NetChoice or its member groups back in January, Marbley this week granted NetChoice's motion for a preliminary injunction, extending that temporary block on enforcement as the case plays out.
"The Act regulates speech in multiple ways: (1) it regulates operators' ability to publish and distribute speech to minors and speech by minors; and (2) it regulates minors' ability to both produce speech and receive speech," wrote Marbley, adding that there is no "contract exception" to free speech rights.
"In the State's view, the Act is a regulation striking at the commercial aspect of the relationship between social media platforms and their users, not the speech aspect of the relationship," noted Marbley. "But this Court does not think that a law prohibiting minors from contracting to access to a plethora of protected speech can be reduced to a regulation of commercial conduct." Thus, the judge agreed with NetChoice that the law restricts minors' First Amendment rights.
To come to this determination, Marbley cited a Supreme Court case concerning video games (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association), in which the justices wrote that even if "the state has the power to enforce parental prohibitions," it didn't follow "that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents' prior consent." Laws that do so do not "enforce parental authority over children's speech and religion; they impose governmental authority, subject only to a parental veto," the justices wrote in that case.
The judge also agreed with NetChoice that the law represents a content-based regulation, which makes it subject to a more strict level of scrutiny than regulations that are not. Interestingly, the judge reached this conclusion in part because the law targets sites with particular functions. "Functionalities allowing users to post, comment, and privately chat—in other words, to connect socially online—may very well be conveying a message about 'the type of community the platform seeks to foster,'" wrote Marbley (citing a case in which NetChoice challenged a Texas social media law). "The features that the Act singles out are inextricable from the content produced by those features" and thus "the Act's distinction on the basis of these functionalities" is content-based.
Subjecting the law to strict scrutiny means that in order for it to be OK, it must further a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored to that end. But while the state says it's out to protect minors from dangerous contracts, "the Act is not narrowly tailored to protect minors against oppressive contracts," wrote Marbley. The judge also rejected the idea that the act is narrowly tailored to other areas that may or may not be considered compelling government interests, such as protecting kids' mental health.
"Foreclosing minors under sixteen from accessing all content on websites that the Act purports to cover, absent affirmative parental consent, is a breathtakingly blunt instrument for reducing social media's harm to children," wrote Marbley. "The approach is an untargeted one, as parents must only give one-time approval for the creation of an account, and parents and platforms are otherwise not required to protect against any of the specific dangers that social media might pose."
Lastly, the court found that the law's provisions are "troublingly vague" with regard to which websites are subject to it. Terms like "reasonably anticipated to be accessed by children," or established" and "widely recognized" media outlets, do not precisely describe whether or not a particular website or media outlet is subject to the law's rules, and "such capacious and subjective language practically invites arbitrary application of the law."
Marbley's recent ruling is the latest blow to the legislative trend of requiring age checks for social media, parental consent for minors to use social media, or other regulations targeting teens and social media use. Some of these decisions have been quite bold in their rebukes, too.
In August, a federal judge held that Arkansas' law to this effect likely violated the First Amendment. "Requiring adult users to produce state-approved documentation to prove their age and/or submit to biometric age-verification testing imposes significant burdens on adult access to constitutionally protected speech," wrote Judge Timothy Brooks in his decision. Furthermore, "a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."
In September, a federal court in California halted enforcement of the state's "Age-Appropriate Design Code" (CAADCA), in another case where the state tried to argue that the rules didn't regulate speech but conduct—collecting and using data. Among other things, implementation of the code would have required that tech companies use "age estimation" techniques that would be invasive to all users' privacy or else treat all users as children.
Alas, these rulings don't seem to have dampened enthusiasm for this sort of legislation, however. So many states are now considering online age-check proposals that it's hard to keep track of them all.
Some of these—like bills under consideration in Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia—would require people to verify their ages before visiting sites featuring adult content such as pornography.
Others would require social media users to verify their ages, ban children from signing up for accounts, require parental consent for people under 18 or 16 years old, or set up specific social media features that couldn't be made available to minors. In the past several months, social media restrictions bills like these have been introduced in Florida, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Utah, which passed the first of these laws last year and is trying to get out of defending it in court, is also considering a revised version.
The Pennsylvania bill is particularly egregious. It would "require social media companies to monitor the chats of two or more minors on the platform and notify parents or legal guardians of flagged sensitive or graphic content," per a press release from the state's Democratic Caucus.
How many times will tech and civil liberties groups have to fight measures like these in court? I guess we're about to find out.
"This is the fourth ruling NetChoice has obtained, demonstrating that this law and others like it in California and Arkansas not only violate constitutional rights, but if enacted, would fail to achieve the state's goal of protecting kids online," said Chris Marchese, Director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, in an emailed statement. "We look forward to seeing these laws permanently struck down and online speech and privacy fully protected across America."
The post Kids Have First Amendment Rights Too, Federal Judge Reminds State Lawmakers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal judge has ruled that Trumbull County, Ohio, officials violated the rights of Niki Frenchko, the only Republican member of the county Board of Commissioners, when they had her arrested during a commissioners' meeting. Frenchko was arrested for criticizing the sheriff, Paul Monroe, for a death in the jail. She was charged with trying to "prevent or disrupt a lawful meeting" under a law that prohibits speech that "outrages the sensibilities of the group." The charge was later dropped. The other commissioners, Monroe, and the deputies who arrested Frenchko were found personally liable. A hearing will be held later to determine damages.
The post Brickbat: Power Mad appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The owner of a house mistakenly raided by the police, resulting in an injury to a 17-month-old living in the house, said she has told police repeatedly that the man they were looking for did not live there and had never lived there. Shivani Tiwari of Medina, Ohio, said she first heard of the man when police approached her as she prepared the home for a new tenant to move in. She said she let the cops inside to see the place was empty and told them she didn't recognize any of the names they asked about. She later gave them contact information for previous tenants when they asked for it. She said police later returned when she called about threats from a neighbor and when the tenant filed a protective order. "On multiple occasions, police have visited that property. How could you not know who's living there?" she said. "They had the opportunity to verify the identity of people living in the property."
The post Brickbat: Nobody Home appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After Alabama's grisly nitrogen hypoxia execution of inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith last week, it looks like another state may adopt the method in a bid to resume executing inmates after lethal injection drugs have become nearly impossible to obtain.
The bill, not yet named, was introduced in Ohio's House of Representatives on Tuesday, and state Attorney General Dave Yost has already given his support. It would allow inmates to choose between lethal injection and nitrogen hypoxia but would require nitrogen when lethal injection drugs aren't available.
The latter is the exact situation Ohio has found itself in during recent years. The state hasn't killed a death row inmate since 2018, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine went so far in 2020 as to say that lethal injection was "impossible from a practical point of view today" due to difficulty finding drugs.
But death by nitrogen hypoxia still brings major concerns for inmate suffering. The method, which involves placing a tight-fitting mask over the inmate's face and slowly replacing oxygen with nitrogen, causing death by suffocation, is experimental. Smith, who was pronounced dead after about 15 minutes of being forced to breathe only nitrogen last Thursday, is believed to be the first person in the world executed in this way. While Alabama prison officials claimed that the execution went as planned, witnesses reported that Smith "struggled against his restraints" and "shook and writhed on a gurney."
The details of Smith's death haven't held back Ohio Republicans, who seem to view the execution method as a useful way to end the state's six-year execution moratorium.
"There must be accountability for offenders convicted of the most heinous crimes and prisoners who continue to flout the law behind bars," Yost said in a Tuesday press release. "The pursuit of justice is a journey, and closure remains elusive for victims' families until a sentence is fully executed. Ensuring that the consequences align with the severity of an offense is essential to providing solace to grieving relatives."
Rep. Brian Stewart (R–Ashville), who introduced the bill, echoed Yost's comments, arguing, "As long as capital punishment remains the law in Ohio, the law should be followed." Stewart added that "providing an additional method for carrying out capital punishments is necessary to ensure Ohio can continue to impose these sentences in response to the most heinous crimes committed in our state."
For opponents of the death penalty, many of whom have viewed the increasing difficulty of sourcing lethal injection drugs as a sign that the practice may be waning in the United States, the introduction of nitrogen hypoxia executions is troubling news. If states follow Alabama's lead and begin executing their death row inmates by suffocation rather than hard-to-source drugs, it's possible that executions could rise in the coming years.
The post Alabama Killed an Inmate With an Experimental Execution Method. Ohio Could Be Next. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>All investment is risky. What better way to avoid that risk than to use other people's money? Federal, state, and local governments dispense gifts, grants, and loans to private companies, generously funded by taxpayers and usually with vague promises of economic development in return. While politicians say they don't like to pick winners and losers, even the "winners" sometimes turn out to be losers for taxpayers.
General Motors I.T.
Innovation Center
Chandler, Arizona
General Motors announced in 2013 that it had picked Chandler for the site of its fourth Information Technology Innovation Center, an internal software development facility. The company would invest $21 million and create 1,000 jobs, and in return Chandler promised over $1 million in economic incentives between 2015 and 2017. In August 2023, G.M. announced that it would close the facility, laying off 940 out of 1,029 workers by the end of October. Chandler's development director told local news that the announcement "came as a complete surprise."
Lordstown Motors
Lordstown, Ohio
Amid the financial crisis in 2009, General Motors (G.M.) received $60 million in tax breaks to expand its Lordstown plant. All the company had to do was keep the plant open through at least 2039; instead, G.M. closed the plant in 2019. Rather than claw back the full amount, the Ohio government settled for a $20 million repayment. G.M. then sold the factory to upstart electric vehicle–maker Lordstown Motors, which received another $24.5 million in grants and tax credits. In June 2023, after delivering fewer than 40 vehicles to customers, Lordstown Motors filed for bankruptcy.
Tesla and SolarCity
Buffalo, New York
In 2013, New York pledged as much as $1 billion toward economic development projects to revitalize Buffalo as a manufacturing hub. The largest beneficiary was SolarCity, a solar panel manufacturer later acquired by Tesla in 2016. The state offered $1.25 billion in grants and tax credits in exchange for a factory that would create 5,000 jobs and generate 1,000 solar panel installations per week. But in 2023, after eight years of lowered job requirements and shifting deadlines, the factory employed just 1,700 people (mostly Tesla analysts) and averaged 21 solar panel installs per week.
Yellow Corporation
Overland Park, Kansas
In 2020, the Treasury Department was apportioned $17 billion in pandemic relief funds to disburse to companies it deemed vital to national security. It loaned $700 million of those funds to Yellow Corporation, a freight trucking company worth only $70 million that had lost $104 million the prior year. According to an audit released in 2023, Yellow had an outstanding balance of $729 million in March and had paid only a measly $230 toward the loan's principal. Yellow filed for bankruptcy in August 2023.
Amazon HQ2
Arlington, Virginia
When Amazon announced plans in 2017 to open a second headquarters ("HQ2"), it encouraged "local and state government leaders" to compete for the project. After receiving several multibillion-dollar offers, Amazon chose Arlington—directly adjacent to Washington, D.C. The state offered as much as $750 million in conditional grants for Amazon to build its campus in Virginia, and in April 2023, the company requested its first tranche of taxpayer funds—over $152 million. While phase one of the project was completed in May 2023, construction is paused indefinitely on phase two.
The post The Government Is Better at Picking Losers Than Winners appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Housing news happens all across the country, but this week's Rent Free is a little more California-centric. Our stories include:
But first, our lead story about zoning laws once again coming for the Good Samaritan.
Since March 2023, Chris Avell's church, Dad's Place, in Bryan, Ohio, has been keeping its doors open 24/7 for anyone who might stop by to use the church's kitchen, get food for themselves or their pets from its pantry, or join in church services.
When the homeless shelter next door is full, Dad's Place will take in some of those people too. Avell considers all these activities a core part of his church's mission. The city of Bryan, however, considers his sheltering of people an illegal, residential use of a commercially zoned property.
This past New Year's Eve, when Avell was arriving at the church to preach that Sunday morning, a police officer served him with 18 criminal charges related to violations of the town's zoning code. Avell pleaded not guilty to those charges earlier this month.
Churches' charitable activities often don't fit neatly into zoning codes' definitions of commercial and residential uses. For that reason, they often get dinged with code violations for doing things like operating a soup kitchen in a residential area or sheltering people in a commercial zone.
The fact that churches are also serving the poor and homeless can make them a target of nuisance complaints from neighbors and extra scrutiny and enforcement from local officials as well.
Bryan's decision to criminally charge Avell is nevertheless unusually punitive.
"It's a rarity that a city and a mayor would press criminal charges against a church period. I'm not aware of a mayor anywhere in the country prosecuting a pastor for having his church open. That seems to be the very definition of religious discrimination," says Jeremey Dys, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute who is representing Avell.
City officials hit Dad's Place with an escalating series of complaints before it filed criminal charges.
In early November 2023, city police and fire personnel visited Dad's Place, where they interrogated people inside and recorded a number of alleged violations of the zoning and fire code. They gave the church 10 days to fix the code violations and stop letting people use the church as a residence.
After those ten days had expired, the city's zoning administrator also visited the church, where he observed more allegedly illegal residential activity including people sleeping in chairs and makeshift bedrooms and preparing food in the church's kitchen. The administrator's report recommended charges be filed against Avell.
Dys argues that the city is using an unfairly narrow definition of what counts as church activity to persecute Avell and Dad's Place.
"It may not look like St. Paul's cathedral, but it is in every sense a church," he says. "Mayor [Carrie] Schlade has in her mind that churches meet at 10 a.m. to noon on a Sunday morning and then they lock the doors and go away for the rest of the week."
The city objects to the idea that they're discriminating against Dad's Place.
"Pastor Avell never requested, nor was approval given, to use Dad's Place as a residence or homeless shelter. The city enforces its zoning code equally against all. A church does not have special rights under the zoning code," reads a city press release from last week.
A subsequent fire department investigation this month also discovered a gas leak and other fire code violations, says the press release.
Dys says that the church is eager to provide a safe environment but that city officials are unfairly targeting Dad's place and that they are giving the city shifting demands on what needs to be done to the building. He notes that the pastor of the previous church that had occupied Dad's Place's building lived on site.
Attempts to negotiate with the city have gone nowhere, says Dys. "It's been 'kick everyone out and then we'll talk'."
Beverley Hills, California, property owners are the collateral casualties in a war between the city and activists suing over its failure to allow new housing construction.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge had blocked the city from issuing new building permits for projects that don't add new housing. That means anyone in Beverly Hills wanting to expand their business or dig a pool in their backyard now can't.
The order comes in a lawsuit brought by the non-profit Californians for Homeownership against Beverly Hills for adopting what they allege is a housing production plan that doesn't meet state requirements.
For background, California gives cities targets of how many housing units they should be permitting to keep up with job and population growth. Localities are required to produce "housing elements" outlining where this new housing can go. The state reviews and certifies these housing elements.
One trick cities have long used to perfunctorily comply with the law while avoiding actually having to allow new housing is to identify existing, profitable businesses as the site of future housing. The city can say it's planned for new housing, even though it's exceedingly unlikely the business will actually be redeveloped.
State housing officials accused Beverly Hills of doing just this when it submitted a draft housing element for review. When Beverly Hills went ahead and adopted the housing element, Californians for Homeownership sued the city.
Courts have a lot of discretion to craft remedies and block cities' ability to issue permits if they're out of step with state housing law, says Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But they've generally used these powers sparingly. A complete moratorium on all building permits, but for those that involve adding new housing, is possibly unprecedented, he tells Reason.
Pro-development "yes in my backyard" (YIMBY) legislators and activists have cheered the ruling.
"Ignoring state housing law has consequences," said California Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) on X (formerly Twitter).
To be sure, the city has invited these consequences by flouting pretty clear warnings from state officials about the inadequacy of its housing element. It's true too that Beverly Hills' restrictions on new housing production crush property owners' ability to improve their land and make the city more unaffordable than it otherwise would be.
Still, the people suffering consequences of Beverly Hills' NIMBYism and irresponsibility aren't really the city government but residents who don't have any direct ability to force their city government to do anything.
Supporters of the courts' moratorium say an inability to get permits will encourage these residents to pressure their local leaders to get into compliance with state law. That also strikes me as overreach. It's an attempt to coerce people into supporting local policy changes by taking away their private rights to improve their property.
Far away from Southern California's wealth, growth-hostile enclaves, development company California Forever has released the language of a proposed ballot initiative it'll need to pass to build a new, urbanist-inspired city in rural Solano County.
The 83-page initiative, which is intended to appear on the November 2024 county ballot, would amend the county's existing zoning laws and urban growth boundaries to allow a new community on 18,600 acres of land owned by California Forever's subsidiary company Flannery Associates.
The initiative would require the company to abide by a number of community benefits agreements—including paying $500 million for scholarships, affordable housing, and parks, as well as another $200 million to invest in existing downtown areas in the county's existing communities.
The California Forever plan for a new city has been controversial since before it was even unveiled. The mysterious Flannery Associates' land acquisitions led to lawsuits between existing landowners and the company. Congress held hearings on whether the company's land purchases near Travis Air Force Base was some sort of Chinese spy plot.
The New York Times eventually uncovered that the land purchases were not an act of espionage, but something even more insidious: a tech-billionaire-backed plan to build a whole new city.
The company has done its best to frame its new city plans as something sustainable and desirable, but not necessarily radical. "All cities were once 'new' cities," California Forever says in some of the pitch material on its website.
California Forever's plans have received a frosty reception from Solano County residents in community meetings thus far. Should it pass, the ballot initiative would also require an exacting level of environmental review to be done of the proposed new community. That could open up the company and the county to years of environmental litigation from project opponents claiming this or that environmental impact wasn't studied enough.
Speaking of excessive litigation, neighborhood activists in Alexandria, Virginia, have filed a lawsuit to undo a suite of zoning reforms the city passed late last year.
The suburban D.C. community's reforms allowed at least four units on all residential lots, housing in industrial zones, reduced parking minimums near transit, and expanded a density bonus program for affordable housing.
A lawsuit filed by the Coalition for a Livable Alexandria and several individual members, and posted online by WTOP, claims the city failed to show that allowing more housing in the city will improve housing affordability. By not establishing that link, the city had acted in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner, they argue.
The group's lawsuit also argues that the zoning reforms violate the Virginia Constitution's equal protection guarantees because they leave private restrictive covenants in place. Anti-development activists managed to block Montana's zoning reforms using that same argument.
The Livable Alexandria lawsuit also seems to argue there's an equal protection violation inherent in upzoning single-family neighborhoods because some single-family homeowners are black. The city's abolition of single-family zoning "deprives Plaintiff Phylius Burks, an African American, of equal protection by moving the goal post as to land ownership after Plaintiff Phylius Burk purchased a single-family home" reads the lawsuit.
We'll have to wait and see if that argument sticks.
The occupancy limits of Fort Collins, Colorado, allow a family to live with an exchange student or a nanny. A family living with an exchange student and a nanny is prohibited. Maybe this is why more sitcoms aren't set there.
The post Zoning Bans the Good Samaritan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the eastern Ohio village of McConnelsville, hundreds of workers convene every morning at a pair of factories that manufacture ball bearings and do sintering, a key component in the steelmaking process.
It's the sort of blue-collar work that's stereotypical of that part of the country—and that's lauded by politicians in both major parties as patriotic and essential, not just because it lets workers feed their families, but because it says something fundamental about America.
And all that happens because of a foreign company.
The two factories in McConnelsville are owned by Miba, an Austria-based multinational manufacturing firm. Miba bought an existing ball bearing plant in McConnelsville in 2001 then built the sinter plant next door in 2010.
Why isn't Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio.) outraged by this?
Vance, you may recall, was angered by the announcement last month that Japan-based Nippon Steel had reached a deal to buy U.S. Steel—which, despite its name, is a publicly traded company and not a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government.
That deal, according to Vance, meant that "a critical piece of America's defense industrial base was auctioned off to foreigners for cash." He vowed to "do everything in my power" to block the transaction between the two private companies.
Vance is not alone in raising objections to the deal. Sens. Bob Casey (D–Pa.), John Fetterman (D–Pa.), Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), and Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) have criticized it as well, and White House National Economic Adviser Lael Brainard has promised to scrutinize to deal and "act if appropriate."
It's either performative outrage or else Vance needs to add a lot more businesses to his personal burn book. Indeed, companies based outside the United States employed 7.9 million Americans in 2021, according to the most recent data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. That includes over 2.8 million American manufacturing workers.
In Vance's home state of Ohio, over 300,000 workers earn paychecks from companies based overseas—and about half of them (151,300) work in the manufacturing sector. That includes the folks making ball bearings and sintering in McConnelsville.
Across the border in Fetterman and Casey's home state of Pennsylvania, foreign companies employ 333,500 workers, including 114,400 in the manufacturing sector.
Thanks to the BEA's data, we also know that about 69,000 Ohioans, 27,000 Pennsylvanians, and over 963,000 Americans overall are employed by companies based in Japan. In Ohio and across the country as a whole, Japanese companies employ more Americans than companies based in any other country—a reflection of the long and mutually beneficial economic relationship between the two allies.
There's also nothing novel about a foreign-based company operating steel mills in the United States. As Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative, points out in a post for the Progressive Policy Institute: One of the largest steel plants in the country is the Calvert mill in Alabama. It was built by a German company, Thyssen-Krupp, and is currently operated as a joint venture between Luxembourg-based Arcelor-Mittal and, yes, Nippon Steel.
Surely, Vance knows that foreign investment in the United States isn't something to be feared or blocked but welcomed. As I pointed out last month, Vance's best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy literally contains a story about how investments by a Japan-based company, Kawasaki, benefitted Vance's hometown of Middletown, Ohio.
Vance's performative populism might be good politics—he's reportedly on former President Donald Trump's shortlist as a possible running mate this year—but it is poor ground for making economic policy.
The post Over 300,000 Ohioans Are Employed by Foreign Companies. Why Isn't J.D. Vance Outraged? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In Chapter 4 of Hillbilly Elegy, the Rust Belt memoir that launched his political career, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) relates a story about the time that Kawasaki bought out Armco, the steel-making company that once employed Vance's "Papaw."
Kawasaki is, of course, based in Japan. At first, Papaw and the other residents of Middletown, Ohio—described by Vance as "a town full of World War II vets and their families—react to the news as if "General [Hideki] Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio." Once the initial fervor dies down, however, Papaw and the rest of the Middletown community recognize that the foreign company's investment in their local community can be a good thing. "The Japanese are our friends now," Papaw tells Vance.
