“There is also the massive accountability issue here. The CBP has authorization to use force against not just foreign travelers at the border but also against Americans within 100 miles of border crossings, and yes, some of them have gotten overly violent with citizens, just like members of other law enforcement agencies. As a federal government agency, the CBP is supposed to operate with transparency about its behavior and the behavior of its agents.
The communications between officers can help establish intent to engage in misconduct or violent behavior. The ability of a government agent to conceal or delete these messages impacts the ability to investigate and, when necessary, prosecute bad behavior. And when the federal government fails to police misconduct on its own, the ability to delete these messages also makes it harder for outside media outlets or accountability organizations like CREW to monitor what’s going on.”
“the Hungarian people voted in a landslide to give Prime Minister Viktor Orbán his fourth term since 2010. Current tabulations give parties allied with the incumbent leader a vote share above 53 percent, an outright majority.
Orbán is a self-proclaimed proponent of “illiberal democracy,” which distinguishes, in Amnesty International’s summation, “a fully democratic ‘Western’ system based on liberal values and accountability from what he calls an ‘Eastern’ approach based on a strong state, a weak opposition, and emaciated checks and balances.” Orbán has spent more than a decade engaging in aggressive gerrymandering, court packing, use of state power to drive out or co-opt dissenting media, and more. Corruption is rampant. The Constitution has been rewritten and ever more power concentrated at the top.”
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“The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which took the rare step of sending a full election-monitoring mission to Hungary, has raised questions about the vote. So arguably the country should not be thought of as particularly democratic or particularly liberal right now.”
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“Orbán’s sweeping victory suggests that many millions of Hungarians, well aware of his record, are on board with his vision for their country. This raises the specter of a true illiberal democracy—it shouldn’t be hard to imagine a country with genuinely fair and open elections but also majority support for authoritarian leaders and policies that deny equal rights to all.
The point of contemplating such a scenario is to recognize that “assaults on democracy” are not the only threat we face. A society in which 51 percent of a population votes to oppress the other 49 percent can claim the mantle of democracy. The problem is that it is illiberal, not undemocratic.
Democratic institutions, important as they are, only get us so far. We must insist on liberalism as well: free speech, private property protections, religious liberty, freedom of movement, constitutional constraints and separations of power and rule of law and all the rest. We can’t know which side of the 50 percent mark we’ll fall on; the less of our lives we allow to be put to a vote in the first place, the better off we’ll be.”
“Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) said that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson and other public defenders root for criminals because “their heart is with the murderers.”
“She came out of law school, and she clerked for Justice Breyer on the Supreme Court. And she became a federal public defender,” Cruz said. “And you and I have both known public defenders. People go and do that because their heart is with criminal defendants. Their heart is with the murderers, the criminals, and that that’s who they’re rooting for. A lot of the same reasons people go and become prosecutors—because they want to lock up bad guys—public defenders often have a natural inclination in the direction of the criminal. And I gotta say that inclination was not just while she was a public defender, but she carried it onto the bench.”
Our adversarial system of justice depends on defense attorneys making the government prove its case and meet a high burden of evidence. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to counsel to make sure everyone—the unpopular, the poor, and yes, even the guilty—has the benefit of a dogged defense against the government’s power to relieve them of their liberty and property.
Supposed conservatives like Cruz should welcome this skepticism of government power, but he and others, like Sens. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), used Jackson’s confirmation hearing to demagogue and grandstand about the horror of her representing Guantanamo Bay detainees.”
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“Public defenders don’t have the luxury of choosing not to defend a client when it’s a political liability. That’s what makes them an indispensable part of our court system.
Ted Cruz went to an Ivy League law school and clerked for a Supreme Court justice. He knows all this, but he’s an unserious person using his perch in the U.S. Senate to get on the TV and spout unserious arguments. It’s an embarrassment.”
“Both the MORE Act and the legalization bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) plans to introduce this spring include unnecessarily contentious provisions that are bound to alienate Republicans who might otherwise be inclined to resolve the untenable conflict between federal prohibition and the laws that allow medical or recreational use of cannabis in 37 states.
According to the latest Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans think marijuana should be legal, including 83 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans. Even Republicans who are not crazy about the idea should be able to get behind legislation that would let states set their own marijuana policies without federal interference.
Such legislation can be straightforward. The Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2017, sponsored by then-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R–Calif.), consisted of a single sentence that said the federal marijuana ban would not apply to conduct authorized by state law. Its 46 cosponsors included 14 Republicans—11 more than voted for the MORE Act last week.
The Common Sense Cannabis Reform Act, which Rep. Dave Joyce (R–Ohio) introduced last May, is 14 pages long. So far it has just eight cosponsors, including four Republicans, but that still means it has more GOP support than Democrats managed to attract for the 92-page MORE Act, which includes new taxes, regulations, and spending programs.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) thinks Congress never should have banned marijuana, because it had no constitutional authority to do so. He nevertheless voted against the MORE Act, objecting to the “new marijuana crimes” its tax and regulatory provisions would create, with each violation punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The 163-page preliminary version of Schumer’s bill doubles down on the MORE Act’s overly prescriptive and burdensome approach. It would levy a 25 percent federal excise tax on top of frequently hefty state and local taxes, impose picayune federal regulations, and create the sort of “social equity” programs that gave pause even to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), the MORE Act’s lone Republican cosponsor.
