The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 5, 1982 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 5, 1982 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
You may have heard that the U.S. Supreme Court killed off the practice of nationwide injunctions, the practice where a federal judge stops a federal policy from going into effect everywhere in the country while a single lawsuit challenging that policy plays out in court.
As a result, you may think that President Donald Trump is now free to implement his national agenda of immigration crackdowns without facing any more interference from pesky lower court judges, who have enjoined such presidential policies in the past.
That was certainly how the White House characterized the Supreme Court's June 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, which lifted several nationwide injunctions against Trump's executive order purporting to abolish the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship for millions of U.S.-born children.
"Today's decision restores the proper separation of powers between the branches of government," declared White House Counsel David Warrington. "Ending nationwide injunctions is a tremendous victory for the American people and the rule of law."
But Warrington's statement did not exactly match the facts. It would have been more accurate to say that the Supreme Court limited the use of nationwide injunctions. And Warrington might have added that the Supreme Court left the courthouse doors wide open for federal judges to block the president's actions nationwide through other comparable legal mechanisms, such as national class-action lawsuits.
Here's how you know that Warrington missed the mark. Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship was reblocked from going into effect nationwide by a federal trial judge barely two weeks after the CASA decision came down, and it has remained so blocked ever since.
If nationwide injunctions are truly dead, then they or their likeness have an uncanny habit of climbing out of the grave daily to haunt the president.
Serial abusers of presidential power have typically raised the loudest complaints against the use of nationwide injunctions. Take Trump's predecessor, President Joe Biden.
Before the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to abolish nationwide injunctions in CASA, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to abolish nationwide injunctions in a case called Garland v. Texas Top Cop Shop (2025), which involved a legal challenge to the federal Corporate Transparency Act. "A court of equity may grant relief only to the parties before it," argued Biden's solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar. "The district court violated that principle by issuing a universal injunction purporting to enjoin the Act itself and forbidding the enforcement of the Act even against non-parties."
Perhaps the administration was still sore after its resounding 2023 loss in Biden v. Nebraska, in which the Supreme Court struck down Biden's plan to unilaterally cancel billions of dollars in federal student loan debt via executive action. That case, as you may recall, took off only because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against the president's plan.
As an authority for the debt cancellation, Biden had invoked the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003. According to President George W. Bush, who signed the HEROES Act into law, it "permits the Secretary of Education to waive or modify Federal student financial assistance program requirements to help students and their families or academic institutions affected by a war, other military operation, or national emergency." In other words, Biden argued that a law specifically designed to ease the student debt troubles of service members fighting the war on terror should also be read to allow him to pursue a separate and more far-reaching domestic policy of his own devising.
The Supreme Court rejected Biden's dubious theory of expansive executive action. "This is a case about one branch of government arrogating to itself power belonging to another," the majority observed. "It is the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature."
No president likes to lose in court. But the sorest losers may be those presidents who think they ought to possess the unilateral power to set national policy as they alone see fit. Perhaps that is why both Biden and Trump went gunning after nationwide injunctions. Overreaching executives tend to chafe when judges get in the way of their power grabs.
Which brings us back to Trump and his executive order on birthright citizenship. Although the Supreme Court's CASA decision did tell the lower courts to dial back the use of nationwide injunctions, the Court also stated that other avenues of nationwide relief would still remain fully available.
For example, "in the wake of the Court's decision," Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed in concurrence, "plaintiffs who challenge the legality of a new federal statute or executive action and request preliminary injunctive relief may sometimes seek to proceed by class action…and ask a court to award preliminary classwide relief that may, for example, be statewide, regionwide, or even nationwide." And that national class-action approach, Kavanaugh added, was just fine under CASA. "Today's decision," he wrote, simply "will require district courts to follow proper legal procedures when awarding such relief."
Two weeks later, Judge Joseph Laplante of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, an appointee of George W. Bush, took CASA at its word when he blocked Trump from enforcing the birthright citizenship order against "all current and future persons who are born on or after February 20, 2025," and whose parents are either unlawfully present in the U.S. or whose parents are temporary visitors to the U.S.
"Because enforcement of the Executive Order would likely constitute unlawful behavior towards the entire class" of such persons, Laplante held in "Barbara" v. Trump, "and because a single injunction and declaratory judgment would provide complete relief to every member of the class, the class fits comfortably" within the federal rules governing national class-action lawsuits.
There are important technical distinctions between a nationwide injunction and a national class-action. But there are also important similarities. The most important is that, in both instances, a federal policy may be blocked from going into effect nationwide while a single lawsuit against that policy plays out in court. Either way, in other words, Trump still faces a judicial ruling that bars him from carrying out his executive order anywhere in the United States.
After repeatedly losing in the lower courts, the Trump administration finally asked the Supreme Court in September to rule on the merits of Trump's birthright citizenship order. After sitting on the petition for nearly three months, the Court agreed in December to hear the case, which will be argued on April 1.