"The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world," Vance writes. "If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown's flagship company probably would not have survived without it."
There's another lesson that a reader might draw from Papaw's reaction to the Kawasaki takeover as well: It doesn't make much sense to apply geopolitical thinking to the world of business. Yes, the Japanese are "our friends now," but there's also a world of difference between an imperial war machine and a multinational corporation that wants to pay you wages for work.
On Monday, another Japan-based company, Nippon Steel, announced that it would be purchasing another struggling American steelmaking company, U.S. Steel, in a deal reportedly worth $14.1 billion.
Upon hearing the news, Vance did not exactly follow his Papaw's example. "Today, a critical piece of America's defense industrial base was auctioned off to foreigners for cash," thundered Vance in an official statement. "Rest assured that I will interrogate the long-term implications for the American people, and I will do everything in my power to protect the future of our nation's security, industry, and workers."
It seems that Vance has forgotten that the Japanese are our friends now, not shady "foreigners" invading crucial American industries. Perhaps he's also unaware that Nippon Steel has operated in the United States for 40 years, and that the company already owns two smaller American-based steelmakers: Standard Steel and Wheeling Nippon Steel, according to Reuters.
Maybe he can pick up a copy of Hillbilly Elegy and learn that other lesson too. There's absolutely no reason to apply silly geopolitical thinking to this transaction, especially when both U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel are publicly traded companies. One has a headquarters in the United States and the other has a headquarters in Japan, yes, but the truth is that both companies are owned by their shareholders—and literally anyone in the world can buy shares in either.
(Cynically, one might note that the Nippon deal means U.S. Steel won't be sold to Cleveland-Cliffs, another major steelmaker that had been aiming to acquire its rival. Cleveland-Cliffs, of course, is headquartered in Vance's home state of Ohio.)
Vance's reaction to the U.S. Steel announcement did serve one productive purpose, however. It is yet another illustration of how the populist right is merely recycling the flawed economic policy ideas of the far left.
For example, here's how progressive Sen. John Fetterman (D–Penn.) reacted to the news: "It's absolutely outrageous that [U.S. Steel] have sold themselves to a foreign nation," Fetterman said in a video recorded, somewhat bizarrely, on the roof of his house. "I am committed to doing anything I can do, from using my platform or my position, in order to block this."
If those statements were swapped, would you be able to tell the difference? Fetterman and Vance engage in the exact same set of fallacies, using almost exactly the same words to engage in some light xenophobia and some promises of heavy-handed government action.
Unsurprisingly, prominent figures of the so-called "New Right" jumped to praise Fetterman. "I'm starting to like this guy a lot," Compact magazine founder Sohrab Ahmari posted on X (formerly Twitter), referencing Fetterman's video statement.
This is all quite silly. America's interests are not served by having two supposedly rival political movements committed to seeing foreign investment as a threat to the country's sovereignty or American workers.
The good news is that the people on the ground—the Papaws of this story—seem to get it. "Don Furko, president of a union local in Clairton, Pa., said he was hopeful that new owners will add more workers in the region," The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Meanwhile, both "U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel said they would honor existing contracts with union-represented workers, and that the companies agreed on the importance of investing in employees," the Journal added.
Nippon Steel is not personally owned and controlled by the ghost of General Tojo. It's a successful, publicly traded corporation with a long history of paying Americans wages for work. There's nothing sinister about this. Conservatives, especially, should understand the inevitable problems that result from mixing up geopolitics and businesses, as it only creates more opportunities for the government to stick its nose where it doesn't belong.
Maybe Vance needs another lesson from his Papaw.
The post What J.D. Vance Could Learn From Reading <em>Hillbilly Elegy</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A former Ohio vice cop accused of demanding sex from women in exchange for their freedom has pleaded guilty on federal charges related to kidnapping, after being cleared earlier this year of murder and voluntary manslaughter charges in a similar but separate incident.
Andrew Mitchell, a longtime officer with the Columbus Division of Police, has pleaded guilty to two counts of deprivation of rights under color of law and one count of obstruction of justice. Prosecutors have recommended he be sentenced to seven to 11 years in federal prison.
The behavior that got Mitchell here is exactly the kind of thing sex workers worry and warn about when prostitution is criminalized. Mitchell picked up sex workers—either under the guise of being a client or of being a cop checking for outstanding warrants—and then used his position as a police officer to terrorize them.
In July 2017, Mitchell picked up a sex worker and "told the victim he was a police officer and acted as if he were doing a check for any outstanding warrants on the victim," per a December 7 press release the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio. "Mitchell used this ruse to handcuff the victim to the doorknob of his vehicle. He drove the victim to a nearby parking lot with multiple dumpsters and forcible [sic] held and detained the victim against her will before dropping her off at her boyfriend's residence."
Later that year, Mitchell picked up another sex worker and "began discussing the victim's rates for sexual activity before announcing that he was an officer with the vice unit and said she was going to jail," according to the U.S. Attorney's office. "Mitchell kidnapped the victim and drove her to Lindbergh Park, holding her against her will."
The prosecutors' latest statement doesn't elaborate on what happened during these abductions. (It's likely that as part of Mitchell's plea deal, he only admitted to the kidnapping and not to sexual assault; because Mitchell's plea is under seal, I'm unable to determine for sure). But the allegations against him in the government's original and superseding indictments (and initial statements) went into more detail.
Mitchell was indicted on federal charges in 2019 and stood accused of forcing victims to engage in sex acts—including oral, vaginal, and anal sex—in order to get free. Additionally, Mitchell was charged with witness tampering, lying to the FBI, and obstruction of justice.
On the last charge—which Mitchell pleaded guilty to—he was accused of having people "remov[e] and dispos[e] of potential evidence from" a rental apartment of his and of having them clean out the property "with bleach and other chemicals."
Mitchell initially pleaded not guilty and, after several continuances, a trial was set to start in January 2024. But earlier this month, Mitchell changed his plea from not guilty on all counts to guilty on three of the eight federal counts against him.
Earlier this year, a jury acquitted Mitchell on state charges of murder and voluntary manslaughter. But the federal case and Mitchell's plea in it adds some damning context to these state charges.
In August 2018, Mitchell fatally shot 23-year-old Donna Castleberry while she was trapped in his car. Mitchell claimed that the shooting was in self-defense.
Castleberry was reportedly working as a sex worker when Mitchell—in plain clothes—picked her up in an unmarked police car and drove her to a location where her side of the car was up against a brick wall, blocking her way out. Mitchell told her he was a cop and this was a prostitution sting, according to Mitchell's testimony, but he was unable to show Castleberry his police badge and she began yelling for help and asking passersby to call 911 before trying to flee. Eventually, she slashed Mitchell's hand with a pocket knife and he fired six rounds at her, with three of them hitting her.
Mitchell was charged with murder and voluntary manslaughter. A jury in the first trial, in 2022, couldn't reach a unanimous verdict. The case went to trial again this year and, in April, a jury returned a not-guilty verdict, apparently believing Mitchell's story that he shot Castleberry in self-defense.
Mitchell's version of the story seems somewhat suspect, even without knowing any of the other allegations against him. Why didn't he just leave the car? She was the one trapped, not him. Why—as the prosecution pointed out at trial—did a forensic examination show Mitchell had his "hand over (the driver's seat) … getting closer to Donna" as he shot, and that he waited more than 45 seconds after she cut him to fire? And even if utilizing his gun seemed necessary, how could firing six times be the most reasonable and restrained response?
But the fact that Mitchell is accused of trapping other women and demanding sex from them, and copped guilty to at least the first part, casts even more doubt on his story about Castleberry. Did he try to sexually assault or extort sex acts from her in the car that day? Was she crying for help because she didn't believe he was a real cop—or because he was abusing his position as a cop? Did he shoot her because he felt his life was threatened—or because she threatened to reveal what he was really up to? We'll likely never know.
Maybe the jury in the murder case got it right. Or maybe justice for Donna Castleberry will never come.
Regardless, Mitchell has been exposed as a predator and will face at least some—if perhaps way too little—repercussions for that.
The post Ohio Vice Cop Who Got Away With Killing Sex Worker Pleads Guilty in Kidnapping Case appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Marijuana legalization took effect today in Ohio, despite a last-minute attempt to override key parts of that voter-approved policy. The failure of that effort suggests that the Republicans who control the state legislature recognized the political perils of so blatantly defying voters' wishes.
Ohio, where legislators authorized medical use of marijuana in 2016, became the 24th state to legalize recreational use a month ago, when 57 percent of voters said yes to Issue 2. As of today, that ballot measure makes it legal for adults 21 or older to publicly possess 2.5 ounces or less of marijuana and grow up to six plants at home. Issue 2 also envisions a state-regulated cannabis industry with retail sales taxed at 10 percent. But as an initiated statute rather than a constitutional amendment, it can be revised by a simple majority of state legislators.
Before the election, Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman (R–Lima) said that if voters approved Issue 2, he would "advocate for reviewing things or repealing things or changing things that are in it." Although Huffman was not specific, a bill that the Senate General Government Committee overwhelmingly approved on Monday would have reduced the possession limit to one ounce, eliminated permission for homegrown marijuana, reduced the statewide cap on the number of retailers from 350 to 230, increased the retail tax to 15 percent, and imposed a 15 percent tax on growers. It also would have effectively recriminalized marijuana possession by banning possession of cannabis obtained outside of a state-authorized distribution system that might not be up and running until late 2024 or early 2025.
After hearing testimony against that controversial proposal on Tuesday and getting an earful from outraged constituents, the committee dramatically changed course. On Wednesday, it unanimously approved a bill that would retain Issue 2's possession limit, preserve the home cultivation option, and allow medical marijuana dispensaries to begin serving the recreational market in the near future, perhaps within a few months. The bill, which passed the Senate by a 28–2 vote, also goes beyond Issue 2 by requiring expungement of criminal records involving low-level marijuana possession.
During "the last three or four days," committee chair Michael Rulli (R–Youngstown) said, "a lot of the public has reached out to probably every single one of our senators with thousands of emails and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of calls. I think the people have spoken." Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who also opposed Issue 2, called the Senate-approved legislation "a very, very good bill," saying, "We have an obligation to follow the will of the people."
The amended Senate bill no longer includes a cultivation tax, but it still would raise the retail tax by 50 percent, meaning the state would be collecting 15 percent in addition to standard state and local sales taxes that average 7.24 percent. And unlike Issue 2, the bill would allow local governments to impose their own taxes, up to 3 percent.
Those additional tax burdens seem inconsistent with Republicans' professed goal of "stamping out the black market," as Sen. Rob McColley (R–Findlay) put it. "It's an imperative that this thing get passed," DeWine said. "What we don't want is a situation where the black market grows." Yet high taxes are one of the main factors that have made it difficult for state-licensed marijuana suppliers to compete with untaxed and unregulated dealers in states such as California.
In addition to the Senate bill, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering legislation that would restrict advertising, impose a 10 percent tax on growers' gross receipts, and bar people from "aggregating their home grow plants into a single location, in essence creating an unofficial cultivation facility." That bill, sponsored by Rep. Jamie Callender (R–Concord), also would nix an Issue 2 provision that allows adults to share up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana "without remuneration." In effect, the Marijuana Policy Project's Karen O'Keefe complains, the bill "recriminalizes passing a joint."
The post Ohio Republicans Drop Last-Minute Effort To Derail Voter-Approved Pot Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Motorists caught speeding in Peninsula, Ohio, have options: They can pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, or PayPal. But if they want to dispute a ticket, the flexibility ends.
Before vehicle owners can appear in municipal court to defend themselves, they must pay a $100 "filing fee." No exceptions. No discounts. No deferrals. It's the cost of admission—roughly the same as a one-day ticket to Disneyland.
Many drivers skip the expense and plead guilty, which works well for Peninsula. In just the first five months after launching a handheld photo radar program in April 2023, this village south of Cleveland generated 8,900 citations and $560,000 in revenue. That's an average of about 1,800 citations and $110,000 in revenue per month.
These are staggering numbers for a community of just 536 residents. If revenue from the program continues at this rate, Peninsula could meet nearly its entire $1 million annual budget from traffic enforcement alone. Six police officers, rotating among nine strategic locations, could keep the village solvent with virtually no help from tax collectors.
Locking the courthouse doors to all but the most determined defendants—who also have $100 to spare—is key to the scheme. The tactic solves a built-in problem with photo radar enforcement that municipalities have grappled with for decades.
These programs are designed for maximum efficiency, which means eliminating human contact as much as possible. The only hiccup occurs when people demand their day in court. Hearings involve old, labor-intensive technology, which has not changed much in 200 years. A sudden strain on the system—inevitable when a police department starts cranking out more than three citations per resident per month—can produce a backlog.
So Peninsula is hiding its judges behind a paywall. Now officers can point and click without talking to anyone. No traffic stops. No trips to the courthouse. No testimony under oath. Revenue can flow like the nearby Cuyahoga River.
The streamlined approach might not seem novel. Many states impose court costs for minor traffic offenses. Appearance fees range from $22.50 in Maryland to $226 in Illinois.
Other states let people contest their tickets for free but charge for lawful behavior outside the courtroom. Arizona, for example, requires hand delivery of automated traffic tickets, which means vehicle owners can ignore violation letters that come in the mail. Once a process server tracks down these people, they must pay extra for not waiving their right to proper notice.
All of these fees undercut the Constitution, which guarantees due process. But judges typically wait until they hear evidence and render a decision before demanding payment. The timing is important. It means even the poorest citizens—people with no money in the bank—can at least show up and confront their accuser.
Stow Municipal Court, which serves Peninsula, reverses the order and collects fees upfront. People who win their cases get their money back (without interest). But if someone shows up and loses, the court keeps the filing fee and tacks on a fine. A $150 ticket jumps to $250, a 67 percent increase.
Not even California, which forces some motorists to pay deposits to reserve their place on the court docket, goes that far. There, the money collected in advance is based on potential fine amounts and does not raise overall ticket costs. California also requires courts to consider a person's ability to pay for citations upon request. Vehicle owners who demonstrate financial hardship can have fines and fees reduced or waived.
Peninsula ignores financial hardship. Court access is a luxury reserved for people who can pay to play.
The village tries to get around the obvious constitutional affront by classifying most speeding violations as civil rather than criminal offenses. Motorists who lose their cases do not face jail time, have points added to their license, or see their insurance rates go up. Yet they still lose money.
Peninsula downplays the perverse incentive for "taxation by citation," the use of police power to raise revenue, by shifting conversations to public safety. Local officials invoke an allegedly urgent need to slow traffic.
Yet these claims of a crisis are dubious. The Ohio Department of Public Safety reports only one traffic fatality in Peninsula since 2020 and only about three collisions per month.
Since the photo radar program started, this rate has more than doubled to nearly seven per month and the village reached a four-year high of 13 collisions in October 2023. This spike could be a coincidence. Perhaps it reflects lower traffic counts during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample size is too small for any definitive statement.
What is certain is the disregard for the Constitution. Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, has described its concerns in a November 27 letter to Peninsula officials. Put simply, people have a right to defend themselves before the government imposes fines and fees.
Traffic courts already take shortcuts to raise revenue. Vehicle owners need more access to justice, not paywalls.
CORRECTION: The revenue from the handheld photo radar program in April 2023 was higher than originally reported; the text has been updated to reflect that.
The post Want To Challenge Your Speed Camera Ticket? That'll Be $100. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman commend the victories for pot legalization and abortion from last week's elections.
02:56: Election week takeaways
18:41: Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W. Va.) announces he's retiring.
33:33: Weekly Listener Question
38:40: Lightning round on last week's GOP debate
45:20: This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Abortion's Big Night," by Liz Wolfe
"Ohio Becomes the 24th State To Legalize Recreational Marijuana," by Jacob Sullum
"Is Wichita Mayor-Elect Lily Wu a Libertarian?" by Eric Boehm
"Republicans Blow Another Opportunity at the Ballot Box," by J.D. Tuccille
"Exit poll: Most Ohio voters still largely favor legal abortion," by Ariel Edwards-Levy
"In Defense of Roe," by Nick Gillespie
"The U.S. Needs a Fiscal Commission Because Congress Won't Do Its Job," by Veronique de Rugy
"Joe Manchin Isn't the Fiscal Conservative We Need, but He's the Best We've Got," by Veronique de Rugy
"3 Reasons Mitt Romney and Republicans Lost Big in Election 2012," by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
"Mitt Romney, Like So Many NeverTrumpers, Was Hobbled by His Own Grubby Political Ambitions," by Matt Welch
"Third Party Candidates Shouldn't Get Their Hopes Up," by Andy Craig
"The Real Worry Behind the Unhinged Freakout Over No Labels," by Matt Welch
"Joe Manchin Is Once Again Telling Republicans and Democrats What They Don't Want To Hear," by Eric Boehm
"Exit Poll: Most Voters Think Trump, Biden Should Not Run in 2024," by Eric Boehm
"Are We Really Doing a Trump vs. Biden Rematch?" by Steven Greenhut
"Are Republicans Finally Getting Serious About Social Security?" by Eric Boehm
"The Libertarian Party's Internal Strife Is as Old as the Party Itself," by Brian Doherty
"What is the Ideal Strategy for the Libertarian Party?" by Nicholas Sarwark, Dave Smith, and Gene Epstein
"'A Tyranny of the Minority': Why This College Dropout Wants To Cancel Cancel Culture," by John Stossel
"The Canceling of the American Mind, by FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott," by Eugene Volokh
"Why Are College Kids Terrified?" by Nick Gillespie
"Jeff Flake Is a Casualty of Collectivist Conflict," by Matt Welch
Reason's interview with Vivek Ramaswamy, by Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's Sponsor:
Audio production by Luke Allen; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post The Two-Party System Abides appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Voters who went to the polls on Tuesday already dread what comes next.
A potential rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Election Day 2024—just 362 sleeps away, it'll be here before you know it—is becoming depressingly more inevitable with each passing day. It's also a damning indictment of the two major parties, which can't manage to throw up any candidates capable of wresting power away from the pair of decrepit has-beens currently threatening the country with reliving the often-unwatchable 2020 campaign.
By now it's hardly news that both Trump and Biden are widely despised by most of the voting public, but an exit poll from yesterday's elections in Ohio might set the bar at a new record low. As CNN details: "Only about a quarter of voters said they think Biden should be running for president again. But former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, fares little better: Only about a third of this electorate in Ohio thinks he should be running to retake the White House."
Trump won Ohio by about 8 points in both 2016 and 2020, and he'll almost certainly be the favorite there again in 2024—thank you, negative partisanship. But that's really saying something, given how few of the state's voters want him to be pursuing another White House bid.
If we were hurtling towards a rematch between an unpopular incumbent and an utterly unfit former incumbent, it would be bad enough. But this is also shaping up to be an election between the two oldest presidential candidates in history. If Trump wins, he'll take back the crown of being the oldest person ever inaugurated—which currently belongs to Biden, who took it from… Trump.
Both candidates have demonstrated ample evidence of mental decline over the past few years, and given their ages there is no reason to believe that trend will reverse itself.
For that matter, there's an increasing likelihood that one or both could be medically incapacitated—or worse—in the middle of the campaign. The best way to deal with that possibility would be for both to exit the race now or to be removed from it by their respective primary voters.
Since that seems unlikely, everyone might benefit from brushing up on the contingency plans that the Democratic and Republican parties have in place to deal with that possibility. As Liz Mair notes at Real Clear Politics, both parties have the authority to fill vacancies created by the death or incapacity of presidential nominees. In practice, that means somewhere between 160 and 200 people will get to hand-pick the Democratic or Republican nominee.
The silver lining to that outcome: Whoever gets picked would likely be less disliked than Trump and Biden are.
But that's an ugly outcome for American democracy. Then again, so is the current situation. Voters keep telling pollsters that they want someone—anyone, please—else to be running for president next year. They still have time to make that happen, but with Election Day 2023 in the rearview mirror, the clock is starting to run out.
The post Exit Poll: Most Voters Think Trump, Biden Should Not Run in 2024 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Voters show up for abortion rights: Yesterday, voters across the country made clear that they oppose Republican-backed abortion restrictions. Andy Beshear, Kentucky's Democratic incumbent, won his reelection bid for governor after repeatedly hammering his opponent's opposition to abortion. In Ohio, both weed and abortion won when put to the people via ballot measures—the latter by 12 points. In Virginia, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won a state Supreme Court seat. (Both states saw a lot of abortion-related campaigning.)
"Abortion is the No. 1 issue in the 2024 campaign," Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, who publicly supported the abortion efforts in Ohio and Virginia, said Tuesday. In Ohio, Issue 1—which amends the state constitution to protect abortion up until the point of fetal viability, or around weeks 22-24—won, which means that Republicans will be thwarted in their attempts to ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. (Former Roundup writer/Ohioan Elizabeth Nolan Brown covered some of the Issue 1 controversy here.)
Many libertarians will find these abortion wins encouraging. I do not.
Although some of the language gestures toward freedom, much of it misrepresents the objections of pro-lifers. "Ohioans know that no matter how you feel about abortion personally, government should not have the power to make these personal medical decisions for the people you love," said one Issue 1 organizer. But how you feel about abortion frequently dictates whether you believe government intervention to be warranted, since one of the few defensible functions of government is protecting innocent beings from being aggressed against. The language of bodily autonomy—which we saw plenty of in the lead-up to these elections—focuses only on the rights of the mother, but never on the rights of the baby. Surely people on both sides can admit that the issue is so fraught because these rights come into conflict, with no easy resolution.
Still, it's undeniable that this is a galvanizing political issue and that Republicans haven't known how to message their beliefs—and allay people's fears about the consequences that stem from abortion bans—post-Dobbs. Generally speaking, the country is profoundly divided on abortion, with 61 percent believing it ought to be legal in all or most cases, and 37 percent believing it ought to be illegal in all or most cases. People tend to be broadly supportive of allowing abortion in the first trimester, but broadly opposed to permitting it in the second and third trimesters.
But "in states where abortion is prohibited, the share of people who say access to abortion should be easier has increased since August 2019," reported Pew in April. "About a third of adults (34%) say it should be easier for someone in the area where they live to obtain an abortion, an 8-point increase since 2019." Almost 20 percent of those surveyed, per Pew, say their views on abortion have changed in the last year or so since the Dobbs decision was handed down by the Supreme Court.