GOP support for marijuana federalism is clear from the fact that 106 Republicans voted last April for the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would protect financial institutions that serve state-licensed marijuana businesses from federal prosecution, forfeiture, and regulatory penalties. The SAFE Banking Act would already be law if it had not been blocked by Schumer, who insisted that his own bill take priority.
Instead of building on the Republican appetite for letting states go their own way on this issue, Schumer is effectively telling GOP senators their views don’t matter. That makes sense only if he is more interested in scoring political points than in reversing a morally, scientifically, and constitutionally bankrupt policy that should have been abandoned long ago.”
“It’s incredibly rare for a draft opinion to be leaked like this and this leak has been roundly condemned.”
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“If the opinion is issued as-is or somewhere near it, constitutional protection of abortion access will be null and the decision of whether or not to permit abortion will return to the states.
Thirteen states have enacted laws saying that abortion is immediately illegal should Roe be overturned (Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming). Others retain (currently unenforced) pre-Roe bans that will be triggered again.
Overall, some 23 states “have laws that could be used to restrict the legal status of abortion,” according to the Guttmacher Institute. This includes nine states with “unconstitutional post-Roe restrictions that are currently blocked by courts but could be brought back into effect with a court order in Roe’s absence.”
Meanwhile, other states have passed laws guaranteeing abortion access in Roe’s absence, and others are poised to do so. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “16 states and the District of Columbia have laws that protect the right to abortion.””
“After rejiggering its speed cameras to fine any car caught traveling as little as 6 mph over the posted speed limit, the city of Chicago collected record-breaking levels of revenue last year.
Chicago’s army of 160 speed cameras issued more than 2.81 million tickets last year and collected $89 million in revenue from motorists, according to data from the Chicago Department of Finance published this week by the Illinois Policy Institute, a free market think tank. That’s more tickets than there are residents of the city, and translates to one ticket issued every 11 seconds during the entire year.
Those numbers shatter the city’s previous speed camera ticket and revenue totals, likely due to the fact that Mayor Lori Lightfoot in March 2021 ordered the cameras to start targeting slower drivers. Previously, the speed cameras had been programmed to issue tickets and $100 fines to drivers going more than 10 mph over the speed limit. Those fines remain in place, but the city’s cameras now also issue $35 fines to drivers going between 6 and 10 mph over the speed limit.
Those $35 tickets accounted for more than two-thirds of the tickets issued by Chicago’s cameras during 2021, according to the Department of Finance data.
Lightfoot and other advocates of the speed cameras argue that they make Chicago’s streets safer by discouraging high-speed driving, but the Illinois Policy Institute points out that more people died in car accidents in the city during 2021 than in 2020 or 2019.
“The safety argument seems weak in light of the various studies and increase in accident deaths, especially when the cameras are generating so much money for a city with massive pension debt and spending it can’t seem to control,” writes Patrick Andriesen, a staff writer at the institute. “Speed cameras might be more accurately called cash cams.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poorest parts of Chicago are where most of the city’s cameras are located and, as a result, are hardest hit by the fines. Andriesen points out that nearly half the tickets issued to drivers in low-income neighborhoods were not paid on time; with late fees, those $35 tickets for barely speeding become $85 tickets.”
“Value grocery chain Smart & Final has agreed to pay California $175,000 because, between March and June 2020, it increased the price of four different types of eggs during a period in which stores were struggling to keep their shelves stocked.
This was in the early days of the pandemic, when Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. That declaration triggered California’s “price-gouging” law, which says that businesses cannot raise prices by more than 10 percent during state emergencies unless they can prove the price increase is due to increased production or labor costs. According to Attorney General Rob Bonta, Smart & Final raised prices for some eggs by as much as 25 percent.
The Los Angeles Times notes that Smart & Final did have a reason for raising the prices—suppliers were also jacking up prices of eggs. But apparently Smart & Final acknowledged that suppliers were raising the prices of “standard” eggs, and that the chain commensurately raised the price of “premium” eggs.
Laws against price-gouging are bad, wrong, and counter-productive, and Bonta’s own observations about this case, quoted by the Times, explain why. He notes that, “When California first went into lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a run on essential supplies, and unfortunately, some businesses saw this as an opportunity to pad their bottom line.”
“While these were premium products, remember that during this time, shelves were often bare, there weren’t a lot of choices. Consumers had few, if any options.”
This is an economically illiterate grasp of why stores jack up prices in a crisis situation. The “run on essential supplies” caused absurd amounts of hoarding and over-purchasing, which many customers were able to do largely because stores were prohibited from raising prices. That sharp increase in demand travels up the supply chain, ultimately leading to some combination of empty shelves and higher prices as suppliers ramp up production.
Price-gouging laws simply attempt to legislate away basic economics at the retail point, and the end result is reasonable prices for goods that are seldom or never available. It doesn’t matter how much eggs cost when a supermarket doesn’t have any in stock. If people actually had to pay more for goods in an emergency situation, they’d be more careful about what they bought and we wouldn’t have had people pushing entire carts of toilet paper out of the grocery stores (and then attempting to resell them online).
The way Bonta describes the store’s situation is that people were buying the more expensive premium eggs due to shortages of the standard eggs. The same demand issues were most certainly going to come into play if people continued to purchase the premium eggs at the same rate they purchased the standard eggs.”