“The FBI has arrested more than 700 Donald Trump supporters who unlawfully entered the Capitol grounds or the Capitol itself that day, many of whom incriminated themselves by recording and/or livestreaming their activities. On the anniversary of the riot, The New York Times reported that “a little over 300” had been charged with petty crimes such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, while “more than 225 people” were “accused of attacking or interfering with the police” and “about 275” were charged with obstructing the congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s election.
Against this backdrop, last week’s indictment of 11 Oath Keepers stands out. It was the first time that any of the rioters had been charged with sedition—specifically, using force to “prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” The conspiracy described in the indictment is notably different from the spontaneous, heat-of-the-moment crimes committed by most of the people who stormed the Capitol. Unlike the riot as a whole, which looked more like a temper tantrum than an incipient coup, the “operation” mounted by the Oath Keepers was planned well in advance. Although it is the closest thing we have seen so far to an “insurrection” (the label that Democrats routinely apply to the riot), it was still half-baked and pitifully ineffectual.”
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” The preparations for January 6 allegedly included gathering Oath Keepers from around the country; paramilitary training; “reconnaissance” of the Capitol area; multiple purchases of guns, ammunition, and firearm accessories; a stash of weapons at a hotel in Arlington; and a “quick reaction force” (QRF) that waited at the hotel, ready to act “if SHTF.” The indictment says “the QRF teams were prepared to rapidly transport firearms and other weapons into Washington, D.C., in support of operations aimed at using force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.””
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“The Oath Keepers who went to the Capitol on January 6 evidently did not bring any firearms, although they did have “hard-knuckle tactical gloves, tactical vests, ballistic goggles, radios, chemical sprays, a paracord attachment, fatigues, goggles, scissors, a large stick,” and a German Shepherd named Warrior.”
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“According to the indictment, however, Rhodes and other Oath Keepers celebrated the riot and talked about following it up with further acts of resistance. “Thousands of ticked off patriots spontaneously marched on the Capitol,” Rhodes said that night in a Signal group chat. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Between January 10 and January 14, the indictment says, Rhodes spent about $18,000 on firearm parts, accessories, and ammunition. But apparently nothing came of whatever Rhodes might have been planning. He was not arrested until.. a year after the spending spree described in the indictment.”
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“On Election Day, Rhodes publicly advised Oath Keepers to “stock up on ammo” and prepare for a “full-on war in the streets” if Biden were declared the winner. A week later, Rhodes posted a “call to action” under the headline “WHAT WE THE PEOPLE MUST DO.” It described elements of the revolt against Milosevic, which included not only “peaceful protests” and “complete civil disobedience” but also “swarm[ing] the streets,” “confronting the opponents,” “storm[ing] the Parliament,” and “burn[ing] down fake state Television.”
In a December 23, 2020, message on the Oath Keepers website, Rhodes said “tens of thousands of patriot Americans, both veterans and non-veterans, will already be in Washington D.C., and many of us will have our mission-critical gear stowed nearby just outside D.C.” He warned that he and likeminded patriots might have to “take to arms in defense of our God given liberty.”
So much for staying below the radar. Rhodes’ lack of discretion was not his only problem. It remains unclear exactly how he hoped to keep Trump in power.”
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“The plan, evidently, was to “scare the shit” out of Congress with a show of force that would persuade legislators to reject electoral votes for Biden. But in the end, the Oath Keepers merely joined a riot that was already in progress, and the riot itself accomplished nothing but an interruption that delayed ratification of Biden’s victory until that night.”
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“The sedition charges do not require that the defendants had any realistic hope of success. Assuming the allegations are true, Rhodes et al. did indeed conspire to use force to “prevent, hinder, or delay” the execution of Congress’ constitutional and statutory obligations to certify the election results. And in addition to the sedition counts, which are punishable by up to 20 years in prison, the defendants face various other charges, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, assault, destruction of government property, interference with law enforcement, and tampering with evidence (mainly by erasing incriminating data on their cellphones).
The Justice Department estimates that as many as 2,500 people may ultimately face charges in connection with the Capitol riot. Most of them will be more like Gonzalez, the “Capitol Doobie Smoker,” than Rhodes and his followers, who had ambitious but inept plans that ultimately amounted to little more than a sideshow in a much broader spasm of vandalism and violence that was itself utterly futile.”
“I’m very supportive of efforts to either essentially bribe localities into doing the right thing through a Race to the Top program if you don’t reduce exclusionary zoning. I think that’s a good effort, but I think that the Economic Fair Housing Act offers something both substantively and politically that’s better.
I think part of the problem with the existing federal proposals is that they suggest that exclusionary zoning is bad policy because it blocks opportunity and makes housing less affordable and damages the planet. All of those things are true, but what I think the Economic Fair Housing Act tries to do is say it’s not just bad policy, it’s immoral for governments to erect barriers that exclude and discriminate based on income … because it’s shameful what’s going on.”
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“In the 21st century, segregated communities are kept that way not through laws that explicitly attempt to keep certain areas white but through a more insidious method — exclusionary zoning and land-use regulations that make it illegal to build affordable types of housing, laws that allow wealthy Americans to block things from being built, and a failure to consistently use federal civil rights laws to desegregate.