Interestingly, in Ohio, "the victory for Yes on Issue 1 was not driven by remarkable Democratic turnout—but by a significant share of voters in Republican-leaning counties casting their ballots for abortion rights," per a Politico analysis of the results.
Beyond abortion: Ohio just became the 24th U.S. state to legalize recreational weed (more from Reason's Jacob Sullum). Colorado's TABOR—which requires excess property tax revenue to be returned to the people—changes were defeated (more from Reason's Eric Boehm). And in Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin—who had tried to get a really solid legislative majority for his party—did not succeed. More here.
RFK Jr.'s second wind: The, uh, antiestablishment candidate made waves earlier in the presidential campaign season, then faded for a while, but he's back again—this time, pissing his former pals off with his recent comments on free speech while also polling surprisingly well. A New York Times/Siena College poll found significant support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when up against Donald Trump and Joe Biden in battleground states and with younger voters:
The New York Times / Siena College Research Institute: Battleground States Poll
In 3-Way Race, Independent Robert Kennedy Jr. Garners 24% Across 6 Battleground States; Trump 35%, Biden 33%, Kennedy 24%; RFK Noses Ahead Among Voters Under 45https://t.co/RP2kHlceEY pic.twitter.com/DVTPWBvRrI
— SienaResearch (@SienaResearch) November 7, 2023
"When asked about the likeliest 2024 matchup, Mr. Biden versus Mr. Trump, only 2 percent of those polled said they would support another candidate," reports The New York Times. "But when Mr. Kennedy's name was included as an option, nearly a quarter said they would choose him."
"The findings suggest that Mr. Kennedy is less a fixed political figure in the minds of voters than he is a vessel to register unhappiness about the choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump."
Though I am not very fond of RFK Jr. (as previously established, to many people's chagrin), I am intrigued by people's possibly growing comfort with rejecting the awful front-runners put forth by the two major parties. I'm not optimistic that such polling data will convert to Election Day results, though.
Scenes from New York:
The fact that it mentions Brooklyn is bizarre (unless the sentiment is just plain old antisemitism). Lefty gentrification discourse—the idea that any neighborhood could be "owned" by any particular ethnic group, or that one has a claim to a place simply by nature of having lived there the longest—has never made sense because it feels reminiscent of far-right nativism. It also ignores that little thing we call property rights, in which you can buy a home or a tract of land and then decide what you do with it and who you allow to live on it, random people's feelings aside.
Settlers in occupied territories are indeed a problem. But the invocation of Brooklyn here suggests the charitable reading of this argument is "people should not be allowed to move to places where a different ethnic group predominates," which is a far right take https://t.co/u3HVvewPtU
— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) November 7, 2023
Honestly think the new LaGuardia Airport has increased my estimate of American state capacity by 5%. (Had been 8% until I looked at the price tag.)
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 7, 2023
HOUSE approves censure against Rashida Tlaib 234-188.
22 Democrats voted in favor of it.
4 Republicans opposed the measure.
— Mica Soellner (@MicaSoellnerDC) November 8, 2023
propaganda for me but not for thee pic.twitter.com/C605tOVUC3
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) November 7, 2023
This should be the easiest thing to at least perfunctorily condemn but nope, not easy for her. https://t.co/BLtP0pysw3
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) November 7, 2023
The post Abortion's Big Night appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ohio, where legislators authorized medical use of marijuana in 2016, went further on Tuesday, becoming the 24th state to legalize recreational use. According to projections by NBC News and The Hill, voters approved Issue 2, which allows adults 21 or older to publicly possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and grow up to six plants at home. With 57 percent of ballots counted, 56 percent of voters had said yes to the ballot initiative, which also will create a system to license and regulate commercial sales.
That's assuming Ohio legislators do not rewrite or override the rules established by Issue 2, which they have the power to do with any "initiated state statute," as opposed to a constitutional amendment. Before Issue 2 was submitted to voters, the Republican-controlled Ohio General Assembly passed up a chance to enact it, and now the measure returns to the legislature, which can revise it before it takes effect.
"I definitely think that if it passes, there are problems in it that need to get addressed," Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman (R–Lima) said before the election. "I will advocate for reviewing things or repealing things or changing things that are in it."
Which things? Huffman was not specific. But in a speech last month, he warned that marijuana legalization could precipitate a "mental health crisis" in Ohio. "When we see more drug use, when we see more teenage mental illness, more teenage suicide," he said, "people may say, 'We should bring this back a little bit.'"
Unsurprisingly, the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol, the group that ran the Issue 2 campaign, thinks the measure should be implemented as is. "We think that Ohio voters have a right to expect that their elected officials follow election results and respect the will of the people," coalition spokesman Tom Haren said in response to Huffman's comments.
Issue 2 was backed by the Marijuana Policy Project, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, the Green Party of Ohio, and two members of the state's congressional delegation: Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Rep. David Joyce (R). Their argument was pretty straightforward: that marijuana should be treated like alcohol, which would replace the black market with a regulated industry, generate tax revenue, and "end unfairly harsh punishments for minor marijuana offenses."
Opponents included a bunch of Republican legislators, several law enforcement groups, and Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who worried about "increased use by underage kids"—a fear that has not materialized in other states that have legalized marijuana. Three Republican legislators employed starkly anti-capitalist rhetoric, complaining that Issue 2 "puts profits over people" by legalizing "an addiction-for-profit industry" that will "make a few greedy investors rich."
Unless state legislators intervene, Issue 2 will establish a Division of Cannabis Control within the Commerce Department, which will be charged with licensing and regulating growers, manufacturers, testing laboratories, distributors, and retailers. Sales will be taxed at 10 percent, in addition to standard state and local sales taxes that average 7.24 percent. Local governments are not authorized to impose additional marijuana taxes, although they can claim a share of the revenue if they allow pot shops to operate within their borders.
The taxes in neighboring Michigan, where voters approved marijuana legalization in 2018, are similar: a 10 percent retail tax, plus a 6 percent standard sales tax. "We're taking money away from drug dealers and Michigan dispensary owners and putting it back into the pockets of our local governments," Haren said before the election.
Legalization of possession takes effect in Ohio on December 7. State regulators are supposed to start issuing commercial licenses within nine months.
"This isn't groundbreaking," Haren said after Issue 2 qualified for the ballot. "We're just trying to get Ohio in line with neighbors like Michigan and Illinois."
Once people can legally buy marijuana, where can they legally consume it? That question has presented a puzzle in other states that have legalized recreational use without allowing businesses analogous to bars or restaurants that serve alcohol. The problem is especially acute for out-of-state visitors, who are apt to find that their hotels frown upon marijuana use.
The Ohio initiative obliquely addresses that issue. It says marijuana use in "public areas" is a "minor misdemeanor," punishable by a $150 fine. It explicitly does not permit marijuana use on "federal, state, or locally owned land." It says landlords may not reject tenants based primarily on their cannabis consumption, although they would be allowed to prohibit pot smoking as long as that is a condition of the lease. Finally, the initiative says it does not "prohibit any public place from accommodating an individual's use of [recreational] cannabis," which seems to leave room for businesses where people can legally use marijuana.
"Cannabis legalization is an issue that unites Democrats, Republicans, and Independents," Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said in a press release tonight. "Ohioans have seen similar legalization laws adopted in neighboring states and they know that regulating the cannabis market is preferable to the failed policy of prohibition. It is imperative that elected officials respect the voters' decision and implement this measure in a manner that is consistent with the sentiments of the majority of the electorate."
The post Ohio Becomes the 24th State To Legalize Recreational Marijuana appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, everyone knew the fallout—for women, for doctors, for U.S. politics—would be profound. "The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision," wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion. With that, nearly 50 years of status quo surrounding abortion was ended. Dobbs torched the legal paradigm that had governed access across the nation since the Court's infamous 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade and its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Unsurprisingly, American abortion laws and access have been radically transformed since the Dobbs decision was released. As of September, in more U.S. states than not, abortion access is now reduced, threatened, or barely existent.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, some red states rushed to pass new restrictions on abortion while others revived long-dormant statutes from a pre-Roe era or "trigger laws" passed more recently but only effective after Roe's demise. As a result, abortion is now banned or severely restricted at all stages of pregnancy in 15 states. In addition, four states now ban abortion at some point within the first trimester, and three states ban it at some point between 15 and 18 weeks of pregnancy.
None of these bans would have been constitutional under Roe, which said abortion must be allowed until the point of fetal viability (around 24 weeks).
Other states have attempted abortion bans but have been thwarted by legal challenges. New or additional bans have been enacted but blocked—at least temporarily—in seven states.
Abortion remains legal until at least the point of fetal viability—and sometimes after—in 23 states, largely in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and West.
But the new restrictions have meant some women have had to travel out-of-state—sometimes quite far—to get an abortion. Some who would previously have gotten an abortion did not do so. An analysis by the Society of Family Planning suggests that between July 2022 and March 2023 alone, "there were 25,640 cumulative fewer abortions" than there would have been otherwise.
In addition, new restrictions have made obstetric care more difficult for doctors and women dealing with nonviable pregnancies or health-threatening pregnancy complications. While all bans so far contain exceptions for cases where a mother's life is at risk, these exceptions don't always encompass cases where continuing a pregnancy is incredibly risky. That means some women who may eventually need to terminate a pregnancy are being told they can't do so until their condition gets worse.
Risk aversion by medical professionals here is understandable. Most of the laws banning abortion carry criminal penalties for doctors or other medical professionals who perform them. This may include jail time—life in prison is on the table in Alabama and Texas—as well as fines or the loss of a medical license. Some states also permit authorities to seek civil penalties for violations. In Texas, the attorney general can seek a civil penalty of $100,000 per illegal abortion.
Some bans can be enforced not by the state but through lawsuits filed by private citizens. Texas started this trend in 2021 with S.B. 8, a law allowing "any person" to sue someone who performs an abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected and authorizing at least $10,000 payouts for successful plaintiffs in such suits. Opponents dubbed it the abortion "bounty hunter" law, and since then, similar laws have been introduced and sometimes passed in other states.
Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers continue to push new restrictions on reproductive freedom—including banning the procedure even earlier in pregnancy, limiting the methods that can be used, and restricting the types of facilities where abortions can be performed. Some show interest in adding more rules around advertising, record keeping, or patient notices—for instance, mandating that women prescribed abortion pills be told the procedure can be "reversed" after the first pill (a claim many medical professionals say is unfounded). Other proposals seek to expand categories of criminal liability, creating new crimes like aiding and abetting abortion, facilitating an unlawful death from abortion (a law meant to be used against abortion pill manufacturers and distributors), and "abortion trafficking" (helping a minor obtain an abortion without parental permission). Some would even establish that personhood starts at fertilization—opening up abortion-seeking women to attempted murder or homicide charges.
Suffice it to say, the legal status of abortion in many states has shifted—and continues to shift—quickly. For many Americans, things seem to be changing too fast and going too far. For others, however, the Dobbs world is proving frustratingly resistant to change.
But one thing is certain: Dobbs' effect on U.S. policy and politics is going way beyond shaping where abortion is and isn't legal. It's wreaking electoral havoc, shifting partisan calculations, and calling into question balances of federal and state power. It's also ushering in a new level of representative democracy in determining the limits of reproductive freedom—along with a backlash to the process that could reach far past policies surrounding abortion.
In many ways, the Roe and Casey era was simpler. But the new world could better reflect the underlying political reality that American opinions about abortion are complex, nuanced, and not terribly extreme.
During the Roe era, it could be easy to forget most Americans are abortion moderates and don't fall easily into a "pro-choice" or "pro-life" binary. Now this fact could be swaying elections—and causing major problems for Republicans.
Poll after poll has shown that relatively few people think abortion should always or never be legal. For most, it matters when and under what circumstances—and they want laws and policies to reflect that.
For decades, politicians could pretend this wasn't the case. Abortion was a convenient frame for criticizing opponents, demonizing them as either killers who wanted to abort babies even as they were being born or troglodytes who wanted to keep all women barefoot, pregnant, and under men's control. But because of Roe and the way courts continually interpreted it, abortion was not something where there was room for a radical departure from existing policies or risk of fallout from taking a stand at odds with popular opinion.
This gave Republicans little to lose by pandering to the more extreme anti-abortion constituents among their base. The policies they pushed—and sometimes passed—wouldn't actually take effect, and no one had to live with the personal, political, or criminal consequences. If conservatives or conservative-leaning independents had some qualms about them, they could rest assured—and still vote GOP—knowing there was the Republican rhetoric, and then there was the Roe-mandated reality. Meanwhile, pro-choice folks could be somewhat complacent, knowing that courts would keep striking down any extreme restrictions on abortion access.
In short, abortion just wasn't something most people needed to have extremely specific views on or considered a political priority. But without Roe, abortion actually matters to voters in a way it didn't before. There are signs this won't work out well for Republicans stuck in the old paradigm.
A wealth of polling since the Dobbs decision suggests Americans are increasingly in favor of at least some legal abortion. "FiveThirtyEight gathered every poll that asked a standard question about abortion — whether it should be legal in all cases, legal in some cases, illegal in some cases, or illegal in all cases — since September 2021, and found that the share of American adults who want abortion to be legal in at least some cases is rising, and the share of Americans who want abortion to be illegal in all cases is falling," the polling analysis website reported in June.
This makes abortion a political boon for Democrats. There's strong evidence that the issue of abortion swayed some results in the 2022 midterms. Democrats credit it with helping them stanch losses in the U.S. House and keep control of the Senate. And Democrats are counting on the issue to give them another boost in 2024 too.
It's a much thornier issue for Republicans, caught between trying to appease constituents and donors who still expect them to take an aggressive anti-abortion stance and the large swath of more moderate conservatives and swing voters with less radical abortion views.
Evidence of this conundrum can be seen in all sorts of places, from the way former president and 2024 candidate Donald Trump has handled the issue to the way some Republicans have reacted to national ban legislation. Far from taking a big victory lap for appointing the judges that struck down Roe, Trump has focused relatively little on the issue and privately opined that Republicans are "getting killed on abortion." When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) introduced a bill in September 2022 that would have made performing an abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy a federal crime, a number of prominent GOP strategists and lawmakers made it clear they wished he wasn't pushing it near election time.
As questions like the issue of a national ban become more salient—it was a big point of contention between candidates in the first 2024 GOP presidential debate—and state laws continue to come into focus, abortion will likely only become more important in upcoming elections. It could continue to drive Republican electoral losses unless GOP candidates start changing their tune.
A Republican Party in which pro-life politics are less of a focus may have to adapt in other ways too, adopting new strategies to drive religious conservative voter turnout or to appeal to moderates and independents. This could ultimately reshape the conservative coalition and/or conservative priorities.
But whether the GOP can get away with refocusing is another question. Even if some want to avoid talking about abortion, it will be difficult, since Democrats have every incentive to keep focus on the issue. "We should put the right to choose on every ballot across the country in 2024—not just with the candidates we choose, but with referendum efforts to enshrine reproductive rights in states where right-wing politicians are stripping those rights away," Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, told CNN in April.
Asking voters to weigh in directly on questions surrounding reproductive freedom helps reveal what Americans really want and will really stand for when it comes to abortion. The result could be the start of a much more democratic abortion paradigm than we've seen in decades—and the ticket to protecting at least some modicum of abortion access in many states.
"Deep in the American DNA is the belief that we should have as little government and as much liberty as possible," writes Elaine Kamarck at the Brookings Institution. "The law's intrusion into the complex medical and moral issues surrounding as personal a decision as abortion strikes at the heart of American's [sic] desires to control their own destiny. All indications are that by the end of the decade the Supreme Court's decision to return abortion rights to states will reinstate abortion across the land."
That may overstate the case a bit. But ballot initiatives related to reproductive freedom have been up for votes in six states since Dobbs was decided in June 2022, and all have come back with positive results for the pro-choice side. Notably, a number of these votes have taken place in largely red states, including Montana, Kentucky, and Kansas.
After the Dobbs decision, Kansas was the first state to vote on an abortion ballot initiative, in summer 2022. Voters resoundingly rejected a proposed amendment stating that the state constitution did "not create or secure a right to abortion," with 59 percent against. Conservatives had put the issue up for a vote as part of a primary election, which trend toward smaller and more Republican voter turnout in Kansas. But voters across the board turned out in droves, with around 47 percent of registered voters casting ballots, compared to 20 percent to 34 percent in primaries generally since 2010.
The 2022 midterm elections saw five states voting on abortion. The more pro-choice position won in all five.
In November 2023, Ohioans will vote on a proposed constitutional amendment to protect abortion access. Measures protecting abortion are already slated for New York and Maryland ballots in 2024, while activists in a number of other states have been preparing or circulating petitions to get measures on their 2024 ballots.
Many of these are being pushed as efforts to "restore Roe." They would institute a similar scheme to what was previously allowed nationwide, with abortion broadly legal in early to mid-pregnancy and bans allowed after a certain point. For instance, the proposed Ohio amendment states: "Abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability."
Pro-lifers in some states, including Colorado, are also working on getting initiatives on ballots. But with the way ballot measures—and abortion poll results—have been trending, the strategy is seen as much more friendly to the pro-abortion side.
The pro-choice tenor of public opinion so far is creating a backlash from conservatives. If this backlash succeeds, it could thwart not just the flourishing of ballot initiatives about abortion but also broader by-the-people lawmaking.
A certain strain of Republicans long insisted that without Roe, abortion could become what it was meant to be: a state-by-state issue. But it's becoming clear—if it wasn't already—that many in the pro-life movement won't be satisfied with this arrangement if it doesn't lead to abortion being outlawed, or at least severely restricted, in their own states and perhaps nationwide. Some are even willing to make democratic processes more exclusionary if it will help get us there.
Whether conservatives were never serious about actually leaving abortion up to individual states or were only serious about it because they imagined that most Americans would support bans is unclear. But in light of the fact that voters keep embracing abortion rights and rejecting restrictions on reproductive freedom, some GOP politicians are responding with attempts to make it more difficult for voters to have a direct say in the issue.
Some of these attempts target the process for getting initiatives on the ballot in the first place, by requiring more signatures, restricting who can collect signatures, requiring a broader geographic distribution for signatories, or raising filing fees. In Arkansas, lawmakers passed a bill that requires signatures from 50 counties instead of 15 to get an initiative on the ballot.
Others target the vote threshold required to amend the state constitution. For instance, Ohio Issue 1 would have raised the threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent.
After enacting a law earlier this year to end special August elections, Ohio Republicans turned around and approved one for Issue 1—ensuring that if it passed, it would take effect before November's vote on an abortion initiative. But voters flocked to the polls and issued Issue 1 a resounding defeat, with 57 percent opposed—even some counties that went for Trump in 2020 voted against.
More battles like this are likely coming. According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, 14 states have been considering "measures that would impact or weaken the ballot initiative process." And while stopping abortion amendments may not be the sole motivation behind such attempts, it's definitely one, and sometimes the main, driver.
In Mississippi, where a court order froze all ballot initiatives in 2021, a (now-dead) GOP-led bill would have again allowed them—except for abortion-related measures. "The state of Mississippi is pro-life," asserted Mississippi state Rep. Nick Bain on the House floor, while arguing against giving residents the chance to prove it at the polls.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose publicly denied that Issue 1 was about thwarting a reproductive rights amendment. He was later caught on video admitting this was his calculation. "Some people say this is all about abortion. Well, you know what? It's 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution," he said in a video shared by News 5 Cleveland and the Ohio Capital Journal.
Pro-life politicians are also finding other tactics to keep abortion initiatives off the ballot or stack the deck against them. For instance, LaRose's office has loaded Ohio's ballot language about the abortion amendment with biased phrasing, substituting "unborn child" for "fetus" and describing post-viability exceptions for a mother's life or health as "always allow[ing] an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy" if a doctor signs off on it.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey tried to substitute his own fiscal analysis for that of State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick's fiscal note summaries for 11 reproductive rights initiatives, saying the auditor had failed to take into account the lost revenue from Medicaid funding and future taxpayers being aborted. This left the petitions in limbo, with the secretary of state unable to certify ballot language and groups unable to start collecting signatures. In July, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Bailey to approve Fitzpatrick's fiscal notes, writing that the matter is "not about the substance of…proposed initiatives petitions" but rather about the limits of the attorney general's authority. State Rep. Hannah Kelly (R–Mountain Grove) and state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman (R–Arnold) then filed a lawsuit challenging the auditor's cost analysis.
The ballot process may not be the only thing under attack in order to stave off pro-choice policies. Some state officials—including those in Oklahoma and West Virginia—have started amending religious freedom statutes to prevent them from being used in legal challenges against abortion bans.
Republican lawmakers and officials aren't the only ones trying to buck the trend of more direct democratic influence and state-by-state differences on abortion policies. We're also seeing some intervention—and overreach—from the federal government, along with attempts to expand or curb abortion access by challenging administrative procedure.
At the heart of these actions is the issue of how much control the feds should have over abortion policy and how much should be left up to the states.
In July 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said that the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals that accept Medicare patients to provide "stabilizing treatment" that may at times include abortion. "If a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the health or life of the pregnant person — or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA's emergency medical condition definition — that state law is preempted," HHS advised. As part of this standoff, the Biden administration is investigating a pair of hospitals that refused to perform an abortion on a Missouri woman with pregnancy complications.
The Department of Justice told Postal Service workers last December they should continue delivering abortion pills even to people in states where abortion is banned.
But by far the biggest legal drama surrounding federal agencies and reproductive rights involves the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone (and its generic equivalents). Interestingly, the matter is playing out as a debate about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval and regulatory process, not individual rights.
So far, one federal court has preliminarily enjoined the federal government from taking any action to make mifepristone less available in states that brought a lawsuit about its status. The case is about mifepristone being singled out "for excessive regulation," said the office of the Oregon attorney general. "Despite evidence that the drug is safer than Tylenol, burdensome restrictions on prescribing and dispensing mifepristone…expose patients to needless anguish and confusion" and "subject providers to bureaucratic oversight that makes providing care much more complicated than necessary."
