“The modern presidency has tremendous powers, of course, but this is still quite the stretch. Hawley is asking the White House to engage in central planning at an absurdly micro-level—and there is, thankfully, no law that actually allows the president to order a factory to continue producing aluminum if its owners have decided to stop.
Even so, the fact that Hawley is even making this request illustrates something important about how Republicans now view the relationship between government and business. It also says something about how the failures of protectionism will spur calls for more protectionism. And, finally, about how the phrase “national security” has become warped beyond recognition to justify further governmental intrusions into the economy.”
…
“It might shock Hawley and some of his colleagues to learn that the Defense Production Act is not a set of magic words that allow presidents to do whatever they’d like. In fact, all the law does is require that businesses fulfill orders from the government before other orders from private customers.
That’s because it is a law meant to be used during wartime. Here’s how it works: Let’s say there’s a war going on and the U.S. military desperately needs 10,000 widgets to ensure victory, lasting peace, and blah blah blah. The Pentagon sends a guy to the widget factory in Albuquerque to request those 10,000 widgets, but the owner of the factory says the 10,000 widgets sitting on his lot have already been purchased by his friend Bob and that the government will have to wait until the factory can produce another 10,000 widgets—so come back in two weeks.
Ah, but wait! The president just signed an order invoking the Defense Production Act for widgets, so now the guy from the Pentagon gets to cut the line. He can buy those 10,000 widgets, and Bob has to wait for the next set to come off the assembly line.
That’s what the Defense Production Act allows. It can’t conjure up new solar panels or additional supplies of insulation out of thin air. It doesn’t allow the government to put a gun to anyone’s head and force them to make baby formula or to keep an aluminum smelter running.”
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“Remember those 10 percent tariffs on imported aluminum imposed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018? That was naked protectionism, and the announced closure of this Missouri smelter seems like pretty good evidence that it failed. There’s other evidence too: As Hawley points out in his letter, this is the third aluminum smelter in the U.S. to announce plans to downsize in recent months. Unfortunately, the failures of protectionism only ever seem to spur calls for more protectionism.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/26/josh-hawley-thinks-the-white-house-can-force-an-aluminum-plant-to-stay-open/
“After President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court, Reason’s Damon Root noted that she “has shown admirable judgment in criminal justice cases.” One especially telling example is Jackson’s handling of people charged with possessing or sharing child pornography, who face absurdly long sentences under federal law even when they have never committed any offenses involving contact with a victim.
Questioning those sentences is politically perilous, since people tend to erroneously assume that anyone who looks at such pictures is a current or future child molester. Yet as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Jackson frequently imposed sentences below the range recommended by federal guidelines. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), a former Missouri attorney general, thinks those decisions reveal an “alarming pattern” of “sentencing leniency for sex criminals,” whom he equates with “child predators.”
Hawley has no idea what he is talking about. His mindlessly punitive attitude elides crucial distinctions and ignores the fact that many federal judges agree with Jackson that the recommended sentences for possessing child pornography are frequently excessive.
Jackson, who is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, was a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) from 2009 to 2014. During that time, Jackson recognized that people caught with child pornography do not necessarily pose a threat to public safety. Hawley cites a hearing at which Jackson said she had mistakenly “assumed that child pornography offenders are pedophiles” and was “trying to understand this category of nonpedophiles who obtain child pornography.”
While Hawley implies that Jackson’s interest in this subject is clearly crazy, it is consistent with research that underlines the importance of a distinction that Hawley ignores in his haste to score cheap political points. As Karl Hanson, a senior research scientist at Public Safety Canada and a leading expert on sex offenders, told me more than a decade ago, “there does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending.”
Recidivism research supports that observation. A 2021 USSC study, for example, tracked 1,093 nonproduction child pornography offenders who were released from prison in 2005. Three years later, it found, 3.3 percent had been arrested for a “non-contact sex offense” (which would include possession of child pornography). Just 1.3 percent had been arrested for a “contact sex offense.” Even allowing for crimes that were not reported, these finding suggests this category of sex offenders is far less dangerous than people commonly imagine.
Hawley is completely uninterested in such findings. He even faults Jackson for referring to “less-serious child pornography offender[s],” a complaint that bizarrely implies there are no differences among such defendants that might be relevant to the punishment they receive. As far as lawmakers like Hawley are concerned, there is no such thing as an excessively severe sentence for possessing child pornography.”
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“In fiscal year 2019, the USSC found, 59 percent of nonproduction offenders received sentences below the guideline range, compared to less than 16 percent in FY 2005. “There had been a steady increase in the percentage of sentences imposed below the applicable guideline range in non-production child pornography cases,” the USSC notes, “which indicate[s] that courts increasingly believed the sentencing scheme for such offenders was overly severe.”
In other words, the downward departures that Hawley presents as aberrant, marking Jackson as especially soft on “sex criminals,” are actually typical.”
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“Hawley’s case against Jackson is based entirely on the unquestioned assumption that the current sentencing scheme is just and that any downward deviations from it must be inappropriately lenient. He cites one defendant, for example, who “had more than 600 images and videos and posted many on a public blog.” The guidelines recommended a sentence of 151 to 188 months, but “Judge Jackson settled on 60 months, the lowest possible sentence allowed by law.”