All of this has resulted in the prices of housing and rent skyrocketing. Over the last year, diminished supply as a result of these laws has pushed the cost of shelter higher than ever, straining the pockets of working-class, middle-class, and even some high-income Americans.”
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“In certain communities, there is still an intent to segregate by race, so I don’t want to downplay that, but having said that, there’s certainly evidence that the issue of exclusionary zoning is not only about race.
We know in predominantly white communities that wealthy whites will use zoning to exclude lower-income whites. We also know, for example, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a predominantly Black community, that there are efforts by wealthier Black people to exclude lower-income Black people through exclusionary zoning.
In some white, liberal communities, you will hear people say they are delighted to have a Black doctor or lawyer move in next door. And so they feel virtuous for no longer excluding directly based on race, without acknowledging that they’d be highly uncomfortable with working-class Black people or white people moving into the neighborhood.
So I think it’s important that we recognize that there’s exclusion going on by both race and class, which is why we need some new tools to beef up the existing laws.”
“The felony murder rule “divorces intent from consequence,” says Lara Bazelon, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco. “The concept is that, well, if you went along for the underlying felony, if you went along for the less serious act…then you’re just as guilty as [the murderer], even if you didn’t know that your co-defendant was armed, and even if you had no intent to kill yourself.”
That scenario is not a hypothetical. In May 2020, not long before Arbery’s convicted murderers were indicted, Jenna Holm was arrested on a manslaughter charge in Idaho, accused of killing a police officer after he arrived to respond to her apparent mental health crisis. But it wasn’t Holm who killed Bonneville County Sheriff’s Deputy Wyatt Maser—something the state conceded. It was another cop, who struck Maser in his vehicle when he drove onto the scene.
While an internal investigation revealed the officers disregarded safety procedures that night, the police eschewed introspection and set their sights on Holm, charging her with an “unlawful act” and tacking a manslaughter charge on top. (A judge recently struck it down, but only after Holm sat in jail for 16 months pre-trial.)
There are many more such stories. In December 2018, 16-year-old Masonique Saunders was charged with the felony murder of her boyfriend, who a police officer shot during the commission of a robbery. Because she allegedly helped plan that burglary, Ohio said the teen effectively killed her own partner. But perhaps the most iconic anecdote associated with the felony murder rule is the unfortunate story of Ryan Holle, who was sentenced to life in prison after he lent his car to some friends. Those friends then used it to commit a crime—also a burglary—which went horribly awry after one of the men found a firearm in the house they were robbing and used it to kill 18-year-old Jessica Snyder.
Holle was a mile and a half away from that scene, but he was treated no differently than Charles Miller, Jr., who saw that gun and spontaneously murdered Snyder. “Felony murder says you are just as liable, you are just as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger,” notes Bazelon. In 2015, Holle’s sentence was commuted to 25 years in prison; he will not be released until 2024.”
“The $1 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed into law..dumps a lot of new money into existing highway programs to be spent by state departments of transportation (DOTs).
The price tag of the bill—which includes $550 billion in new spending, $110 billion of which is earmarked for highways and bridges”
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“by mostly topping off existing programs, it will largely maintain a status quo where some states deploy their highway dollars effectively, while others continue to set them on fire in the hopes that that will produce better roads.”
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“That would include places like New Jersey, which ranked last in a report on state highway performance released by the Reason Foundation today.
The Garden State, per the report, spent $1,136,255 per mile of state-controlled road in 2019 while also having some of the worst urban congestion and pavement conditions in the country.
That’s well above more cost-effective states like Virginia. It managed to spend only $34,969 per mile of state-controlled roads while also having above average pavement quality and slightly worse-than-average congestion. (Virginia ranked second overall in the Reason highway report, right behind North Dakota.)”
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“Feigenbaum says part of New Jersey’s high expenditures can be chalked up to the high design quality of its highways, which have generally wider lanes and straighter curves in order to improve safety. (It ranks fourth in the Reason report in terms of overall fatality rate). But he also says a lot can also be explained by a cronyist state DOT that’s dominated by political appointees.
A state like Virginia has been able to keep up road quality while keeping overall road spending in line by having a more professionally run DOT, he says. It also makes heavy use of public-private partnerships, whereby private companies put in their own capital to rebuild or expand highways in return for being able to charge tolls on the lanes that they build, says Feigenbaum.
In keeping with its “spend more on the same old programs” nature, Biden’s new infrastructure bill does remarkably little to advance public-private partnerships or expand the interstate tolling that supports them.
The infrastructure bill does increase the amount of private activity bonds (tax-exempt bonds issued by a private company to fund an infrastructure project) that can be issued from $15 billion to $30 billion. It also reauthorizes a handful of limited programs that allow states to use tolls to reduce congestion or rebuild bridges. But it leaves in place a general prohibition on tolling interstate highways.
The overall trend in highway spending over the past decade has been higher spending and marginally improved roadway quality, says Feigenbaum, with some states standing out for either their innovations or their wastefulness.