Meanwhile, another federal court decision would suspend mifepristone approval entirely. That decision comes in a case brought by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which challenged the FDA's 2000 approval of mifepristone along with its later generic approval and loosening of restrictions on abortion pill prescriptions. In April 2023, U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk held that the FDA erred in approving mifepristone originally and erred in its later challenged actions too; he ordered access to the drug suspended. The Biden administration appealed Kacsmaryk's ruling, and that same month, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the government's request for a stay "pending disposition of the appeal."
In August, the 5th Circuit held 2–1 that parts of Kacsmaryk's ruling should stand and parts should not. "We vacate the component of the order that stayed the effective date of the 2000 Approval and the 2019 Generic Approval," wrote Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod for the majority. However, the court upheld the parts of Kacsmaryk's ruling related to later FDA directives (including the FDA's actions allowing abortion pills to be prescribed virtually and shipped by mail and its 2016 guidance saying lower doses could be prescribed).
For now, nothing will change as the Supreme Court reviews the matter and decides whether to take up the case. The Biden administration and pharmaceutical company Danco Laboratories have both asked the Court to hear the case.
Even as the battle over abortion pill approval and prescribing plays out in the courts, the FDA has continued to loosen prescribing restrictions around abortion drugs and around birth control—proving that the Dobbs world will spur some opportunities for federal deregulation too.
In January, the FDA paved the way for retail pharmacies to dispense abortion pills. (Until 2021, they had to be prescribed and dispensed at a specially certified doctor's office and after that, only through mail-order pharmacies, since the FDA had failed to put in place a system for certifying retail pharmacies to dispense them.) The FDA also recently approved the first hormonal birth control pill for over-the-counter sale.
While some challenges to abortion laws are playing out at the federal level, more of them are taking place in state courts. Lawsuits out of at least eight states have challenged abortion bans on religious freedom grounds. Another common tack is arguing that abortion bans violate privacy rights enshrined in state constitutions. Still others have asserted that bans violate women's right to self-preservation.
These challenges highlight one way the Dobbs landscape around abortion looks much like the pre-Dobbs landscape: It involves a lot of bills—of varying degrees of constitutionality—being introduced by state legislatures and, when passed, swiftly battled out in state courts.
But while lawsuits over abortion laws have long been common, the legal onus is now different, with more burden on abortion access advocates to prove that laws should not be allowed than on anti-abortion advocates to prove that they should be. Even as some of these laws are challenged in court and put on hold by judges, they can create a chilling effect on the provision of abortion in states that enact them.
So far, state supreme court rulings on abortion bans have been mixed. North Dakota's Supreme Court ruled in March that the state constitution implicitly protects the "right to obtain an abortion to preserve the woman's life or health." Oklahoma's Supreme Court struck down its bounty hunter laws in May, holding that they were unconstitutional because they conflicted with a decision saying that the state constitution protects an "inherent right of a pregnant woman to terminate a pregnancy when necessary to preserve her life." Meanwhile, the Idaho Supreme Court said in January that its state constitution does not protect abortion. And in Indiana—the first state to pass tighter restrictions on abortion after the Dobbs decision was handed down—the state Supreme Court said in June that its constitution permitted a law banning abortion in almost all cases.
In South Carolina, Supreme Court rulings have been mixed. In January, the court struck down a six-week abortion ban, saying it placed an "unreasonable restriction upon a woman's right to privacy." But the state's legislature tried again in May, passing a similar ban with small tweaks. That measure returned to a South Carolina Supreme Court in which the author of the January ruling—Justice Kaye Hearn, previously the only woman on the court—had since retired. This time around, the court upheld the ban.
A lot of legal battles have been playing out over so-called "heartbeat laws," which ban abortion as soon as fetal cardiac activity can be detected (around six weeks of pregnancy—which means four weeks after conception and about two weeks after a woman would miss her first period). The vast majority of U.S. abortions take place within the first trimester—under 8 percent occur after 13 weeks of gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—but most of these do take place after six weeks. CDC data show that between 2010 and 2019, some 62.5 percent to 66 percent of abortions took place after six weeks.
State court rulings on heartbeat laws so far have been varied, with some allowed to take effect as legal challenges play out and others halted for the time being.
For instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a six-week ban into law in his state in April. But it will only take effect if a 15-week ban currently being challenged is upheld. That case turns on whether the Florida Constitution's privacy clause protects the right to an abortion.
In the Dobbs world, the future of abortion will almost certainly continue as a multifront battle—playing out in statehouses and courthouses, electoral politics, citizen-led initiatives, backlash to these initiatives, and attempts by federal agencies to set nationwide policy by novel means. Which of these avenues becomes the most influential remains to be seen.
For now, however, it's a world in which voters are starting to gain unprecedented power to determine abortion policy, both through the candidates they vote for and via direct referendums on questions related to reproductive rights.
Dissatisfaction with how voters use this power threatens to undermine it—along with democratic processes more broadly.
But if that can be avoided, we might start to see American abortion politics and policies better reflect the reality that most people in the U.S. aren't extremely pro-life or extremely pro-choice. They recognize the moral questions surrounding abortion aren't one and the same with the legal questions. They overwhelmingly differentiate between abortions that occur early and later in pregnancy. They support limits but also want to avoid substituting the judgment of politicians for the judgment of doctors and families in tough situations. They're wary of giving the state too much power to pry into people's reproductive lives.
The paradigm laid out in the Roe ruling attempted to grapple with some of this. But it also left citizens and their elected officials with little control over what is, no matter where you come down on it, a very serious and salient issue. In many ways, the Roe regime was simpler than where we find ourselves now. It was also less democratic.
The Dobbs decision was widely portrayed as a death knell for reproductive freedom in this country, and the past year has certainly offered up all sorts of incursions on this freedom. But it's also opening up new opportunities for supporters of legal abortion—who make up the majority of Americans—to turn their policy preferences and moral intuitions into political reality. This new reality has the chance to more accurately reflect American beliefs—if officials let it.
The post <em>Dobbs</em> Is Reshaping American Politics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Pennsylvania's Peter Brothers Trucking delivers goods all across America. Owner Brian Wanner says Pennsylvania bureaucrats now are driving him out of his home state.
"We have no say," complains Wanner in my new video. "We can't do anything about it."
"No say" because Pennsylvania's new rules don't come from Pennsylvania. They come from California.
"I don't want to be anything like California!" complains Wanner.
Too bad for him and other Pennsylvania truck owners, because Pennsylvania's Environmental Quality Board decided their state will automatically copy California regulations.
California's rules will raise the price of a new truck by about one-third. Trucks that once cost $190,000 will now cost about $260,000.
California regulators said this new air-pollution regulation is needed because the trucks Wanner drives "contribute greatly to…serious health and welfare problems."
That's ridiculous, says Wanner. "We have come so far in the last 40 years. In 1980, one truck produced as much [pollution] as 60 trucks today."
"So to reduce pollution, we want people to buy new trucks," I point out.
"But if you put these costs on us that we cannot afford, we're going to just run the older trucks!" responds Wanner.
"The regulators don't think about that?" I ask.
"They do not!" Wanner replies. "They do not see the consequences of what they're doing."
Now truckers like Wanner will just buy trucks in neighboring states.
"We can go to Ohio and get cheaper trucks," he says.
So there won't be any pollution reduction. The new rule will just hurt Pennsylvanians who sell trucks.
Who are these regulators? Pennsylvania's Environmental Quality Air Board is mostly made up of people from unrelated departments, like the Fish and Boat Commission, the Game Commission, the Historical and Museum Commission. I doubt that many know much about air pollution.
"The whole idea of having a regulatory board like this is, 'Oh, these people are experts,'" says attorney Caleb Kruckenberg of the Pacific Legal Foundation. "'They know what they're talking about. They're smarter than the lawmakers.' But if you look at the board, that's not true. These are just random bureaucrats who work in the government, and they say, 'I don't know. Let's follow California.'"
Kruckenberg is suing Pennsylvania on behalf of truckers like Wanner, arguing that what Pennsylvania does violates the Constitution.
"Nobody in Pennsylvania has ever voted for the standards that now control Pennsylvania."
I push back. "So what? California seems to have a lot of money. I could see a state saying, 'Yeah, let their regulators figure out how we reduce pollution, and we'll save money doing what they do.'"
"If people want something," Kruckenberg replies, "their legislature is supposed to pass it."
California's rules will soon get still more expensive because Gov. Gavin Newsom has decreed that soon, all new vehicles must be electric.
"But electricity comes from fossil fuels!" Kruckenberg points out. In Pennsylvania, some comes from coal, and most comes from natural gas.
So to power all-electric trucks, Pennsylvania will burn more fossil fuels.
Still another problem: electric trucks are heavier.
"That's harder on the roads," says Wanner. Also, "electric trucks have a very low mileage radius, so you can't work all day. It's nothing that you can take across the United States."
Pennsylvania's regulators don't seem to care. They just want to do what California does.
"Why would we allow our state to give away their lawmaking procedures to California?" asks Wanner. "That's not the American way. If we want to follow California, we can move there! I don't want to be anything like California."
COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post California Environmental Regulations Are Driving Truckers Out of Pennsylvania appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In Ohio, a Dayton Public Schools employee has resigned after being caught on video
The post Brickbat: No Running in the Halls appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Columbus, Ohio, authorities are investigating two police officers who casually discussed charging an 11-year-old girl with manufacturing child porn. The girl in question had allegedly sent inappropriate photos of herself to a much older man, prompting her father to call the police.
"Sexual Assault Unit detectives were immediately notified of the incident and have since initiated an investigation," said the Columbus Department of the Inspector General in a statement, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
The interaction between the police officers and the girl's father was captured by a doorbell camera and posted to TikTok. The account that posted the video on TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
In the video, the police arrive at the girl's house at about midnight, according to the father, who complains that he called them many hours earlier. The father steps outside the door and explains the situation: His 11-year-old daughter sent pictures of herself to an adult man. He suggests that he wanted the police to convey the seriousness of the situation to her, though she has already gone to bed.
"I just want her to realize what this was," says the father. "I mean, reality is not much I probably can do about it, is there?"
One of the police officers responds: "I mean, she can probably get charged with child porn."
The father is taken aback, and clarifies that he believes his daughter is the victim, not the perpetrator.
"Doesn't matter," says the officer. "She's still making porn."
At that point, the father—quite wisely—tells the officers to have a good night and shuts the door in their faces.
The viral video created understandable outrage on social media, which has prompted the authorities to investigate their own response. Most people do not think an 11-year-old girl who has produced pornographic images of herself should be arrested for it.
An adult male coercing a child into sending sexual images is absolutely engaging in criminal activity, and if that's what happened here, it should be dealt with. It's not at all encouraging that the police seemed to have the situation backward.
Nevertheless, state laws criminalizing child pornography often fail to make this important distinction. Indeed, underage teenagers are often charged for consensually swapping sexts. Overzealous police have a habit of making things worse rather than better.
The post Police Threaten To Arrest 11-Year-Old Victim of Child Porn appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In August, Ted Daniels lost his job teaching journalism at Ashland University in Ohio. Why? According to a university official, he was encouraging student journalists to be "overly persistent." The university's paper also reported that officials told Daniels he was allowing the paper to do "too much investigative journalism."
Soon after refusing to renew Daniels' contract, administrators began demanding that students submit issues of The Collegian, the student-run outlet Daniels had advised, for prior review. However, university officials claimed this "decision was predicated on some recent, rather glaring grammatical errors."
Earlier this month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, wrote a letter to the university, reminding officials that, while Ashland University is a private institution free to construct its own rules around student speech, it has also consistently promised students and faculty free expression rights.
"As a private institution that explicitly guarantees students and faculty the right to freedom of expression, Ashland may not violate academic freedom or chill student journalism by dismissing a journalism instructor for encouraging students to gather the news," FIRE attorney Lindsie Rank wrote in a September 8 letter to the university. "There can be no question that administrative actions against student media in response to what they report or based on disagreement with their newsgathering practices violate any notion of free expression."
Last week, the university's president responded to FIRE's letter, insisting that the university protects and supports student journalism while also defending its required prior review of the student paper. The letter also stated that "Mr. Daniels' transition did not result from the Collegian's reporting."
However, FIRE says the timing of Daniels' ouster suggests his firing was directly related to student press activities, contrary to university officials' statements. The group says that Daniels' ouster was directly related to student press activities, contrary to university officials' statements. "Administrators first suggested nonrenewal mere hours after a meeting between Collegian editors and Ashland Provost Amiel Jarstfer. In the meeting, Jarstfer reportedly criticized the newspaper for its headlines and for not being 'respectful' of 'confidential meetings,' apparently referencing Collegian reporters' attendance at a campus town hall last spring," Rank wrote in a Monday press release. "Daniels' dismissal also came within days of Collegian editor Katelyn Meeks' unsuccessful month-long effort to schedule a back-to-school interview with Campo," the university president.
Even though Ashland University is a private college, there's still good reason to think it has violated student rights.
"Essentially, when a [private] institution has those kinds of policies, courts have found that those kinds of policies create a binding legal contract and that those institutions are then required by law to stick to those commitments of ensuring expressive freedom," Rank told Reason. "Ashland, for example, has been out in the media, touting themselves as this really fantastic place for expressive freedom….Well, it's really dishonest of them to make those kinds of claims and hold themselves out as this bastion of free expression if they're not going to back that up with action."
The post Ashland Professor Allegedly Ousted for Allowing 'Too Much Investigative Journalism' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Biased changes to ballot language spur lawsuit. Ohio Republicans failed in an attempt to doom an abortion rights ballot initiative by changing the threshold of votes needed for it to pass. Now, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose—who said the attempt was "100 percent" about thwarting the abortion measure—has a new tack to stack the deck against it: using highly charged and potentially misleading ballot language.
Backers of the measure are, in turn, suing over the LaRose-approved ballot summary.
The measure, dubbed Issue 1, will be put to Ohio voters this fall and would amend the Ohio Constitution to make explicit that the state protects reproductive freedom.
It would add a "Right to Reproductive Freedom" section to the Ohio Constitution, stating that "every individual has a right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on: contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one's own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion. The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either: an individual's voluntary exercise of this right or a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right" unless it "demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual's health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care."
The proposed amendment goes on to say that the state could still ban abortion "after fetal viability" (defined as "the point in a pregnancy when, in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient's treating physician, the fetus has a significant likelihood of survival outside the uterus"). However, post-viability bans could not apply in situations where "the pregnant patient's treating physician" deems an abortion necessary "to protect the pregnant patient's life or health."
Backers of the amendment proposed putting its full text on the ballot. That seems like it should be pretty uncontroversial, no? When it comes to something as weighty as amending the state's constitution, it's good to give voters all of the context and facts.
But in a 3-2 vote last week, the Ohio Ballot Board—which contains LaRose as a member—rejected the idea that this fall's ballots should include the amendment's full text. Instead, they opted for summary language submitted by LaRose's office.
The summary text characterizes the bit about post-viability bans and their exceptions by saying the amendment would "always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy, regardless of viability, if, in the treating physician's determination the abortion is necessary to protect the pregnant woman's life or health."
It uses the phrase unborn child instead of fetus.
It leaves off any mention of specific reproductive rights other than abortion, omitting the amendment's references to contraception, fertility treatments, continuing a pregnancy, and miscarriage care.
Instead of saying that the amendment would restrict "the State"—defined in the proposed amendment as "any governmental entity and any political subdivision"—from interfering with reproductive freedom, it says it would block "the citizens of the State of Ohio" from doing so.
And instead of saying the amendment would give Ohioans the "right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions," it says it would guarantee the right to one's own "reproductive medical treatment." Backers of the amendment suggest this change falsely implies that the amendment would make the state provide and fund abortions.
The new language "is blatantly misleading and purposefully inaccurate," asserted Rep. Elliot Forhan (D–South Euclid).
"The entire summary is propaganda," said Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights co-chair Lauren Blauvelt.
LaRose is "the public servant responsible for conducting free and fair elections in Ohio" but he's "playing dirty to win. It's wrong," opined journalist Marilou Johanek in the Ohio Capital Journal.
LaRose called the new language "fair and accurate."
The Ohio Ballot Board is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of ballot language. But before voting on the language, board member and state Sen. Theresa Gavarone made it clear that she's anything but neutral. "This is a dangerous amendment that I'm going to fight tirelessly against," she said.
"Gavarone also claimed, as anti-abortion groups throughout the state do as well, that the amendment is 'an assault on parental rights,'" but "neither the amendment nor the summary approved by the board mention parental rights of any kind," notes the Ohio Capital Journal. "The senator continued her comments during the board meeting, saying the true nature of the amendment 'is hidden behind overly broad language,' despite the fact that the board summary took out pieces of the full text."
This week, Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit challenging the proposed ballot summary, calling it "irreparably flawed" and aimed at misleading Ohioans into voting no on the proposal. The group is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to order the board "to reconvene and adopt the full text of the Amendment as the ballot language" or, alternatively, to "adopt ballot language that properly and lawfully describes the Amendment."
First Amendment experts discuss age-verification laws. In a new panel discussion hosted by the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, First Amendment lawyers Lawrence Walters and Bob Corn-Revere have a wide-ranging discussion about age-verification laws, regulation of social media, and Woodhull's case against FOSTA:
R Street Institute's Shoshana Weissmann has been doing a series of columns about age-verification proposals. Her latest looks at how VPNs render enforcement impossible.
Reminder: We can't drug war our way out of fentanyl overdoses…
If you know that the DEA seized enough fentanyl last year to kill every American you should understand the impossibility of ending drug overdoses by stopping the supply of fentanyl. The drug war created the incentives that brought us street fentanyl. Interdiction can't stop it. https://t.co/jLLdHwZOAK
— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) August 30, 2023
… and most fentanyl entering the U.S. is coming through legal ports of entry, not being smuggled over the U.S.-Mexico border. Reason's Fiona Harrigan noted this last year:
Despite the idea's sticking power in certain circles, it's inaccurate to say that undocumented immigrants crossing an open border are chiefly responsible for fentanyl arriving at the country's doors. In reality, U.S. citizens carrying the drug through legal ports of entry are primarily to blame.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has reported an upward trend in fentanyl seizures over the past few years. From 2,800 pounds seized in FY 2019, CBP seized 11,200 pounds of fentanyl in FY 2021 and 12,900 pounds in FY 2022 through the end of August.
Seizures conducted by two distinct bodies within CBP combine to yield those numbers. The first, the Office of Field Operations (OFO), enforces immigration and customs laws at ports of entry—points where someone may lawfully enter the United States. The second is U.S. Border Patrol, which intercepts undocumented individuals and illegally imported goods between those ports of entry.
The vast majority of fentanyl seized in recent years has been obtained by the OFO, not Border Patrol. The drug was mainly seized from smugglers at legal ports of entry, not illegal border crossings. OFO seizures amounted to 2,600 pounds in 2019 (93 percent of the total fentanyl seized by CBP), 4,000 pounds in 2020 (83 percent), 10,200 pounds in 2021 (91 percent), and 10,900 pounds so far in 2022 (84 percent). The Drug Enforcement Agency confirms the port trend, saying that "the most common method employed [by Mexican cartels] involves smuggling illicit drugs through U.S. [ports of entry] in passenger vehicles with concealed compartments or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor-trailers."
• "The Environmental Protection Agency removed federal protections for a majority of the country's wetlands on Tuesday to comply with [the] recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling" in Sackett v. EPA, NPR reports. (More on the Sackett case from Reason's Ronald Bailey.)
• Journalist Stephen Lemons brings us updates from jury selection in the Backpage trial:
Court recessed till tomorrow in #Backpagetrial in federal court in Phoenix. They're doing individual voir dire of jurors now. So far they've only gone through 10, leaving 100 to go. 1/ https://t.co/vXGOeLEKhw
— Stephen Lemons (@stephenlemons) August 30, 2023
• Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is facing allegations that police tortured people brought to a facility known as the "Brave Cave" for arrest processing.
• Economists are worried about mid-size cities experiencing a "commercial real estate apocalypse."
• Los Angeles officials want to make it more difficult for RV owners to rent out their spaces.
• Alabama is set to try out a new, untested execution method.
• A 12-year-old student in Colorado Springs was removed from class for having a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack.
• "Do students have privacy rights when it comes to their parents?" asks the Los Angeles Times.
• Rick Perry makes the conservative case for psychedelic medicine.
The post From 'Fetus' to 'Unborn Child': Ohio Adopts Biased Ballot Summary of Abortion Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Ohio initiative that would legalize marijuana for recreational use officially qualified for this November's ballot yesterday. If successful, it would make Ohio the 24th state to allow cannabis consumption without a doctor's note.
The Ohio Legislature authorized medical use of marijuana in 2016. A February 2022 Emerson College poll found that a bare majority of likely voters (50.4 percent) thought marijuana also "should be legal for recreational purposes," while about 40 percent were opposed and 10 percent were undecided. The cannabis initiative, backed by the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol and funded largely by the Marijuana Policy Project, will be presented to voters alongside an initiative that would guarantee abortion rights, which could boost turnout among voters inclined to favor marijuana legalization.
"This isn't groundbreaking," coalition spokesman Tom Haren said after Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose certified that the initiative campaign had collected enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot. "We're just trying to get Ohio in line with neighbors like Michigan and Illinois."
Michigan voters approved marijuana legalization in 2018, and the Illinois legislature followed suit the following year. Like those states and all the others that have legalized recreational use, the Ohio initiative would set a minimum purchase and possession age of 21. Adults 21 or older would be allowed to publicly possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana—the same as the limit in Michigan but higher than the one-ounce maximum in Illinois—and grow up to six plants at home. Michigan likewise allows home cultivation, while Illinois limits it to medical marijuana patients.
The Ohio initiative would establish a Division of Cannabis Control within the Commerce Department, which would be charged with licensing and regulating commercial growers, manufacturers, testing laboratories, distributors, and retailers. Sales would be taxed at 10 percent, in addition to standard state and local sales taxes that average 7.24 percent. Local governments would not be authorized to impose additional marijuana taxes.
Michigan's marijuana taxes are similar: a 10 percent retail tax, plus a 6 percent standard sales tax. But the taxes in Illinois are much higher: That state collects a 7 percent excise tax at the wholesale level, plus retail taxes that vary depending on the type of product: 10 percent on flower with a THC concentration up to 35 percent, 20 percent on edibles, and 25 percent on any product with THC content that exceeds 35 percent. Local governments impose additional taxes up to 3.75 percent. And all of that is on top of standard state and local sales taxes that average 8.82 percent.