While a sentence of 12 to 15 years might be appropriate (or even too lenient) for someone who sexually abuses a child, Hawley thinks it’s obviously just for a defendant whose crimes consisted of nothing more than collecting and sharing images of such abuse. He likewise thinks it’s obvious that a five-year sentence for such conduct is akin to a slap on the wrist. Many people, including many federal judges, disagree.
Hawley’s sense of justice does not even comport with the views of average citizens who serve on federal juries. In a 2014 case involving a defendant who was caught with 1,500 child porn images on his computer, for example, James Gwin, a federal judge in Cleveland, asked the jurors what they thought an appropriate sentence would be. On average, they recommended a prison term of 14 months—far shorter than the mandatory minimum (five years), the sentence recommended by prosecutors (20 years), and the term indicated by federal sentencing guidelines (27 years).
Taking a cue from the jury, Gwin sentenced the defendant to five years, the minimum required by statute, which was one-quarter the term that prosecutors wanted but still four times longer than the jurors deemed fair. No doubt Hawley would consider five years insufficient in that case as well. But he does not bother to defend that position, except by lazily and ignorantly classifying all such defendants as “sex criminals” who are “preying on children.”
As a federal judge in Iowa, Mark W. Bennett likewise found that jurors did not agree with the sentences that Hawley believes are self-evidently appropriate. “Every time I ever went back in the jury room and asked the jurors to write down what they thought would be an appropriate sentence,” Bennett told The Marshall Project’s Eli Hager in 2015, “every time—even here, in one of the most conservative parts of Iowa, where we haven’t had a ‘not guilty’ verdict in seven or eight years—they would recommend a sentence way below the guidelines sentence. That goes to show that the notion that the sentencing guidelines are in line with societal mores about what constitutes reasonable punishment—that’s baloney.””
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“”Protecting the most vulnerable shouldn’t be up for debate,” Hawley says. “Sending child predators to jail shouldn’t be controversial.” But the issue is not whether “child predators” should go to jail. It is whether defendants who are not “child predators” should be imprisoned for, say, 14 months (as the jurors in the Ohio case recommended), five years (the mandatory minimum in that case), or, as Hawley presumably would prefer, the 27 years recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.”
“In an op-ed for The New York Times published Friday, Hawley uses the temporary supply chain problems as an excuse to push for a permanent expansion of federal power over the affairs of private businesses. We must “fundamentally restructure our country’s trade policy,” Hawley demands, and that means injecting both the Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucrats into companies’ purchasing decisions. Under the terms of a bill that Hawley is proposing, any product determined to be “critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base” would have to have at least 50 percent of its value made in the United States.
Why is it necessary for the government to get significantly more involved in the system of global trade that’s allowed Americans to enjoy unparalleled prosperity in recent years? Because “the global pandemic has exposed this system for what it is—a failure,” Hawley writes.
One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.
A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That’s hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he’s asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.”
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“Hawley says the supply chain crisis is the result of “a crisis of production.” Wrong again. American manufacturing is stronger than it has ever been, in part because outsourcing low-level production has allowed companies here to focus on higher-value goods (which means higher wages for the people who make and sell them). The true cause of the current mess is a disconnect between supply and demand—supplies have been constrained by a number of pandemic-related issues like temporarily closed factories and worker shortages, while demand has shifted in unexpected ways.”
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“If his thesis is correct, then items that are already mostly produced domestically should be exempt from the problems with foreign supply chains, right? Except, no, that’s not true. As Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, points out, the vast majority of food consumed in the United States is grown, raised, and otherwise produced here. And yet Americans are seeing higher prices and supply issues at the grocery store too.
“That a mostly‐domestic U.S. food supply chain hasn’t protected American consumers from recent shortages and price increases is unsurprising,” Lincicome writes. “For starters, many of the same things that stress global supply chains—COVID-19 outbreaks; supply‐demand imbalances; labor shortages in the trucking and warehousing industries; misguided trade, transportation, and immigration policies; etc.—stress domestic ones too.””
“From 1998 to 2002, Kennedy was Hawley’s adviser at Stanford. Hawley, a history major who graduated with honors and wrote a thesis about Theodore Roosevelt, wasn’t just another young man in a hurry, passing through a top university. Kennedy remembers him as deeply engaged and thoughtful, and a serious scholar of the Constitution.
Then, after the election, the professor watched in shock as his former star student became the first senator to say he would challenge the certification of Joe Biden’s win, openly trying to prevent the people’s chosen president from taking office. On January 6, Hawley was photographed giving a raised fist to protesters outside the Capitol as he walked in, planning to object to the electoral results. Even after the rioters breached the Senate chamber and violently interrupted the process, he refused to backtrack on his claims, refuted by court ruling after court ruling, of “irregularities” and “fraud” in the election.
“I absolutely could not have predicted that the bright, idealistic, clear-thinking young student that I knew would follow this path,” says Kennedy. “What Hawley and company were doing was kind of the gentlemanly version of the pointless disruption that happened when the mob invaded the Capitol.”
Conversations with more than a dozen of Hawley’s Stanford classmates and a half-dozen faculty members who knew him all raise versions of the same question: What happened to the person they knew?”