The new infrastructure bill will likely produce more of the same.”
“Now that President Joe Biden has signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the bipartisan infrastructure framework, or BIF) into law, the federal government faces a new challenge: getting the funds out to states and cities.
In the coming months — and years — federal agencies will distribute billions of dollars for everything from bridge repairs to public transit expansions to bike paths. Most of this money will go directly to state governments, which will have significant discretion over which projects they’d like to fund.”
“The bill is also larded up with provisions that will make infrastructure projects more costly for taxpayers. That matters, of course, because if you inflate the cost of building a bridge and you have a fixed amount of money to spend on new bridges, you’ll get fewer bridges.
For example, the bill’s “Buy American” provision is nothing more than performative patriotism and a handout to politically powerful unions. By mandating that materials used in road, bridge, and rail projects come primarily from the United States, Congress will effectively hike prices and engage in arbitrary protectionism.”
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“The infrastructure bill could have been an opportunity to reform other federal rules that unnecessarily drive up the cost of building infrastructure. Like the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires that most workers on federally subsidized building projects are paid the local “prevailing wage” negotiated by unions even if the workers themselves are not unionized—and only about 13 percent of construction workers are part of a union. The Davis-Bacon Act rules can increase the costs of infrastructure projects by as much as 20 percent.
Similarly, the infrastructure package could have suspended or eliminated parts of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in order to streamline environmental reviews of infrastructure projects. Currently, NEPA reviews take more than four years on average, and they are frequently used as tools to block development for reasons that often have little to do with the environment.”
“In May, the Lone Star State raised the minimum legal age for working in a sexually oriented business from 18 to 21.”
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“Since the new law passed, adult businesses in Texas have laid off “droves” of 18- to 20-year-old workers, according to the Texas Entertainment Association (TEA), an organization that represents the interests of sex-oriented businesses and one of the plaintiffs challenging S.B. 315. Kevin Richardson, a TEA member who owns five adult cabarets, told the court he had to lay off more than 700 people due to the new law.
Evanny Salazar is one of the young adults who lost a job after S.B. 315 reclassified her as a child. Salazar “worked at two adult cabarets in San Antonio, Texas, where she earned about $1,000 a night” and did not witness any human trafficking, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman noted in a July ruling. “Before she worked as an exotic dancer, Salazar was homeless and lived in her car,” he wrote. “Her job at the adult cabarets allowed Salazar to obtain housing and cover her living expenses. Since losing her job as an exotic dancer, Salazar has become homeless again and works for Door Dash [sic], where she makes about $30 a night.””
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who..signed a bill that aims to restrict social media platforms’ editorial discretion, says the new law “protects Texans from wrongful censorship” and thereby upholds their “first amendment rights.” The law, H.B. 20, is scheduled to take effect on December 2, but that probably will not happen, because it is blatantly unconstitutional and inconsistent with federal law.
Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice who served as his state’s attorney general from 2002 to 2015, presumably knows that. But whether he is sincerely mistaken or cynically catering to his party’s base, H.B. 20 reflects widespread confusion among conservatives about what the First Amendment requires and allows.”
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“the First Amendment applies to the government and imposes no constraints on private parties.
To the contrary, the First Amendment guarantees a private publisher’s right to exercise editorial discretion. The Supreme Court emphasized that point in a 1974 case involving a political candidate’s demand that The Miami Herald publish his responses to editorials that criticized him.
The constitutional protection against compelled publication does not disappear when we move from print to the internet, or from a news outlet to a website that invites users to post their own opinions. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, “the Government may not…tell Twitter or YouTube what videos to post” or “tell Facebook or Google what content to favor.”
Yet that is what H.B. 20 purports to do. The law says “social media platforms” with more than 50 million active monthly users in the U.S. may not “censor” content based on the “viewpoint” it expresses. That edict covers any effort to “block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.”
H.B. 20 makes a few exceptions, including “expression that directly incites criminal activity” and “specific threats of violence” that target people based on their membership in certain protected categories. But otherwise the rule’s reach is vast: As two trade organizations note in a federal lawsuit they filed last week, H.B. 20 “would unconstitutionally require platforms like YouTube and Facebook to disseminate, for example, pro-Nazi speech, terrorist propaganda, foreign government disinformation, and medical misinformation.””
“FOSTA and the takedown of Backpage have made finding and fighting sex criminals more difficult, according to the GAO report.
Since FOSTA’s passage, the commercial sex ad market has become more highly fragmented and more likely to be based overseas. This “heightens already-existing challenges law enforcement face in gathering tips and evidence,” the report says. Those running the newer platforms often “host servers abroad, reside abroad, use offshore bank accounts and financial institutions, or introduce third parties to attempt to obscure or distance themselves from the day-to-day operation of their platforms, according to DOJ officials.”
Whereas sites like Backpage and Craigslist were willing to work with legal authorities—reporting suspicious ads, turning over information relevant to prosecutions, etc.—the new crop of commercial sex ad platforms are much less responsive and helpful. As a result, prosecuting their users has become more difficult, as has finding the victims of sex trafficking.”