Notably, legalization in Michigan was accomplished by a ballot initiative, the route that Ohio will take if voters give their approval. The designers of those initiatives evidently took to heart lessons from states like California, where heavy taxes and heavy regulation have combined to maintain a black market that still accounts for somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of marijuana sales seven years after voters approved legalization. Money-hungry legislators in Illinois, by contrast, apparently were unfazed by that example.
Another factor contributing to California's embarrassing situation is local bans on marijuana businesses, which have created "massive cannabis deserts" where "consumers have no access to a legal retailer within a reasonable distance of their home," as a 2022 report from Reason Foundation (which publishes this website) noted. The Ohio initiative opens the door to similar problems by allowing local governments to "prohibit" or "limit the number" of marijuana merchants within their jurisdictions. It does, however, give them an incentive to allow cannabis sales by promising them a share of the resulting tax revenue if they do.
Although the Ohio initiative's backers say their aim is to regulate marijuana "just like" alcohol, their plan does not completely fulfill that promise. Yes, the minimum purchase age, like the one for alcohol, would be 21, although there are reasons to doubt the wisdom of that limit, which leaves younger adults subject to criminal penalties for possession or for misrepresenting their ages while attempting a purchase. And yes, marijuana, like alcohol, would be subject to a special "sin" tax. Ohio's proposed 10 percent rate, according to at least one estimate, would have an impact similar to the combined effects of state and federal taxes on beer and wine prices. But alcohol regulations do not include anything like the personal possession restrictions that Ohio (like every other state that has legalized marijuana) would be imposing on cannabis consumers.
According to the initiative, exceeding the possession limit would be punishable under Section 2925.11 of the Ohio Revised Code. It would be either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the amount involved. By contrast, drinkers do not have to worry about criminal penalties when they transport more than a specified amount of beer, wine, or liquor for personal use.
For people who do not successfully complete the process to obtain the requisite license, selling marijuana likewise would remain a felony, punishable by one to eight years in prison, again depending on the amount involved. Selling alcohol without a license, by contrast, is a misdemeanor in Ohio, punishable by up to six months in jail.
Once people can legally buy marijuana, where can they legally consume it? That question has presented a puzzle in other states that have legalized recreational use without providing for businesses analogous to bars or restaurants that serve alcohol. When cannabis consumption is allowed only in private residences, a state is clearly not regulating marijuana "just like" alcohol. The problem is especially acute for out-of-state visitors, who are apt to find that their hotels frown upon marijuana use.
The Ohio initiative obliquely addresses that issue. It says marijuana use in "public areas" would be a "minor misdemeanor," punishable by a $150 fine. It explicitly does not permit marijuana use on on "federal, state, or locally owned land." It says landlords may not reject tenants based primarily on their cannabis consumption, although they would be allowed to prohibit pot smoking as long as that is a condition of the lease. Finally, the initiative says it does not "prohibit any public place from accommodating an individual's use of [recreational] cannabis," which seems to leave room for businesses where people can legally use marijuana.
Does that mean licensed dispensaries might also be allowed to "accommodate" cannabis consumption, in the same way that bars and restaurants "accommodate" alcohol consumption? Presumably that would depend on the regulations issued by the Division of Cannabis Control. I have asked the Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol for clarification, and I will update this post if and when I get an answer.
Details aside, this system obviously would be a big improvement on a legal regime that threatens all recreational cannabis consumers and anyone who supplies them with fines or incarceration. If voters approve the initiative, nearly half of the states will allow recreational use of marijuana, which nevertheless remains completely prohibited under federal law. The short-term prospects of resolving that contradiction, let alone in a sensible way, do not seem very bright.
The post In November, Ohio Could Become the 24th State To Legalize Marijuana appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today's special election in Ohio will determine the fate of Issue 1, a ballot measure meant to make it harder to amend the state's constitution and to get amendments on the state's ballot in the first place. Wrapped up in this battle is a larger fight over abortion rights—and one that could be coming soon to other states.
If Issue 1 passes, Ohio will require proposed constitutional amendments to receive 60 percent of the vote, instead of the current simple majority required. It would also change signature collection rules for groups trying to get amendments on the ballot, requiring the collection of signatures from at least 5 percent of voters in the last gubernatorial election in all counties, instead of the now-required 44 counties. And it would get rid of a 10-day period currently allowed to replace signatures that the secretary of state deems invalid.
Issue 1 is backed by Ohio Republicans, who have promoted it with some interesting rhetoric. One talking point has been that it protects the Ohio Constitution from out-of-state interests. (For instance: "At its core, it's about keeping out-of-state special interest groups from buying their way into our constitution," Protect Women Ohio Press Secretary Amy Natoce told Fox News.) Another has been that it signals trust in elected officials to safeguard citizen interests, rather than letting a random majority of voters decide what's best. (The current simple-majority rule for amending the state constitution "sends the message that if you don't like what the legislature is doing, you can just put it on the ballot, and soon the constitution will be thousands of pages long and be completely meaningless," Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told Politico in a prime example of this tack.)
Arguments like these are notable because they go against conservative rhetoric in other realms. One could easily imagine an alternate universe in which Ohio Republicans railed against a measure like Issue One on the grounds that it sought to make it harder for ordinary people to have a voice.
But Republicans have an ulterior motive in making it more difficult for Ohio voters to amend the Constitution: an amendment on the ballot this November stating that "every individual has a right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one's own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion."
"The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either an individual's voluntary exercise of this right or a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right, unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual's health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care," it continues. "Abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability. But in no case may such an abortion be prohibited if in the professional judgement of the pregnant patient's treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient's life or health."
Because of the upcoming vote on the abortion amendment, the battle over Issue 1 has turned into a proxy battle over Ohio abortion laws. (For instance, in my parents' Catholic parish bulletin in Cincinnati, a section purporting to explain the impact of Issue 1 instead focused almost entirely on the fall abortion measure.)
"Given current polling, Republicans are expected to lose the November vote, so they're trying to change the rules mid-game," writes Politico contributor Joshua Zeitz. "The gambit is so transparent that even two former GOP governors, Robert Taft and John Kasich, have come out in opposition."
The abortion element means Issue 1 has attracted a lot more attention than a battle over ballot procedures and constitutional amendment rules likely otherwise would. As of yesterday, "more than 500,000 voters [had] already voted on Issue 1," reported Politico.
A USA TODAY Network/Suffolk University poll from July suggested that Issue 1 has a wide range of detractors. Fifty-seven percent of the voters polled said they were against it, while just 26 percent were for it. Opponents came from across the political spectrum. "Democrats are more likely to oppose Issue 1, but 41% of Republicans, 60% of independents and 41% of Ohioans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 said they're also against it," reported the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Many supporters of Issue 1 have been open about the fact that it's meant to prevent the November abortion initiative from passing. But supporters have also been playing up other conservative fears in an attempt to pass it. For instance, one particularly disingenuous ad that's been running frequently in Ohio in recent weeks suggests that Issue 1 protects against those who would "put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids."
Measures like Issue 1 may be coming to many more states than just Ohio.
One "trend in the post-Dobbs era has been the use of direct democracy to protect abortion rights," notes The New York Times. "The mechanisms of direct democracy—referendums, initiatives, ballot questions and the like—allow voters to register their preferences directly, bypassing elected officials and other intermediaries." That's made them an appealing target for anti-abortion advocates worried about what will happen when protecting abortion is put to a popular vote.
Kat Rosenfield looks at recent controversies over books and suggests the popular narrative surrounding this surge of "book bans" is wrong. Media coverage has focused largely on right-wing parents with anti-LGBT agendas or qualms about books concerned with race. Conservatives certainly are pushing for certain books to be restricted or excluded from school libraries. But "for every parents' rights group demanding the removal of Gender Queer from the school library, members of the political left have their own, no less ideology-driven ways of restricting access to books," writes Rosenfield for Pirate Wires. What's more, the battle lines haven't been drawn over book bans in any traditional sense of the word but over what books should be stocked in school and public libraries.
The ubiquity of the term, "book ban," elides the fact that book bans as such don't really exist anymore. …
By the time you're talking about limiting its distribution in a library setting, you're not really fighting about the book anymore. You're engaged in a bigger, uglier power struggle for the soul of the library itself. …
This is perhaps the most important context missing from the "book banning" discourse: absolutely none of this is about the books themselves. This is also the good news: despite the efforts of folks on both sides of the political aisle, and despite the enormous amount of ink spilled about the scourge of book bans, the actual content of most school libraries — even the ones in Florida — remains truly and wildly diverse in the original sense of the word. For every explicitly ideological YA book aimed at gender-questioning or LGBT youth, there's a slew of ordinary coming of age novels, faith-based books about troubled Christian teens, and no shortage of deeply unwoke heterosexual smut for the brazen few who are both nerdy and horny enough to go digging through the stacks for Flowers in the Attic or Clan of the Cave Bear (a.k.a. every school library's true, albeit silent constituency).
Instead, this is a conflict centered on the library as a public institution — and more specifically, on what happens when one of those institutions abandons political neutrality as a core value. We've already seen how this has played out in media and academia, how the perception of political partisanship leads to a catastrophic loss of trust. As the columnist Megan McArdle notes, "It turns out that if you treat your profession as an explicitly political project, people will extend your profession the same trust they extend politicians."
More here.
In related news:
????In a new report, PEN America warns against the cancellation of books due to online outrage—and calls for a broad recommitment to the freedom to write & the freedom to read.
Read: Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm https://t.co/vyvuhHcmYk pic.twitter.com/lNUbWQFV9G
— PEN America (@PENamerica) August 7, 2023
The trucking company Yellow Corporation has filed for bankruptcy, with plans to lay off 30,000 employees—and default on a $700 million pandemic aid loan. The company "blames the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) trucking union, of which 22,000 of the company's 30,000 employees are members," notes Reason's Joe Lancaster:
Yellow CEO Darren Hawkins criticizes the union for "literally driving our company out of business" due to "nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics." …
But the situation is more complicated than a disagreement between a company's management and its workers. In 2020, as countless companies struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress apportioned trillions of dollars to help both workers and companies survive the sudden economic blow. But hidden in that amount was a $17 billion fund under the Treasury Department's sole control, to be disbursed to companies deemed necessary to national security.
In May 2020, Sen. Jerry Moran (R–Kan.) petitioned then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for help on Yellow's behalf; six weeks later, the company was approved for a $700 million loan, and in exchange, the government took a 29.6 percent stake in the company. The Treasury Department later explained that Yellow was "the leading transportation provider to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection." But at the same time, the Department of Justice was suing Yellow over allegations that the company overcharged the government by inflating its freight volumes. (The company settled the case in March 2022 for $6.85 million.)
Yellow Company's bankruptcy "underscores criticism" of the loan, notes Axios. "Criticism of the Yellow loan has been bipartisan, beginning when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and continuing under Republican leadership," and now "taxpayers are about to take a bath on Yellow."
• "I think it is very safe to say at this point that 2023 is the odds-on favorite to be the warmest year on record," climate scientist Zeke Hausfather told The Washington Post. Hausfather previously expected 2023 to be the fifth-hottest year on record. "What's changed is the last two months have been incredibly hot, setting records by a very large margin compared to what we've seen in the past."
• What's going on in Niger?
• A federal judge has rejected former President Donald Trump's defamation countersuit against E. Jean Carroll, who earlier this year won a $5 million judgment in a sexual misconduct suit against him.
• The Free Press explores Anthony Fauci's behind-the-scenes machinations to control the narrative about COVID-19's origins.
• Texas has appealed a judge's Friday ruling that women with medically complicated pregnancies were exempt from the state's bans on abortion. "The appeal placed a stay on the injunction—meaning that the abortion ban will not change in practice," explains The Dallas Morning News. "The case's fate is now up to the Texas Supreme Court."
• Are Republicans tiring of attacks on "wokeness"?
• PayPal has launched a stablecoin. The coin "is 100% backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term U.S Treasuries and similar cash equivalents," and is "redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars," states the company in a press release. "The stablecoin is built on Ethereum," notes The Verge.
• The Food and Drug Administration has approved zuranolone, the first drug specifically aimed at postpartum depression.
The post Ohio's Issue 1 Doesn't Mention Abortion. But That's Why People Are Voting Today. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Lorain, Ohio, police department says it is investigating after Officer Elliott Palmer shot and killed a family's Labrador retriever mix named Dixie. Bodycam video that started after Palmer was already on the scene shows a woman standing in a residential yard trying to control at least three dogs. One dog walked up to Palmer. But Palmer pointed at it and possibly spoke (Palmer had his bodycam muted), and it walked away. Another dog broke away from the woman and ran up to Palmer, who shot the dog and continued to fire at it as the dog limped away.
The post Brickbat: Barking Orders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Upstart electric vehicle (E.V.) manufacturer Lordstown Motors announced on Tuesday that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company simultaneously sued Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer Foxconn, its largest investor, for fraud and breach of contract. No matter how either scenario shakes out, it's all part of a long and shameful saga of crony capitalism.
In March 2019, General Motors (G.M.) shuttered its plant in Lordstown, Ohio, open since 1966. Automobile factory closures are nothing new, but in 2009, amid high gas prices and the Great Recession, Ohio gave G.M. $60 million to build the fuel-efficient and inexpensive Chevrolet Cruze in Lordstown. To qualify for the full amount, the company had to operate the plant through at least 2039.
When G.M. shut down the plant two decades early, the state threatened to claw back all $60 million before settling for a $28 million repayment and a $12 million investment in "workforce, education and infrastructure needs."
Then, in August 2019, Lordstown Motors announced plans to buy the facility and eventually build an all-electric pickup truck. G.M. sold the plant for $20 million and even loaned Lordstown $40 million toward the purchase and renovations (an amount roughly equivalent to the purchase price, plus the amount of taxpayer money that G.M. was allowed to keep).
But G.M. was not the only investor in the project. In December 2020, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approved a $20 million tax credit for the company. JobsOhio, a private nonprofit development agency that receives funding from state liquor revenues, pledged another $4.5 million.
The extra cash didn't do much good: In June 2021, Lordstown's CEO and CFO both resigned amid reports that the company had lied about its preorder numbers. That same month, the company admitted that it did not have enough cash to begin production and may not survive.
Desperate for investment, Lordstown announced in November 2021 that it had sold the factory to Foxconn, an international electronics manufacturer best known for making the iPhone. The following year, Foxconn kicked in an additional $170 million, and in exchange, the two companies would collaborate on a jointly-developed E.V. in addition to Lordstown's still-unreleased electric truck.
Foxconn is no stranger to bad deals made with taxpayer money: In 2017, in exchange for $3 billion in funding from the state of Wisconsin, the company agreed to spend $10 billion to build a manufacturing plant in the state that would employ over 13,000 people. Four years later, the company had spent around $700 million on a plant that employed around 1,500 people.
Lordstown indicated on Tuesday that part of the reason it sought bankruptcy protection was that Foxconn reneged on the second disbursement of cash. As a result, Lordstown is suing Foxconn for fraud and breach of contract. For its part, Foxconn claims that Lordstown violated the companies' joint agreement when its share price fell too low and was at risk of being delisted by NASDAQ.
Lordstown's bankruptcy may be a blow to the local economy in Northeastern Ohio. But the real tragedy is that state officials committed taxpayer money, first to General Motors and then to a completely unproven startup. In this case, the solution is simple: Government should let the taxpayers keep their cash and insist that private companies raise and spend private money.
The post Ohio E.V. Manufacturer Fails Despite Millions in Taxpayer Subsidies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After many years of working in the policy world, I have concluded that politics is at most 10 percent about making the world better and safer. The rest is at least 45 percent theater and 45 percent catering to special interest groups. Further evidence for my assessment comes from the recent grandstanding in the U.S. Senate on rail safety.
One reason why so much of what comes out of Congress is useless, if not straight up destructive, boils down to incentives. Politicians need something they can brag about when they seek reelection or election to higher office. Meanwhile, legislators are constantly surrounded by special interests who plead for government-granted privilege such as subsidies, loan guarantees, tariffs, or regulations cleverly designed to hamstring competitors. Politicians rarely hear from the victims of their policies. Few voters can trace the origin of the higher prices they pay and the lower living standards they suffer.
Enter the Rail Safety Act, a joint product of Sens. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio). This bill, introduced in early May, is touted as a legislative response to the February freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled toxic material, forcing people out of their homes and filling the air with toxic gas. Thankfully, no one was injured. But before anyone understood what truly caused the derailment—most likely a faulty wheel—politicians of all stripes were out promising new regulations to improve rail safety.
The result is legislation with little connection to the derailment, or to any other derailments for that matter. Indeed, it appears to push pet projects that legislators wanted all along without any reckoning of costs and benefits. In consequence, says University of Dayton professor Michael F. Gorman in a new paper, none of the bill's detailed prescriptions and rules "would reduce the risk of a serious accident involving the transport of hazardous material. Taken together, they will likely result in an inferior outcome to the status quo."
This is not surprising. What the bill does have is an awful lot in it for unions to like. For instance, it would freeze train crew sizes (the opposite of efficiency and something unions were demanding long before the derailment) and require more inspections that can only be performed by, you guessed it, union workers.
These regulations might appeal to some people, but let's not pretend they will make the railroad industry more effective. Instead, they would make freight more expensive, potentially pushing more of it toward trucking (a dirty and more dangerous mode of transport). More frustrating is that none of these measures would prevent what is the leading cause of derailment in the United States—namely, human error.
The solution to human error is more automation rather than more people. In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials earlier in May, the Reason Foundation's Marc Scribner explained how rail safety can be greatly enhanced through automated track inspection and automated train operations. He also noted that the search for improved safety above and beyond what regulators require of the rail industry—improvement chiefly through automation—is already well underway.
All of this casts quite a bit of doubt on the rhetoric surrounding the issue. After the bill cleared committee with just one other Republican vote, Vance suggested that without it, there would be another East Palestine incident. In reality, there will be other train derailments regardless of whether the legislation is enacted. The good news is that most of these incidents will likely be insignificant, as a vast majority of derailments are.
This explains why we didn't hear much about derailments before East Palestine. As for rarer, more serious derailments, there's plenty of hope on that front. Whatever one thinks of U.S. railroads, sober analysis of the available data shows the industry is already overwhelmingly safe. This is especially true when juxtaposed against other modes of transportation, particularly trucking.
My colleagues at the Mercatus Center have showed clearly that the number one input to improved rail safety is private investment, something railroads do pretty well. They do it to the tune of around $25 billion a year, and at about six times the level of the average U.S. manufacturer. Most of those manufacturers happen to be served by railroads, and many are darlings of the New Right and its policy agenda.
Certainly, Congress could pursue policies to further improve rail safety. Instead, the American public is being railroaded by 50 percent pandering and 50 percent favoritism to unions.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post The Rail Safety Act Is About Union Handouts, Not Safety appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Under the watch of then–President Donald Trump in May 2019, the Department of Transportation withdrew a proposed regulation that would have required all freight trains in the United States to operate with two-person crews.
That rule, which the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) had been contemplating since the waning days of the Obama administration, was backed by labor unions as a way to protect railroading jobs from automation that allows trains to operate safely with only a single person in control. After three years of investigating the issue, the FRA reported that accident data did not show two-person crews to be any safer than one-person crews. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) agreed, telling the FRA that "There is insufficient data to demonstrate that accidents are avoided by having a second qualified person in the cab."
Then, in February, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. It spilled vinyl chloride, a chemical long used to make PVC plastics, into a trackside ditch, and a controlled burn used to clean up the mess launched towering plumes of black smoke over the town.
In the media and political frenzy that followed, there has been little opportunity for a sober discussion about railroad safety. Instead, a bipartisan group including Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and J.D. Vance, a Republican, have rushed forward with the Railway Safety Act, a bill that would impose the two-person crew requirement that the FRA considered and rejected in 2019.
The rule still has nothing to do with safety. Indeed, the train that derailed in East Palestine had a crew of three aboard.
Rather than being focused on policies that will actually improve the safety of American railroads, the bill—which could get a final vote this week—is all about politics. As such, it is a useful illustration of how right-wing populists like Vance are actually advancing long-running goals of the political left in their muddled pursuit of reorienting the Republican Party.
That includes Trump, of course. Even though it was his administration that killed the two-man-crew mandate in 2019, the former president is now a strong supporter of the bill that would impose the same mandate in 2023.
"JD Vance has been working hard in the Senate to make sure nothing like this EVER happens again, and that's why it's so important for Congress to pass his Railway Safety Act," Trump posted on Truth Social last month. "JD's terrific bill has my Complete and Total Endorsement."
Trump has never been one to think deeply about policy—or to let hypocrisy get in the way of political opportunism. Still, the fact that Trump, Vance, and seven other Republican senators have jumped to endorse a bill full of labor policies unrelated to railroad safety is telling. It's perhaps the clearest legislative signal yet of a political trend identified by Reason's Stephanie Slade, which she calls right-progressivism.
It's not the first time this has happened. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson heaped praise on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) in 2019 for a list of economic policies that Carlson said "sound like Donald Trump at his best." Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) sided with unionized rail workers during a recent labor spat with the Biden administration. Much of Trump's protectionist trade agenda might as well have been pulled directly from the progressive playbook.
As Slade notes, those on the political right who are advocating for a larger, more powerful federal government are often "unapologetic proponents of actual left-wing policies, such as tariffs, industrial subsidies, and aggressive antitrust action."
Add costly and unnecessary regulations to the pile.
The two-man-crew mandate is just the start. The Railway Safety Act also grants broad new powers to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who would be responsible for creating a new regulatory regime to govern trackside sensors and the power to write new regulations for railcars and their routine inspections. Regulations that make it more difficult or expensive to ship goods by rail will actually undercut safety by pushing more hazardous materials onto roadways, warns Philip Rossetti, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute.
Rail accidents have been steadily declining for years, notes Michael Gorman, a business and logistics professor at Dayton University, in a recently published paper. Meanwhile, trucking accidents are on the rise, and trucking accidents involving hazardous materials have caused more property damage and loss of life than train derailments in recent decades. Legislation that exclusively piles new regulations onto rail will trigger "higher rail shipping costs and more goods traveling by truck, which would be a decidedly inferior outcome for society," Gorman concludes.
In supporting the Railway Safety Act, Vance and Trump are signaling support for a litany of left-wing goals: growing the regulatory state, giving bureaucrats more power over American businesses, and protectionism for union jobs. They're also falling into the same trap as many progressives: ignoring trade-offs and obvious unintended consequences.
If the so-called New Right is reorienting the conservative movement to help accomplish the goals of the progressive left, one might wonder why America has a conservative movement at all.
The post In Debate Over Railway Safety Bill, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Are Leaning to the Left appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When sheriff's deputies in Adams County, Ohio, raided Afroman's house last year, they were looking for more than just marijuana, which the rapper is famously fond of. The deputies were searching for evidence of outlandish claims from a confidential informant that the house contained a basement dungeon.
The Adams County Sheriff's Office (ACSO) executed a search warrant on Afroman's house last August on suspicion of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. Afroman was not charged with a crime, and the kidnapping angle was never explained. But now, public records obtained by Arthur West, a public records advocate, and provided to Reason shed more light on the raid, which has since led to a bitter legal battle between Afroman and the ACSO deputies.
According to the search warrant affidavit, the Adams County Sheriff's Office received a tip from a confidential informant that Joseph Foreman, better known as Afroman, was not only trafficking large amounts of marijuana, but he also "has a basement, referred to as 'the dungeon' in which he…keeps women locked in, forcing them to urinate and defecate in a bucket as punishment for upsetting or disobeying him."
Body camera footage of the raid shows the deputies—after the initial excitement of busting down the front door—ambling through Afroman's house, rifling through his clothes and CDs, and trying to find false walls and secret rooms.
But the hourslong search turned up no evidence to corroborate the claim of a basement dungeon. Part of the problem may have been that, as Afroman's record label told Vice, the house did not have a basement.
There was no big stash of weed either. According to search warrant documents, deputies recovered a glass jar containing "green leafy vegetation" (shake, according to deputies on the body camera footage), THC wax, and several pipes.
The deputies also seized more than $5,000 in cash, which they were ultimately forced to return. (The returned amount was $400 short, which an investigation later determined was due to a counting error by deputies.)
Reason has extensively written about how police departments use unreliable confidential informants and unverified tips to launch violent, unconstitutional raids.
In a statement to Reason on Afroman's behalf, Adam "Dot" Muniz, the director of operations for Music Access Inc., Afroman's distributor, says the search warrant's allegations are "entirely false. If there was any indication they were true, he would have been arrested during the unlawful police raid."
Afroman has yet to be charged with any crime. He subsequently used surveillance footage of the raid and cellphone video taken by his wife to lampoon the ACSO deputies. He released two music videos for songs mocking the cops, "Lemon Pound Cake" and "Will You Help Me Repair My Door." He also sold merchandise with images of the deputies and used the footage to promote his products and tours.
The mockery offended the deputies so much that seven of them filed a lawsuit against Afroman in March. The deputies argue Afroman used their personas for commercial purposes without permission, causing them to suffer "embarrassment, ridicule, emotional distress, humiliation, and loss of reputation."
The lawsuit also named Muniz's company. Muniz called the suit a "desperate cry" and said it originally misstated his company's name.
The Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief in support of Afroman's motion to dismiss the suit, arguing it's a blatant example of what's known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP).
"There is nothing the First Amendment guards more jealously than criticism of public officials on a matter of public concern, regardless of whether the criticism is harsh, or vulgar, or presented in a series of catchy music videos," David Carey, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, says. "The fact that Afroman may profit from his work does nothing to alter the First Amendment's protection, any more than a newspaper loses its protection by being sold. And the idea that public law enforcement officers have a protectable right to personal privacy while conducting a search of someone's home is nothing short of absurd—there are few scenarios that present less of a privacy interest than that."
One of Afroman's lawyers has previously said he intends to countersue.
The post Ohio Cops Raided Afroman's House Looking for a Dungeon Because of a Bizarre Confidential Informant Tip appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Mason County, Kentucky, grand jury has indicted Ripley, Ohio, police officer Caleb Savage for reckless homicide, failure to render aid, and leaving the scene of an accident. The Kentucky State Police says Savage spotted a vehicle he thought resembled one "suspected to be involved in a property crime." Savage followed the vehicle across the state line into Kentucky where he turned on his lights and siren and began a chase. The driver fled but lost control and crashed after a couple of miles. Savage did not stop or call for help but returned to Ohio. The driver of the other vehicle was pronounced dead at the scene. Savage has resigned from the police department.
The post Brickbat: Giving Chase appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the city of Lebanon banned abortion in 2021, it initially seemed like a pointless stunt. At that point, Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, and there were no abortion clinics in Lebanon, a city of around 21,000 people in southwestern Ohio. But social workers and activists worried that the ban's broad language could be used to punish people for counseling or otherwise helping women obtain abortions outside the city.
That dauntingly vague, speech-chilling threat was magnified after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022. But in the face of a constitutional challenge, the city amended its ordinance last fall, excising language that threatened people with prosecution for "aiding and abetting" abortion.
Lebanon's ordinance made it unlawful "to procure or perform an abortion of any type and at any stage of pregnancy in the city of Lebanon." It also banned possession or distribution of "abortion inducing drugs" and made it illegal "to knowingly aid or abet" an abortion.
The city defined aiding and abetting to include activities such as providing transportation to an abortion clinic, providing "abortion doula" services, giving money to someone with knowledge that it would be used to terminate a pregnancy, or "giving instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortion." The ordinance also covered any other conduct that "makes one an accomplice to abortion."
Lebanon was not only criminalizing constitutionally protected speech; it was trying to criminalize speech outside Lebanon. On May 11, 2022, nine days after Politico published a leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, the National Association of Social Workers and the group now known as the Abortion Fund of Ohio filed a federal lawsuit challenging Lebanon's ordinance. The two organizations argued that the ordinance violated the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process, which requires "fair notice" of what a law prohibits.
"This case concerns whether a municipal government may enact a vague, sweeping ordinance that can be interpreted to criminalize virtually all activity even tangentially connected to abortion without providing fair notice of the specific conduct it forbids," said the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. "The Ban asks ordinary citizens….to interpret and apply complex, nuanced legal concepts in order to determine whether their conduct is likely to subject them to prosecution."
A declaration from a Lebanon-based social worker identified as "Beth Doe" illustrated the quandary created by the ban. "No matter the focus of one's social work practice, pregnancy is an issue that can arise at any time," she noted. "I worry that the ordinance encompasses the information and referrals related to abortion that I provide to clients, even in cases where my client is not located in Lebanon, because I am personally located in Lebanon."
The law's prohibition of aiding and abetting "poses more questions than it answers," the plaintiffs argued. Did offering emotional support to someone obtaining an abortion count? Could Lebanon-based donors to the abortion fund be prosecuted if the organization covered transportation and lodging expenses for someone seeking an abortion outside Lebanon?
Rather than defend the ordinance's aiding-and-abetting provision, Lebanon quickly capitulated, formally agreeing in May to amend the ordinance. In the meantime, it promised not to prosecute the plaintiffs or any of their members, volunteers, staff, or donors for aiding and abetting abortion.
The amended ordinance, enacted in September 2022, still prohibits abortion and the possession or distribution of abortion-inducing drugs. But the entire section on aiding and abetting is gone.
In January, the city further stipulated that it "does not claim authority to enforce its prohibitions against conduct" that occurs outside Lebanon. It also stipulated that the ban does not apply to "an abortion where mifepristone and misoprostol"—the two drugs used in the U.S. abortion-pill regimen—"are prescribed and dispensed to a pregnant woman outside Lebanon, and then she ingests the misoprostol [the second drug in the two-step process] in Lebanon." Nor does the law touch conduct that "aids or abets a drug-induced abortion in which the patient ingests misoprostol in Lebanon."
That's one small victory for free speech and due process. But similar battles are playing out across the country and likely will for years.
The post Advocates Pressured an Ohio Town To Reverse Ban on 'Aiding and Abetting' Abortions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Capital punishment could soon be on its way out of Ohio. Recent efforts from the governor, the attorney general, and state legislators suggest the state is moving away from the practice.
Ohio's last execution was in 2018. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has been slowly phasing out executions since he was elected. In 2019, he rescheduled an execution, citing fears "that the use of a particular drug that we would announce that would be used in [an execution] protocol might result in that particular drug company cutting off the state of Ohio." In 2020, DeWine declared an "unofficial moratorium" on the death penalty because of the difficulties in obtaining the necessary drugs to carry out a lethal injection execution "without endangering other Ohioans." And last week, he granted reprieves of execution for three death-row prisoners—extending each of their execution dates by over three years.
Even DeWine's Attorney General Dave Yost seems dissatisfied with the current status quo, which leaves death-row prisoners in legal limbo. On March 31, Yost released a 421-page report on capital punishment in the state, which levied considerable criticism against Ohio's "broken," expensive, and ineffective system.
"It is a system that is not fairly, equally or promptly enforced, and because of that it invites distrust and disrespect for the rule of law," reads the report's executive summary. "The extra cost of imposing the death penalty on the 128 inmates currently on Death Row might range between $128 million to $384 million. That's a stunning amount of money to spend on a program that doesn't achieve its purpose."
The report notes that the system "satisfies nobody." It reads, "Those who oppose the death penalty want it abolished altogether, not ticking away like a time bomb that might or might not explode. Those who support the death penalty want it to be fair, timely and effective. Neither side is getting what it wants while the state goes on pointlessly burning though [sic] enormous taxpayer resources."
Three days prior to the report's release, a group of a dozen bipartisan legislators introduced a bill that aims to abolish the state's death penalty altogether. If the legislation is passed, Ohio would become the 24th state to formally ban the death penalty.
"The death penalty, as it is applied today, devalues the dignity of human life," state Sen. Michele Reynolds (R–Canal Winchester) said at a press conference announcing the bill last month. "Human life should not be a bargaining chip. What we do with a human life should not be based on where you live, what race you are or your socioeconomic status."
The post Will Ohio Kill The Death Penalty? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Around midnight on New Year's Day 2022, an Ohio man was shot and killed by a police officer for firing "celebratory" shots into the air. Now, his widow has filed a federal lawsuit against the officer and local police department, claiming that police violated her husband's constitutional rights by using unnecessary, excessive force.
"For decades, United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution to prohibit a police officer's use of excessive force during the arrest of a citizen," the lawsuit states, adding that police deprived "Plaintiff of his well-established right to be free from excessive force, per the authority cited herein."
Near midnight on December 31, 2021, 46-year-old James Williams fired shots into the air from the porch of his Canton, Ohio, home. According to the lawsuit, this is a common occurrence on New Year's Eve within the town. In fact, the complaint notes that earlier in the evening, before Williams fired any shots, Canton police received a radio broadcast alerting them of another man that was firing shots into the air as "celebratory fire for New Years."
When Williams "join[ed] in that activity," a nearby police officer—Robert Huber—heard gunfire and drove to the front of William's home, which had a 6-foot fence surrounding the porch. According to the lawsuit, Huber then walked up the steps of the porch and looked through a window, where he saw Williams walking through the house while holding a rifle. The complaint states that Huber then backed off the porch and onto the street, where he activated his body camera and radioed for backup.
According to the lawsuit, Huber heard gunfire shortly after and approached the fence around the porch with his gun drawn. Without any verbal warning to Williams, Huber fired at the fence, striking Williams in the chest. The complaint states that Huber then shouted, "Shots fired, shots fired," and, "Police! Get down now! Police! Get down now!"
The complaint states that Williams then staggered into his living room, in view of his children, where he died shortly thereafter. The suit states that Huber did not attempt to provide medical care to Williams at any point.
"Defendant Huber intentionally fired his service weapon at Decedent and killed him with gunfire while Decedent posed no threat of death or serious bodily harm to Defendant Huber," the lawsuit states. "Huber fired at Decedent through a wooden fence which blocked Defendant Huber's view of the scene in front of him, putting at risk the lives of Decedent, Plaintiff, and their children."
Huber has not been disciplined or charged in connection with the shooting. Last September, a grand jury declined to charge Huber, sparking protests in Canton. "While the Stark County Prosecutor has failed in obtaining justice for James, we will not stop until we do," read a statement from the family's legal team.
While Huber seems unlikely to face criminal charges, this latest lawsuit is the final legal avenue for William's family to hold police accountable for his death. (A previous lawsuit was dismissed for Williams' widow's failure to obtain legal counsel.) However, it's unclear whether they will succeed in obtaining a settlement, as wide-ranging qualified immunity protections guard police from civil lawsuits. For now, accountability for Huber, or the police department that failed to discipline him, seems far-off.
"I really feel that there was no justice for James Williams and his family," said Canton City Councilwoman Chris Smith after the grand jury's decision. "There was no justice. I am disappointed in this system."
The post A Police Officer Killed a Man for Firing 'Celebratory' Shots Into the Air. Now, He Faces a Federal Lawsuit. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wake of the ugly freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last month, a bipartisan group of senators has proposed a bill they say would overhaul safety regulations for American railroads.
The bill also includes, perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of provisions that seem to have nothing to do with the cause of the Ohio accident that garnered national attention after hazmat crews conducted controlled burns of potentially toxic substances. Instead, the bill would deliver a costly new union-favored mandate to the railroad industry, making it more expensive to ship goods across the country for little (or no) safety benefit.
Tucked into the 18-page Railway Safety Act introduced by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) and J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) is a provision mandating that "no freight train may be operated without a 2-person crew." As Reason has previously reported, the two-person crew mandate is something railroad labor unions have been seeking for years as a way to maintain staffing levels as trains become more and more automated.
More highly automated trains are both safer and cheaper. Since the advent of positive train control (PTC)—essentially a computer-based override system that monitors speed and track signals to avert collisions, and which railroads have been mandated by Congress to use since 2008—rail accidents and employee injuries have fallen. Data from the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an industry group, show accidents are down 30 percent since 2000, while employee injuries have fallen by more than 40 percent. Meanwhile, a 2015 study by Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, and the AAR found that switching from two-person to one-person crews could save railroads $2.5 billion over a decade.
The federal government's own railroad, Amtrak, ditched its two-person crew requirement all the way back in the 1980s. That means Vance and Brown's bill would be imposing an expensive new rule on freight trains—supposedly in the name of safety—that wouldn't apply to trains carrying passengers.
And then there's this inconvenient detail: The train that derailed in East Palestine actually had three crew members on board.
In some ways, the Railway Safety Act looks like the kinds of bills that get batted around in the aftermath of mass shootings. Those proposals often aim to place more restrictions on legal and law-abiding gun owners or prohibit cosmetic upgrades that anti-gun activists dislike, but rarely (if ever) do they address the circumstances that led directly to a tragic event.
The same seems to be true here. While the investigation into the accident is ongoing, all indications so far point to two causes that worked in tandem to derail the Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine. The primary cause was an overheated wheel bearing, which failed and caused the train to derail as the crew was attempting to bring it to a stop after being alerted to the potential problem. The secondary cause was a possible delay in getting that alert to the crew. At least one trackside sensor meant to look for overheated wheels—known as a "hotbox detector"—along the train's route did not function properly. By the time the crew was alerted to the problem, it was too late.
Hotbox detectors aren't infallible, clearly, but they've got a long track record of success. A 2019 Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) report found that "accident rates caused by axle and bearing-related factors have dropped 81 percent since 1980 and 59 percent since 1990 due to the use of [hotbox] detectors." Doubling down on that technology seems like a good bet.
In response to the derailment in East Palestine, Norfolk Southern announced plans to install more hotbox detectors along its routes. The National Transportation Safety Board and the FRA have indicated they may implement new rules for hotbox detectors and other automated trackside safety equipment—and change how crews are expected to respond to alarms from those sensors. That seems like a targeted, focused, and likely effective response to prevent another accident like this one.
By contrast, members of Congress ought to ask themselves what a two-man crew mandate would have done to prevent the derailment. If anything, the East Palestine derailment was the result of there being too little automation in the operation of freight trains, not too much.
But that's not a satisfactory answer to the political forces on either side of the aisle who favor dragging railroads backward to the times when they operated less safely and less efficiently. The White House, in a statement that notably did not mention the two-person crew mandate, says the bill is full of "commonsense rail safety measures" and encouraged Congress to pass it quickly. Conservative groups that are part of the "New Right" have signaled their support for the bill, and Vance is joined by Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) in sponsoring it.
More sensors along the tracks might have prevented the mess, but an extra union worker in the engine's cab wouldn't have saved the day—and, indeed, didn't. It makes no sense to use this accident as an excuse to pile a costly, unnecessary mandate on American railroads—but that's exactly what Biden, Brown, Rubio, and Vance seem determined to do.
The post After the East Palestine Derailment, Congress Is Trying To Force Unrelated, Costly Regulations on Railroads appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy when you break into a famous rapper's house with an AR-15 and take his money? A group of Ohio sheriff's deputies thinks so.
Seven Adams County Sheriff's deputies have filed a lawsuit against Afroman for using footage of them raiding his house in several music videos, FOX19 reports. The deputies argue Afroman used their personas for commercial purposes without permission, causing them to suffer "embarrassment, ridicule, emotional distress, humiliation, and loss of reputation."
The Adams County deputies executed a search warrant on Afroman's house last August. According to a search warrant, Afroman was suspected of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping. The bust came up empty, and Afroman was never charged with a crime. Deputies did, however, seize more than $5,000 in cash, which they were ultimately forced to return. (The returned amount was $400 short, which an investigation later determined was due to a counting error by deputies.)
Afroman then used surveillance footage of the raid and cellphone video taken by his wife in two music videos, "Lemon Pound Cake" and "Will You Help Me Repair My Door." He also sold merchandise with images of the deputies and used the footage to promote his products and tours.
The complaint claims Afroman used their likenesses in dozens of social media posts, "subjecting them to undue ridicule."
"In some instances, it has made it more difficult and even more dangerous for Plaintiffs to carry out their official duties because of comments made and attitude expressed toward them by members of the public," the lawsuit says.
Of course, if they had spent their time solving real crimes instead of trundling around Afroman's house playing drug warrior, they would have remained happily anonymous.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction to take down the posts and videos, as well as more than $25,000 in damages.
In an Instagram post following the filing of the suit, Afroman shared a statement from his attorney Anna Castellini: "We are waiting for public records requests from Adam's county we still have not received. We are planning to counter sue for the unlawful raid, money being stolen, and for the undeniable damage this had on my clients family, career and property."
The post Ohio Cops Sue Afroman for Using Video of Them Raiding His House in Music Videos appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new lawsuit alleges that an Ohio woman suffered a broken wrist and other injuries after being violently arrested during a traffic stop, in part due to filming the police who pulled her over.
In February 2020, Amanda Mills was pulled over for speeding in Walton Hills, a small town outside Cleveland, Ohio. According to the suit, a police officer, identified in the lawsuit only as "Officer Schmidt" exited his cruiser "irate" and "screaming." Nervous, Mills began recording the encounter. Schmidt ordered Mills to get out of her vehicle. According to the suit, "Amanda asked 'why?' without making any other statement or any sudden movement. At this point, Officer Schmidt realized Amanda was filming him with her cellphone, and he became even more agitated."
According to the complaint, Schmidt "opened Amanda's driver-side door, grabbed her by the wrist and arm, and ripped her out of her vehicle." Another officer helped Schmidt pin Mills to the side of her vehicle. The suit alleges that "Amanda screamed that she was not resisting arrest and continued to cry out in pain." However, rather than releasing her, officers handcuffed Mills and put her in the back of their cruiser while they searched her vehicle. Eventually, Mills was released from custody after officers could not find illegal substances or outstanding warrants for her arrest. While Mills was initially charged with a first-degree misdemeanor for "failing to comply" with police orders, that charge was eventually dropped.
According to the suit, Mills was left with a broken wrist and other injuries to her arm and breasts. The complaint alleges that the officers' excessive force violated Mills' Fourth and 14th Amendment rights. The complaint also says that the Walton Hills Police Department's practices are the "moving force behind the injuries suffered by Amanda," and the department is guilty of "failing to adequately train, adequately supervise, as well as failing to investigate and discipline, its police officers when it comes to the excessive use of force."
While Mills' claims and the video she recorded are chilling, she faces an uphill battle in receiving restitution due to the specter of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil liability even when their actions are unconstitutional.
In Mills' case, police seemed to have been enraged in particular by her attempt to film them—an activity which has consistently been ruled to be protected by the First Amendment.
"Forcibly removing someone from their vehicle without warning or reasonable circumstances and then violently slamming them against the car is so extreme, outrageous, and beyond the realm of human decency and intolerable in a civilized society that emotional distress is guaranteed to occur," the complaint reads. "The Officers' actions were unreasonable, deliberately indifferent, reckless, willful, wanton, and shocking to the conscience, all of which deprived Amanda of her civil rights."
The post Ohio Woman Says Cops Broke Her Wrist for Recording During Traffic Stop appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The latest report from safety officials investigating the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, shows that the left and right's post-accident regulatory proposals likely would have done nothing to prevent the crash. A preliminary report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Thursday suggests a mechanical issue with an overheated wheel bearing was to blame for the accident.
The report says that track sensors detected a wheel bearing on the Norfolk Southern train was heating up rapidly as it traveled through eastern Ohio. When a sensor alerted the crew that the bearing's temperature hit 253 degrees above the ambient temperature, they brought the train to a halt to inspect the problem.
During their braking procedure, the train's automatic brakes were triggered—which likely meant the train had already derailed by the time the crew was bringing it to a stop.
This is just a preliminary report. It doesn't identify what caused the train's wheel bearing to overheat in the first place. But it does suggest that most of the post-accident commentary has been disconnected from the actual causes of the accident.
Prior to the release of the NTSB report, the White House and the media have been eager to pin the cause of the disaster on various deregulatory moves made by the Trump administration.
In particular, they've pointed to the Trump administration's revocation of an Obama-era rule that would have required Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes on all trains carrying exclusively high-flammable cargo.
The revocation of that rule wasn't just an initiative of the Trump administration, however. The 2015 FAST Act required the administration to perform a cost-benefit analysis of requiring ECP brakes, and not go forward with the mandate if it didn't pass that cost-benefit analysis. A congressional watchdog report in 2016 found that the Obama administration had implemented its ECP mandate without doing a thorough enough analysis of the technology's costs and performance.
That's all kind of beside the point, however. Even if the ECP rule had been in place, it wouldn't have applied to the train that derailed in East Palestine. That train was carrying mixed cargo without enough high-flammable cargo-containing cars to trigger the old ECP rule.
On February 16, NTSB director Jennifer Homendy said people blaming the accident on the repeal of the ECP rule were spreading "misinformation."
The ECP braking rule would've applied ONLY to HIGH HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAINS. The train that derailed in East Palestine was a MIXED FREIGHT TRAIN containing only 3 placarded Class 3 flammable liquids cars. pic.twitter.com/ReAFDSdsn7
— Jennifer Homendy (@JenniferHomendy) February 17, 2023
That hasn't stopped the White House from citing the repeal of the ECP rule to USA Today on February 22 as an example of Republicans' efforts to undermine rail safety.
On the right, Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) sent a letter to Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg demanding he investigate railroads' use of precision-scheduled railroading (PSR).
Rubio and Vance hone in on PSR's alleged reduction in the number of railroad workers per train for harming safety, writing "it is not unreasonable to ask whether a crew of two rail workers, plus one trainee, is able to effectively monitor 150 cars."
This earned the two senators a glowing write-up in The American Conservative, which said their letter was a sign of "serious populism."
PSR is a nebulous term for a lot of different practices railroads have adopted to use their assets more efficiently, says Marc Scribner, a senior transportation policy analyst with Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website). "It's kind of a boogeyman that's a stand-in for everything [people] don't like about the railroads."
Scribner says that PSR is getting a lot of blame for a drop in railroad workers that was in fact caused by layoffs and early retirements during the chaos of the pandemic. And given that the East Palestine derailment appears to have been caused by a mechanical failure of a wheel bearing, it's not clear at all that more workers per train would have prevented it.
In response to Rubio's criticism, Buttigieg accused the senator of hypocrisy because he supported greater use of automated track safety inspections.
The facts don't lie. The 2021 letter you signed was obviously drafted by railroad industry lobbyists.
It supports waivers that would reduce visual track inspections.
Now: will you vote to help us toughen rail safety accountability and fines, or not? https://t.co/o5MGvbEZbA
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) February 21, 2023
Federal rules require human-performed visual track inspections. In the past few years, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has allowed a number of railroads to conduct pilot programs whereby the railroads reduced the number of human-performed inspections and increased the number of automated inspections.
Those pilot programs proved successful in that the automated inspections found more defects than visual human inspections, says Scribner. The hope of these programs was that they would free up visual inspectors to examine signals and other track components that can't be inspected by automated technology. Doing that should improve safety.
But Biden's FRA killed these pilot programs. In 2021, Rubio and 22 other senators signed a letter asking that these pilot programs be continued. They weren't.
Buttigieg bringing that up as an example of Republican safety regulation slashing is disingenuous. It's particularly egregious given that there's been no indication thus far that track defects (that these inspections, human or automated, would detect) had anything to do with the East Palestine derailment.
That so much of this mudslinging happened prior to the preliminary NTSB report on the accident is telling. It shows that most of the finger-pointing and regulatory gotchas happening right now are more about political point scoring than safety.
That's certainly unseemly. If it leads to a bunch of ill-considered regulations being applied to freight rail companies, it could be quite costly too.
Should ex-felons have the right to vote? Bloomberg's Jonathan Bernstein says yes:
In practice, the policy of restricting felons from voting is irrational. Former felons retain other political rights. They are entitled to freedom of speech. They can electioneer on behalf of a candidate. They can donate money. It makes no sense to allow these democratic freedoms while denying them the right to vote.
Read the whole thing here.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom's plan to cap oil company profits is running headlong into reality. The governor's proposal got a skeptical treatment at its first public hearing before a California Senate committee. Reports Politico:
Sen. Steve Bradford (D-Gardena), the committee's chair, summed up a fear held by others on the committee as they paged through charts and documents and listened to detailed explanations for prices that are typically among the highest in the nation."In our pursuit to address gasoline prices, we must ensure our actions that we take first [do] no harm to consumers," Bradford said.
And more:
"There is clearly a belief out there among many people that oil companies were profiting off the backs of Californians," said Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine). "At the same time, we don't really have a smoking gun as far as I can see, that shows intentional collusion."
Read Reason's Steven Greenhut on Newsom's various schemes to increase energy costs for Californians.
• A new study from Australian seismologists finds that Earth's core has five layers to it, not the four that had previously been assumed. Researchers at Australia National University have found "new evidence of a 400-mile thick solid metallic ball at the center of Earth's inner core," reports The Washington Post.
• Entertainment company Warner Bros. Discovery is plotting to make several more Lord of the Rings movies that will explore more stories within the universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Russia's invasion of Ukraine turns one year old today. Reason's J.D. Tuccille warns about the potential for the conflict to go global.
• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) says she plans to introduce a resolution calling for an audit of U.S. aid to Ukraine. Congress has approved $113 billion in military and nonmilitary aid to the country thus far.
• A new study finds that people harbor fewer discriminatory feelings toward Asian Americans if they're overweight.
People have fewer discriminatory feelings against overweight Asian Americans, because they see them as "real Americans".https://t.co/quW1UyDZUW pic.twitter.com/BxQuHA9vNP
— Nicholas says, NGDP Targeting Now! ????️???????????????? (@captgouda24) February 23, 2023
The post New NTSB Report Highlights Useless, Premature Regulatory Push After East Palestine Derailment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Long-term risks still unclear, experts say. Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, aren't sure if it's safe to stay in the area after a train carrying hazardous materials derailed there and authorities released toxic materials into the air from train cars in danger of blowing up.
The "controlled burn of the toxic materials has filled the air and covered surface waters and soil with chemicals," notes The New York Times. "Dead fish have floated in nearby creeks, and an unnerving aroma has lingered in the air."
All told, several dozen Norfolk Southern train cars—including 11 transporting hazardous materials—derailed near East Palestine on February 3. Two days later, hundreds of areas residents and businesses were told to evacuate and, on February 6, authorities released vinyl chloride from five of the tanker cars to keep them from exploding.
On February 8, the evacuation order was lifted. But although East Palestinians have been allowed to return to their homes and businesses, they worry that doing so is risky and say there's a lack of clear guidance about what is and isn't safe.
These worries have been exacerbated by speculation and hyperbole from politicians, pundits, and folks on social media—where "commentators have called the situation the 'largest environmental disaster in history' or simply 'Chernobyl 2.0,'" the Times points out:
They warned, without evidence, that vital water reservoirs serving states downriver could be badly contaminated. And they suggested that the authorities, railroad companies and mainstream news media were purposefully obscuring the full toll of the crisis.
"Planned attack, cover-up or both?" asked "Conservative Daily Podcast," a program known for pushing far-right talking points.
Some of that speculation was echoed by mainstream outlets like Fox News, which suggested the fallout could be catastrophic.
"You better punch in at 9 a.m., Ohio, even if it means inhaling mustard gas on the way in," said a sarcastic Jesse Watters, the Fox News host, on Tuesday, over a title reading: "Ohio town looks like Chernobyl."
In other words, the disaster has been fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and partisan mudslinging. (See, for instance, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio using this as an excuse to call for the firing of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Or The Nation using the opportunity to take shots at capitalism.)
Left in the lurch are the people of East Palestine, who aren't sure what to believe.
"I think most of the residents here are concerned that they're going to sweep this under the rug," East Palestine resident Lisa Simmons told PBS NewsHour. "We have got dead fish in the streams. There's a lot of reports of pets and animals dying. And we just want to make sure that we're taking care of here."
For what it's worth, the Environmental Protection Agency said the air is safe and public water systems are safe.
But there are still a lot of unknowns about long-term risks, some experts say.
Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is still investigating how this happened.
A report this week from the NTSB said there was an overheated wheel bearing on the rail car that started the derailment. Wayside hot-box detectors—which use infrared sensors to detect when rail car components are overheating—are supposed to detect this sort of thing and flag rail crews about issues. "A hot-box detector in East Palestine notified the crew moments before the train derailed," noted train industry publication FreightWaves. "It's unclear if any hot-box detector prior to East Palestine notified crews."
Around East Palestine, Norfolk Southern currently employs no signalmen who specialize in the maintenance of devices like hot-box detectors, according to FreightWaves. Christopher Hand, director of research at the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, told the publication that signalmen these days spent most of their time on government-mandated tests rather than routine maintenance.
"At a very boisterous meeting [Wednesday] night in the local high school gym, East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway told the crowd through a bullhorn that Norfolk Southern would be held accountable," reports The Bulwark. Conaway said: "They screwed up our town, they're going to fix it."
The Bulwark piece, by Ohio writer Daniel McGraw, delves into some interesting context about East Palestine and nearby areas, where environmental and economic concerns have been butting up against each other:
About twenty miles from where the derailment occurred, a plant operated by Shell Oil opened last fall. It was nearly ten years in the making. Located on the Ohio River near Monaca, Pennsylvania, the facility, known as an "ethane cracker," opened in November and employs about 600 people to make the tiny pellets that are the precursor for nearly every product made of plastic. These pellets are often called "nurdles."
The process of making plastics involves separating the ethane and methane out of natural gas and heating the methane until it transforms into ethylene, the highly reactive raw material for polyethylene, the most common kind of plastic. The process is ecologically problematic in several ways.
One day before the train derailed, two environmental groups announced they were suing Shell Chemical Appalachia, operator of the Monaca plant, for violations of federal and state air-quality standards….
But the business community and many elected officials argue that even if there are environmental risks, the economic benefits are undeniable—and sorely needed. "You can't just have a service economy," Beaver County Commissioner Jack Manning said in an interview last spring. He links the loss of the area's once-robust steel industry to the more than 50 percent decline in its school-age population between 1972 and 2012, and is eager for something to lift the community's prospects again.
It's against this backdrop that the train carrying chemicals that help make plastics derailed.
The big problem, writes McGraw, is that "the solution that the government and Norfolk Southern went with of burning the chemicals and then sending in the crisis manager to ascertain the severity of the situation seems like the sort of decision that favors the trains more than the people."
Whether that was the right decision or not is hard for laypeople to assess—which is probably what makes this situation so ripe for politicking and conspiracy theorizing.
Did the Pentagon shoot down a hobby radio balloon? President Joe Biden said on Thursday that the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) the U.S. shot down last week and over the weekend were not Chinese spy balloons. Meanwhile, some evidence suggests that at least one of them may have been a tiny amateur radio "pico" balloon. This sort of hobby ballooning relies on mylar helium party balloons to carry solar-powered transmitters, which can be picked up by amateur radio hobbyists.
The "UFO" shot down over Canada has probably been identified: A tiny amateur radio pico balloon (K9YO-15), launched on 22 Oct 2022, has gone missing in the area of the shot down. It was on it's 7th circumnavigation of the globe, being aloft for 123 days.https://t.co/01ogxcginH pic.twitter.com/GEKWYxVA7y
— Gunter Krebs ???? ???? ???????? (@Skyrocket71) February 16, 2023
From RTL-SDR.com:
There is speculation that at least one of the objects shot down over Canada, Yukon by a US Air Force jet may have been amateur radio pico balloon K9YO-15 which was launched from Illinois on October 10 2022. It was on it's [sic] seventh circumnavigation of the globe after being aloft for 123 days.
The launch blog post indicates that the K9YO-15 balloon was flying a silver mylar 32″ sphere SAG balloon which appears to be this one from balloons.online.…A pentagon memo notes that the object shot down over Canada was a "small metallic balloon with a tethered payload" which fits the description of the pico balloon exactly.
The K9YO-15 balloon ceased all WSPR telemetry transmissions while flying just below Alaska since Feb 11 00:18 UTC (just before sunset in Alaska when the solar panels would stop working).
By using NOAA wind models and the last known location by Alaska, K9YO-15 was projected to have been over Yukon when the US Air Force shot down the unknown balloon object at Feb 11 20:41 UTC (3:41 PM EST / 1:41 PM Yukon time according to Canadian Defense Minister Anand). Reports put the altitude of the shot down object at approximately 40,000ft (~12000 meters), which matches the projected ~11500 meters of K9YO-15. Based on the previous days transmission times, it is suspected that if it were operational, the balloon would have begun transmitting again sometime later in the Yukon afternoon when the sun was stronger, but no transmissions have been seen.
On February 14th the balloon was declared as missing in action by the launch group.
More here.
Fox News hosts' texts revealed in lawsuit from voting machine maker Dominion:
This filing in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is one of the most remarkable documents I've ever seen. Filled with private texts between Fox stars like Hannity and Carlson, plus Murdoch, all admitting they knew Fox's stolen election claims were lies. https://t.co/F5VTxc3w3C
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 17, 2023
Kentucky abortion ban can be enforced. Kentucky's Supreme Court held on Thursday that a lower court was wrong to halt enforcement of two state laws limiting abortion. "The two measures are Kentucky's so-called trigger law banning the procedure and a separate 'heartbeat' law restricting abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy," reports CNN:
Siding with Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, Justice Debra Hembree Lambert asserted in her opinion that the circuit court "abused its discretion by granting abortion provider's motion for a temporary injunction."
Planned Parenthood, along with an abortion provider represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Kentucky, sued to block Kentucky's sweeping abortion laws after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
They filed two complaints challenging the two statutes, which effectively prohibit abortions in Kentucky except in limited circumstances where it is necessary to preserve the life of the mother, according to the opinion….
After a circuit court temporarily enjoined the abortion bans last summer, an appellate court judge granted the attorney general's emergency request to dissolve the injunction, but an appellate panel later recommended that the state's highest court weigh in on the injunction.
More here.
State Reps. Stephen Kinsey (D., Philly) & Eric Nelson (R., Westmoreland) want to lower the driving age to 15 b/c "if Pa. teens wish to work and are legally permitted to do so, they should not be denied the right to travel to their place of employment." https://t.co/nOQ3NTKS9E pic.twitter.com/z5NZUWsNNT
— Stephen Caruso (@StephenJ_Caruso) February 16, 2023
• A Shreveport, Louisiana, police officer has been charged with negligent homicide in the February 3 shooting of an unarmed man, Alonzo Bagley. The officer, Alexander Tyler, was responding to a domestic disturbance report.
• Economist Emily Oster tackles "panic headlines" about screen time and processed foods.
• Reason's Billy Binion looks at a letter that hundreds of contributors to The New York Times sent on Wednesday to express discontent with the paper's coverage of transgender issues.
• "It's important for people to grasp reality because no single issue will affect our fiscal future more than Social Security and Medicare," writes Veronique de Rugy.
• OnlyFans creators talk A.I. porn.
• In Virginia, a fight is brewing over access to data from period-tracking apps. ("If you're concerned about a surveillance state newly empowered to snoop through your personal information to possibly prosecute you for procuring an illegal abortion, privacy measures must be much more thorough than merely deleting a period tracking app," noted Reason's Liz Wolfe last summer.)
The post Ohio Train Derailment Is Another Excuse for Mudslinging and Conspiracy Theorizing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you follow policy debates long enough, arguments you never thought you'd hear can become key components of the two parties' policy platforms. That's certainly the case when it comes to some Republicans and their new "never touch Social Security and Medicare" position.
Over the weekend, newly elected Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) tweeted that former President Donald Trump was 100 percent correct to demand that "under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security." Vance's tweet was issued amid the debt ceiling fight, but this position has long been held by Trump.
Now, to be fair, the GOP's well-intentioned engagement in the overall debt ceiling dispute is limited by the short time Congress has to raise the limit, all but ruling out credible reforms of Medicare or Social Security. Reforming these two programs will take a considerable amount of time and requires bipartisan action. However, this reality is no reason to assert that the programs' benefits should never be touched.
I cannot wait to hear the grand plan that the "don't touch Social Security and Medicare" Republican caucus has to address the $116 trillion over 30-year shortfall—that's 6 percent of U.S. GDP—facing the two programs. No action from Congress means no money to pay for all the benefits. That means enormous cuts that will hurt the low-income seniors who truly depend on the programs.
Of course, if Vance and friends insist on not touching benefits, they could address the Social Security and Medicare shortfalls with enormous tax hikes. For Social Security alone, when the trust fund dries out, they will have to agree to immediately raise the payroll tax from 12.4 percent to 15.64 percent—or close to a 25 percent tax increase. Add to that the tax hike necessary for Medicare and then repeat the exercise over the years to fill the entire shortfall.
It's not as if we haven't been warning politicians that these troubles were brewing. Back in 2000, roughly when I started working on fiscal issues, experts already warned that the Social Security trust fund would run out of assets by 2037, triggering painful benefit cuts. Today, the situation has deteriorated further, with the trust fund now on track to run dry in 2035, along with any practicable hope for fixing the problem.
In other words, these problems shouldn't surprise anyone. When Social Security started, life expectancies were lower. In 1950, there were more than 16 workers for every beneficiary. That ratio is now below three workers per retiree and will be only 2.3 workers per retiree by 2035. Add to this trend decades of politicians buying votes by expanding benefits beyond incoming payroll taxes and you have a true fiscal crisis on your hands.
That's why it's so alarming that so many in the GOP are giving up on educating a public that's been brainwashed for years with misleading soundbites like "You earned your Social Security benefits, so you are entitled to the benefits now promised," or "There's an account with your name on it." Such misinformation has made serious discussion of reform very difficult.
There's no question that retirees deserve fair treatment, but the facts are that the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that workers do not have a legally binding right to Social Security benefits, and if Congress cuts benefits even by, say, 50 percent, it can do so—no matter how much anyone has paid into the program. It won't come to that, but the ruling still stands. It's also fiction that all the benefits that have been promised were earned by workers—they weren't. That's in part because current retirees are paid with taxes from current workers, not from funds saved out of the payroll taxes retirees paid when they were in the workforce.
It's magical thinking to say that touching Social Security and Medicare is a nonstarter. Even more strange, many of the same Republicans want to spare these two programs while still putting Medicaid on the chopping block. Medicaid should be reformed too, but at least that program serves poor people. By contrast, the seniors who receive Social Security and Medicare today are overrepresented in the top income quintile while younger Americans are overrepresented in the bottom quintile. So these guys want to cut benefits for poor people on Medicaid while subsidizing relatively wealthy boomers with taxes taken from relatively poor youngsters. Yikes.
The GOP's transformation into the party of big and fiscally reckless government is proceeding apace.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Social Security Is on the Brink of Collapse. The GOP Won't Touch It. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As state governments kick off their spring legislative seasons, a bill introduced in the Ohio Senate will attempt to legalize home alcohol distilling. Whether this leads to an uptick in at-home distillers in the Buckeye State is a trickier question, especially since home distilling is currently illegal at the federal level.
To the average person, it may come as a surprise that distilling liquor in your garage remains illegal in 2023, while homebrewing and winemaking have been legal for decades. Limits on the home production of alcohol trace back to Prohibition, and recent attempts to change the status quo at the federal level have failed to gain traction.
To understand the current prohibition on home distilling, it's helpful to look at the history of homebrewing in America over the past few decades. Until President Jimmy Carter legalized homebrewing at the federal level in 1978, craft beer was a niche activity. The craft beer boom roughly coincided with Carter's reform, as the number of breweries in America grew from under a hundred in 1978 to over 9,000 by 2021.
Needless to say, Americans did not suddenly learn how to make beer in the late 1970s; in reality, Carter's reform merely brought thousands of secret homebrewers out of their garages and basements and into taprooms. Able to make money off their talents, a wave of homebrewers opened up microbreweries throughout the '80s, '90s, and '00s, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, a similar situation pertains to home distilling—sometimes referred to as hobby distilling. Federal law prohibits home distilling, and anyone violating the law is potentially subject to a felony and five years in prison. Like so many laws in our overcriminalized society, however, there is uncertainty about how rigorously these laws are enforced. Similar to homebrewers in the '70s and '80s, it's likely that some of America's craft distilleries started out as clandestine home distilling operations.
Many hobby distillers buy distilling equipment and claim to only use it to make essential oils, while others even resort to contrivances like obtaining a federal permit to distill gasoline—as Max Watman, author of Chasing the White Dog, has noted, "it's a tough argument whether or not your fuel smells too good to be running your lawnmower."
In addition to the federal prohibition, numerous states have laws on the books forbidding home distilling. A handful of states—including Alaska, Arizona, Massachusetts, and Missouri—allow home distilling for personal consumption. Now, Ohio is the latest state to attempt to remove its ban.
But it's far from clear how the federal government would react in a hypothetical situation where a home distiller makes alcohol that is legal under Ohio law but technically still illegal under federal law. In such a case, some legal observers have speculated that the feds might treat home distilling like it currently does marijuana in states where cannabis is legalized. At the same time, there have been examples of the federal government cracking down on home distillers in recent years, so making your own hooch is not a risk-free proposition.
Regardless, it is worth taking a step back and considering whether home distilling should be considered a felonious activity in modern-day America. On the one hand, distilling carries risks, including fire and explosions, if not handled properly. On the other hand, the same could be said about firearms, firecrackers, and turkey fryers—all of which Americans are allowed to possess and use with varying levels of regulation.
If policy makers are concerned, they could always develop simple, straightforward rules around home distilling, such as requiring a cheap and simple permit that would demonstrate that a home distiller possesses basic competency and understanding of the distilling process.
In the meantime, until the federal government changes its laws, the best hobby distillers can hope for is more state-level reforms like in Ohio—and a murky federal enforcement posture.
The post Decriminalize Moonshine! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ohio just took a step to make it easier for people who need a license to work to make a living.
By quietly signing a bill on January 2 that recognizes occupational licenses issued by other states and required by law to practice in various trades and professions, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine reduced the barriers to entry for people already licensed elsewhere to set up shop in Ohio without having to go through the whole onerous licensing process yet again. It's not a complete fix for a regulatory burden that serves as a barrier to employment and drives up prices for consumers, but it's a step in the right direction.
The new law was buried in a list of other legislation, camouflaging its importance to those seeking to enter the job market, start a business, or simply move across a state line from one set of rules to another. It doesn't eliminate licensing requirements—a key reform called for by many economists. But universal recognition of licenses issued in other states lets people jump through the hoops necessary to get permission to work just once rather than multiple times.
"Universal recognition allows a licensed professional to apply for and be quickly granted a license to work based on the training or testing he or she has already completed," noted the Goldwater Institute, which developed reform legislation with the Institute for Justice. "So long as an applicant has held a valid out-of-state license in good standing for at least one year and does not have any disqualifying criminal history or open complaints, he or she is eligible to receive a similar license under recognition."
Making licenses portable is enormously important because requirements have proliferated across the country in recent decades. They turn the right to make a living into a privilege doled out by state agencies under the control of existing practitioners who don't exactly welcome new entrants who challenge them for market share.
"In the 1950s, approximately 5 percent of U.S. workers had an occupational license, meaning they completed additional schooling or training (and paid the necessary fees) and passed an exam to be licensed to practice the profession in a certain state," Saint Francis University economics professor Edward Timmons pointed out in 2018 for the Harvard Business Review. "Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 23 percent of full-time workers have a license."
Licensing requirements were sold as a means for raising standards and guaranteeing greater safety. But that's not what they do.
"This study finds no evidence that licensing raises quality and some evidence that it can reduce it," Kyle Sweetland and Dick M. Carpenter II wrote in a 2022 Institute for Justice paper on the effects of occupational licensing.
To the contrary, licensing requirements do harm.
"There is evidence that licensing requirements raise the price of goods and services, restrict employment opportunities, and make it more difficult for workers to take their skills across State lines," the Obama White House cautioned in a 2015 report.
Licensing especially hurts low-income Americans and immigrants who want to start businesses or enter trades, but find the costs and time requirements for getting permission to work daunting.
"The higher the rate of licensure of low-income occupations, the lower the rate of low-income entrepreneurship," reported economist Stephen Slivinski in a 2015 Goldwater Institute study.
Occupational licensing has also become a means to exercise political control, with permission to work denied to practitioners who offend regulators and politicians. That abuse of the power recently hit the headlines with the case of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and a California law that openly seeks to muzzle physicians who stray from official messaging.
As awful as occupational licensing is, radical change is a tough sell for a public misled into believing that guild-style restrictions are safety measures. Universal recognition, by which states honor each other's licenses, was developed as a compromise measure to reduce the harm done by licensing. Arizona was the first state to adopt the approach, in 2019. Ohio is just the latest to follow suit, becoming the 19th such state so far. But, as a compromise, universal recognition is less of a cure-all than a kludge.
"Universal recognition can differ quite drastically from state to state," warns the Institute for Justice. "Multiple states have imposed additional rules and requirements that thwart license portability and workforce mobility, undermining the main goals of universal license recognition."
Some states award licenses just to residents, while others only recognize "substantially equivalent" licenses from other states, dinging applicants from places less burdened by red tape. That makes the various flavors of universal recognition a lesser problem than state-specific licensing, but still a problem. Reducing the barriers to entry for people who want to work, and creating greater competition so that consumers can benefit, requires bigger changes.
"The analysis of the benefits and costs of licensing may find that some occupations would benefit from lesser forms of regulation, such as certification or registration, or even no regulation," the University of Minnesota's Morris Kleiner wrote in a 2015 Brookings Institution call for a range of reforms. Under certification, anybody could work in a given field, but those who voluntarily submit to third-party exams and standards could advertise their credentials.
The Institute for Justice agrees, pointing out that, "despite licensing's prevalence, most occupations we study are unlicensed in at least one state." If competition, word of mouth, online reviews, and certification work for practitioners and consumers in those states, they're clearly not really necessary. The organization recommends an array of voluntary and less-intrusive regulatory alternatives to licensing in order to reduce barriers to entry and increase competition.
In the meantime, though, universal recognition of occupational licenses is a big improvement over state-by-state barriers. Ohio is moving in the right direction by recognizing other states' licenses so that workers need only suffer expensive and time-consuming requirements once instead of going through the process repeatedly. The next step is to get regulators entirely out of the way so that making a living is again recognized as a right instead of a privilege.
The post Ohio To Honor Occupational Licenses from Other States appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Justice Patrick DeWine wrote the opinion for the Court, joined by three of his colleagues: Justices Fischer, Donnelly, and soon(-to-be-Chief) Kennedy. Chief Justice O'Connor and Justices Brunner and Stewart concurred in the judgement only, but none wrote separately to defend deference to agency interpretations. The 4-3 split is also interesting because the justices did not divide along partisan lines.
Justice DeWine begins his opinion this way:
This case involves a dispute about a statute that sets forth the requirements a firm must meet to provide engineering services in Ohio. Specifically, the firm must "designate one or more full-time partners, managers, members, officers, or directors" as in "responsible charge" of its engineering activities. R.C. 4733.16(D). The state agency in charge of administering the statute contends that to be a full-time manager, one must be an employee and cannot be an independent contractor. The court of appeals determined that it was required to defer to the agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute and, on this basis, held that the statute precluded an independent contractor from fulfilling the role of full-time manager.
To resolve the dispute, we must answer two questions. The predicate question is: What deference, if any, should a court give to an administrative agency's interpretation of a statute? Second, once we have sorted out the deference issue: What does the statute mean?
We reaffirm today that it is the role of the judiciary, not administrative agencies, to make the ultimate determination about what the law means. Thus, the judicial branch is never required to defer to an agency's interpretation of the law. As we explain, an agency interpretation is simply one consideration a court may sometimes take into account in rendering the court's own independent judgment as to what the law is.
Applying our independent judgment here, we find nothing in the statutory language to preclude an independent contractor from serving as a fulltime manager of an engineering firm. We reverse the contrary judgment of the court of appeals.
While there were prior decisions in which courts had deferred to agencies, Justice DeWine explains that there was never a "deference doctrine" in Ohio equivalent to Chevron. Among other things, this would mean that deference to state agencies could not be based upon the assumption that the state legislature enacts statutes against a background of presumed deference to agency resolutions of statutory ambiguities.
More from Justice DeWine's opinion:
Administrative deference is a frequent topic in the federal courts. Most practitioners are familiar with the framework established by the United States Supreme Court in Chevron, 467 U.S. at 865-866, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 81 L.Ed.2d 694, under which a court is required to defer to an administrative agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. And few topics are more often discussed in legal circles than the efficacy of the Chevron regime. . . .
Ohio's approach to deference is much harder to categorize. Prior to Chevron, on only a couple occasions did this court directly address deference to an agency's legal determinations, and both dealt with deference to a federal agency's interpretation of federal law. . . .
In a few earlier cases, we suggested that a long-standing administrative practice carries weight in the interpretive process. . . . But neither case can fairly be read as setting forth a general rule of deference to agency interpretations. Rather, the principle set forth in those cases is in line with the long-held idea that "certain executive interpretations of legal text should receive 'respect' " because "an ambiguous legal text should be given its contemporaneous and customary meaning." Aditya Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive Interpretation, 126 Yale L.J. 908, 941 (2017). . . .
It was not until after the 1984 Chevron decision that deference language began to appear in our cases on a regular basis. See, e.g., West Virginia v. Ohio Hazardous Waste Facility Approval Bd., 28 Ohio St.3d 83, 85, 502 N.E.2d 625 (1986). But such instances seemed more a matter of tossing in a few lines here and there to support a particular result than any application of an established doctrine. Fair to say, there is no "Chevron moment" in this court's history. There has never been a case to systematically explain the contours of our deference doctrine, its theoretical justification, and its application in particular cases. . To the contrary, if one parses our caselaw, one can find at least three different—and irreconcilable—formulations by this court of deference standards. . . .
The confused state of our caselaw and our failure to articulate any justification or consistent standard for agency deference suggests that we should take a step back and examine the matter in light of first principles. As we will explain, Ohio's system of separation of powers precludes any sort of mandatory deference to agency interpretations. Furthermore, the principal justification for mandatory deference that has been set forth in the federal courts—that deference is appropriate because the legislature has delegated policy-making authority to an administrative agency—cannot be reconciled with Ohio law.
The relatively brief opinion cites extensively from the relevant academic literature, referencing quite a few folks who are likely familiar to VC readers.
Another interesting tidbit: The Ohio Attorney General's office filed two briefs in the case. One, by Ohio Solicitor General Ben Flowers on behalf of Attorney General Dave Yost, argued against deference. The other, by Michael Hendershot of the AG's office, defended the agency's interpretation (but did not rely upon deference for the argument).
The post Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Deference to Agency Statutory Interpretations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Celebrity status is no foolproof protection against the cruel and pointless drug war. Case in point: Afroman. Police raided his Ohio home back in August, claiming the musician—best known for the 2000 song "Because I Got High"—may be selling drugs.
By all available evidence, the whole thing was bogus. And now, money seized from Afroman's home is allegedly missing.
The raid on Afroman's home was conducted by the Adams County Sheriff's Office. According to a search warrant obtained by Fox 19 News, Afroman was suspected of drug possession, drug trafficking, and kidnapping.
As part of the raid, sheriff's deputies seized more than $5,000, saying it may be connected to drug sales.
No charges were ever filed, and the government has now returned the money. Or some of it.
Afroman, whose given name is Joseph Foreman, says $400 is still missing. And Fox 19 News backs up this claim. "We watched it being counted out of sealed evidence bags, and $400 in cash was missing," said Fox 19's Ken Baker in a recent broadcast.
Afroman posted about the money on Instagram last week, saying he was filing a lawsuit "against Adams County Sheriff Dept for deformation [sic] of character from kidnapping being on the warrant." His post also accused sheriff's deputies of "tampering with evidence/disconnecting cameras" and "stealing money from evidence room."
The Adams County sheriff told the Cincinnati Enquirer the matter of the missing money allegations had been turned over to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
Perhaps to save face—or to try to avoid legal liability—the sheriff is still acting as if the raid was warranted, despite the fact that the seized money was returned (which wouldn't happen if authorities still thought it was drug money) and despite the fact that Afroman isn't facing any charges. The sheriff told the Enquirer last week that some items from Afroman's home were still being tested and charges could still be filed pending results.
But "the Adams County Prosecutor's Office said the raid failed to turn up probative criminal evidence," attorney Anna Castellini told Fox 19.
Afroman told TMZ back in August that all the cops found at his house was trace amounts of marijuana in some old joints, plus a vape pen and some hemp. "He's mostly upset about the force they used and the damage to his house," TMZ reported. Afroman also suggested he was profiled because he often raps and talks about smoking pot.
The sheriff's office has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the raid, which was conducted by officers in tactical gear carrying long rifles. "My girl and her mom were telling how my kids were screaming and crying," Afroman told WLWT5. "Police were running around my company with AR-15s."
Afroman told Fox 19 last week that the raid and authorities' allegation of kidnapping had impacted his ability to book shows and left him anxious about the possibility of police popping back in to snoop around.
What's going on with Iran's morality police? The New York Times reported yesterday that Iran has abolished its morality police following months of protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by said police for wearing her headscarf too loosely. The news reportedly came from Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Javad Montazeri, who mentioned it Saturday during a meeting reported on by state media. But celebration may be premature: "the government did not confirm the move and local media reported that his remarks had been 'misinterpreted,'" notes The Guardian. Matthew Petti sorts through the competing reports here.
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Like the story about the FBI seizing almost $1 million from this family—and never charging them with a crime https://t.co/DUiLQo0nKp
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In August, I wrote about Michael Jennings, an Alabama man who was arrested after refusing to give police officers his full name.
Jennings had been watering his neighbor's flowers. (2/6)https://t.co/5tH7XYiQ7j
— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) December 2, 2022
I spent much of the last few months working on a long magazine feature about some big things the Rufo "groomer" crusade gets wrong. It'll be out later this month. There is almost certainly material in here that you have not seen before. Reason makes this work possible. pic.twitter.com/Ob8Z6wN2xr
— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) December 5, 2022
It's a final — the last race is called for the House.
GOP House majority will be 222 seats — a nine-seat pickup. Exact same margin that Pelosi had entering this current Congress. https://t.co/nVuGKBIHZU
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) December 3, 2022
• Unherd warns about "the birth of the biostate."
• Nobody really knows where American recycling is going.
• A woman who regrets getting her breast removed at age 30 is suing, claiming that a social worker and a therapist she talked to should have stopped her.
• Zaid Jilani looks at Maryland's efforts to open up more jobs to people without 4-year college degrees.
The post Cops Return Cash Seized From Afroman in Bogus Drug Raid…With $400 Missing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How did masked gunmen get into a Cleveland, Ohio, high school that was on lockdown? Administrators let them in. A school security officer had called 911 to report the gunmen when he saw them arrive and placed the school on lockdown. But two assistant principals let them into a school vestibule. In a statement, one of them, who wasn't identified, said, "I confirmed the interior doors were locked and instructed the four suspects to come to the vestibule because it was unsafe to be outside because I saw police officers." Police arrested three teens and confiscated two guns on arrival.
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]]>Once Justice Kennedy assumes her role as the new Chief Justice, there will be a vacancy on the Court for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to fill. Ohio Supreme Court justices serve six year terms, but when there is a mid-term vacancy–as is occurring here with Justice Kennedy's elevation–the governor appoints a replacement to serve the remainder of the term.
Governor DeWine's choice is particularly important because it will determine the orientation of the Court. There are seven seats on the Ohio Supreme Court. Three are held by conservatives (Kennedy, Fischer, and DeWine). And three are held by liberals (Brunner, Michael Donnelly, and Melody Stewart). Thus the seventh justice will control the Court's balance. Chief Justice O'Connor, while once conservative, had become something of a "swing" justice, occasionally joining with the Court's liberal wing on major issues. This has frustrated many conservatives who had hoped a Republican majority on the Court would mean more consistent outcomes.
The Governor appears to understand the importance of this nominaton. As a spokesman told the Vindicator:
"There are a lot of important cases coming up, and it's important to (DeWine) it's someone who respects the law. The governor wants judges who tend to try not to legislate from the bench, but interpret the law as written. Those are things he's opined on with the U.S. Supreme Court so certainly that would not be a surprise if those are the things he emphasizes there."
Lobbying for a potential Supreme Court pick has already begun. Political insiders are pushing their favorite potential picks, and such lobbying is often driven more by political allegiances than any concern for judicial philosophy or temperament. A pick like this does create the opportunity to reward political allies, but basing a Supreme Court appointment on such considerations would be a wasted opportunity.
One way to ensure that a Supreme Court appointment is made for the right reasons, and that a pick reflects the Governor's preferred judicial philosophy, is to rely upon a committee or council to review potential nominees. This is the approach former Governor John Kasich used to fill a vacancy created by Justice Evelyn Lyndberg Stratton's retirement in 2012. I was honored to serve on that committee, and I believe the process worked well, resulting in the appointment of Justice Judi French.
As I explained in a blog post at the time, part of what made the process work was that Governor Kasich made clear what he wanted—a highly qualified jurist with a conservative judicial philosophy matching that of the governor (and who would be a viable candidate for re-election)—and let us evaluate the applicants on his behalf, free of political influence or meddling. It did not matter whether one of the applicants had better political connnections or relationships than the others. We were told to identify the best nominee given the governor's criteria, and that is what we did, through a process of carefully reviewing application materials, examining their records, and interviewing potential nominees.
The approach utilized by Governor Kasich is not the only way to make this sort of choice, but I think it highlights that if a Governor cares about the direction of the Court (as Governor DeWine says he does), then the Governor needs to be sure that any Court pick is based upon the judicial philosophy, temperament, intellect, and other qualifications of potential appointees, and not whether a particular candidate has the right political allies or superficial pedigree.
Opportunities like this do not come around very often. Mid-term vacancies on the Court are relatively rare, and picks that control the balance of the Court are rarer still. How Governor DeWine uses this oportunity could have a profound effect on Ohio law. There are quite a few big issues heading their way to the Ohio Supreme Court on which this pick will likely make the difference. Here's hoping the Governor understands the gravity of his choice.
The post A Pivotal Pick for the Ohio Supreme Court appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance cruised to victory in Ohio's U.S. Senate contest on Tuesday night. The race looked to be a test of whether combative campaign tactics in defense of nationalist policies can find success at a high level when practiced by someone other than former President Donald Trump. Yet the failure of a predicted "red tsunami" to materialize makes it hard to draw sweeping conclusions from the Ohio outcome.
Viewed in isolation, Vance's win would seem to augur well for both Trump and the national conservative agenda of which the senator-elect has been a high-profile proponent. His victory will make him the third natcon-friendly member of the U.S. Senate, alongside Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
A number of other races across the country were too close to call as of Wednesday morning, however, with control of both the House and the Senate hanging in the balance. Vance also badly underperformed a fellow Republican and onetime Trump critic in what has become an increasingly bright red state. Ohio incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine secured a second term by a 25-point margin; in that context, Vance's six-point victory looks less impressive.
This was supposed to be a very good night for the GOP, with both structural factors and economic fundamentals working in Republicans' favor. The party of the sitting president has historically done poorly in midterm elections: As the Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson put it yesterday, "with the exception of 1998 and 2002, this has been true through my lifetime." Meanwhile, amid a slagging economy and high inflation, surveys have consistently found that the cost of living is voters' top concern, and that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on that issue.
Despite those headwinds, Democrat John Fetterman managed to flip the Pennsylvania Senate seat being vacated by Republican Pat Toomey, defeating celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, and Democrat Josh Shapiro won the Pennsylvania governor's race against Republican (and vocal 2020 election denier) Doug Mastriano. In Arizona, Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters—whose candidacy, like Vance's, was bankrolled by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—is currently trailing. Far more surprising is that Kari Lake, a Trumpy local TV celebrity who was expected to easily claim the Arizona governor's mansion, is also behind.
The decidedly non-Trumpy Republican Gov. Brian Kemp won reelection in Georgia. And although Trump threw his weight behind the former football star Herschel Walker for the Peach State's U.S. Senate seat, that race looks poised to go to a runoff. If Walker loses, it will be a blow for the perception, fostered in the wake of the 2016 Access Hollywood tape, that Trump-like fame and fortune outweigh personal sexual transgressions with voters.
The story in Florida, where Republican incumbents Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis cleaned up, is more ambiguous.
Rubio has been a fellow traveler of the national conservatives, speaking regularly at their conferences, laying out a case for what he calls "common-good capitalism," and generally embracing more government intervention in the economy than Republicans in the past have tended to be comfortable with. But in the last year he has returned to speaking eloquently about the importance of individual freedom, something many on the New Right consider passé or even naive. And unlike Vance and some others in the natcon movement, he has resisted going all in on what I call will-to-power conservatism: the demand that Republicans use state coercion to reward their friends and punish their enemies, rule of law be damned.
DeSantis, on the other hand, has been an active practitioner of will-to-power politics. He went after Disney for voicing objections to a state education law. He has tried to control social media platforms' moderation policies. And during COVID, he did not stop at rejecting statewide lockdown measures and reopening the public schools; he used government power to preempt the right of local governments to set their own pandemic policies and prohibited private businesses from implementing vaccine requirements. Voters rewarded him with an almost 20-point victory over party-switching former Gov. Charlie Crist, which would seem to offer evidence for the idea that "muscular," big-government conservatism is the Republican Party's future.
At the same time, DeSantis' success on an otherwise disappointing night for the GOP represents a challenge to Trump himself. DeSantis is a much smarter and more serious candidate than the former president, far and away the top alternative for the Republican Party's 2024 presidential nomination. What's more, Trump knows it: He came out swinging against the Florida governor, whom he tried to brand "Ron DeSanctimonious," in the week before the midterms. This unprompted attack against a member of his own party removed any doubt whether Trump sees DeSantis as a threat. The latter's runaway win on Tuesday night suggests the former president's power over the Republican Party may indeed be waning.
Vance, who admits to being a "flip-flop-flipper" on Trump, may seem like a counterexample to this narrative. In 2016, he tweeted that the then–presidential candidate "makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible." Responding to the Access Hollywood tape, he lamented, "Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man." He deleted those tweets, and others critical of the 45th president, while bidding for Trump's endorsement in the Senate primary, which he eventually received. (Trump then publicly joked that Vance had "kiss[ed] my ass" to get his support, proving that no act of abject fealty goes unpunished.)
It wasn't long before Vance had warmed to a Trumpy blend of hatemongering and authoritarian braggadocio. My personal favorite example is a tweet from the Senate hopeful last year asking just how "disgusting and violent" it is in New York City—as if Vance, a Yale Law graduate and founder of a multimillion-dollar venture capital firm, required tutoring on such questions from Ohio voters.
In the end, his pandering to Trump's supporters paid off for the author of Hillbilly Elegy. What that experience suggests about the future of his party, and of the New Right, is less clear.
The post J.D. Vance Seized His Chance, but the New Right Had a Bad Night appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Voters in Ohio and Alabama on Tuesday chose to make their states' respective cash bail systems more stringent, electing in different ways to enshrine a dangerousness standard when determining a defendant's suitability for release before trial.
Ohio's new constitutional amendment will allow judges to set a dollar amount commensurate with a person's criminal record, the seriousness of their alleged crime, and their odds of appearing at court following pretrial release. The Ohio Senate ushered the initiative forward in direct response to a ruling from the state's highest court, which said in early January that bail could only be used to ensure a defendant's presence at trial—the constitutionally prescribed reason for its use.
In Alabama, voters were tasked with deciding if the state should be able to deny bail for certain offenses if the government can convince a judge that the defendant poses a threat to the community or cannot be trusted to return to court. Those offenses include murder; first-degree kidnapping, rape, and sodomy; sexual torture; first-degree domestic violence, human trafficking, burglary, arson, and robbery; terrorism; and child abuse.
Dangerousness standards are not new to the bail debate. New Jersey implemented a similar rubric in 2017, allowing courts to perform a risk analysis when deciding where a defendant should spend time before he or she goes to trial.
But that system also replaced cash bail.
It's a consequential distinction between the amendment passed by Ohio, for example, which will now make its dangerousness standard proportional to the dollar amount required for pretrial release. In other words, whether or not an Ohio defendant is set free before trial will turn on how rich he or she is or who comes to his or her financial aid, regardless of how dangerous he or she might be. In practice, it is divorced from actual danger.
New Jersey's risk-analysis bail reform was implemented under Republican Gov. Chris Christie. The results have shown both a minute risk of re-offense and flight before trial; the pre- and post-bail reform numbers are virtually consistent.
Despite New Jersey's success in offering a prototype for reforming cash bail while protecting public safety, the debate has become increasingly politicized. Many reformers say that a dangerousness standard is racist, while law-and-order politicians are likely to present any bail reform as a driver of violent crime.
The answer is more nuanced than either major political party would want their base to believe.
The post Tough-on-Crime Cash Bail Initiatives Win in Ohio and Alabama appeared first on Reason.com.
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