What will happen when the Supreme Court weighs the case, at last? It's possible that Trump will win and the justices will use the opportunity to restrict the use of national class-action lawsuits against presidential orders just as they limited the use of nationwide injunctions. That would be a big win for every power-hungry president going forward.
But the Supreme Court might also rule against Trump's order on the correct grounds that it violates the text, history, and original meaning of the Birthright Citizenship Clause. In so doing, the Court would not only strike a blow against Trump's unconstitutional stance. It would solidify the national class-action lawsuit as a handy tool to use against presidential overreach.
The post Nationwide Injunctions, a Crucial Check on Presidential Power, Are Not Dead Yet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
For a variety of reasons, I oppose Donald Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and those in the US on temporary visas. And I have argued he deserves to lose the Supreme Court case on this issue. But unlike many other opponents of Trump's policy and of his constitutional arguments, I am not convinced birthright citizenship is the ideal system. It is, at most, only a second-best option, in the sense that it's better than the currently likely alternative.
Under current political conditions, that likely alternative is subjecting hundreds of thousands of children to deportation, and many adults, as well. Even though Trump's executive order is limited to children born at least 30 days after it was issued, the logic of his legal arguments would deprive millions of adults and older children of their right to live in the United States, as well. If the Fourteenth Amendment denies birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa-holders, that fact did not begin suddenly in 2025, but must have been true all along. Thus, the likely consequence of a legal victory for Trump would be grave harm to millions of children and descendants of immigrants, plus severe damage to the American economy and society from the resulting deportations and legal uncertainty. In addition, millions of other Americans would find it difficult to prove citizenship status if it can no longer be done on the basis of a birth certificate.
But while birthright citizenship is better than the likely alternative at this point in history, I do not believe it is the ideal policy. I explained some of the reasons why in a 2018 post:
Unlike most other advocates of immigration and immigrant rights, I have significant reservations about birthright citizenship. In my view, important human rights should not be so heavily dependent on parentage and place of birth. Our current citizenship system has all too much in common with medieval hereditary aristocracy, under which freedom of movement and other crucial rights were largely dependent on ancestry. I cannot outline anything like a comprehensive alternative here. But, as a general rule, I would prefer a system under which some rights now largely determined by citizenship (particularly freedom of movement, residency, and employment) were delinked from citizenship and made presumptively available to everyone, and citizenship itself were made easier to acquire through pathways that do not require the applicant to be a relative of a current citizen.
More generally, one of my (and many others') main objections to immigration restrictions is that they restrict people's liberty and opportunity based on arbitrary circumstances of ancestry and place of birth. If you were born to the right parents or in the right place, you get to live and work in the US; if not, you can only do so if the government gives you permission, which in the vast majority of cases is likely to be denied. In that respect, they are very similar to racial segregation and South African apartheid. In both cases, liberty is gravely restricted and many are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression because of morally arbitrary circumstances of birth over which they have no control.
Birthright citizenship is an improvement, in this respect, over a policy based on ancestry and parentage. For many children, it creates an alternative pathway to get around unjust restrictions. But it still restricts liberty and opportunity based on circumstances of birth, in this case based on place of birth, as well as parentage. And people have no more control over the location of their birth than over the identity of their parents. Neither determines your moral worth or how much liberty you are entitled to.
Thus, the far superior policy is simply to let people live and work where they want, regardless of who their parents are or where they were born. If that liberty is to be restricted, it should be only if the people in question pose some grave danger that cannot be addressed in other ways. And, in such extreme situations, native-born people's liberty could potentially be restricted, as well. I develop these points in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
Obviously, under current circumstances, citizenship includes not only the right to live and work in the US, but also rights to vote, hold public office, and receive various welfare benefits. In an ideal system, restrictions on voting and office-holding would be based on competence and (in some cases) there might be exclusions based on a demonstrated danger to liberal democratic institutions (as with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court wrongly gutted, to a large extent). We already have some competence-based constraints on the franchise, such as excluding children, some convicts, and immigrants who cannot pass a civics test most native-born Americans would fail if they had to take it without studying.
Access to welfare benefits should, I believe, be much more severely limited than is currently the case for both immigrants and natives. But even now the vast majority of immigrants contribute more to the public fisc than they take out, and limiting the welfare state is a bad argument for immigration restrictions that - if applied consistently - would also justify severely restricting many other liberties.
Thus, the ideal political system would have a strong presumption against restrictions on migration, while also imposing competence-based constraints on voting rights and office-holding, and limiting welfare benefits in various ways. We need some combination of decoupling citizenship from freedom of movement, constraints on access to government power, and limiting welfare benefits to a class of people who genuinely cannot avoid severe privation without them. And none of these rights and privileges should be, to any great extent, based on parentage or place of birth.
But, obviously, there are serious questions about whether governments can draw these lines in the right places and be trusted not to abuse their powers. Elsewhere, I have argued that we probably cannot rely too much on competence-based restrictions on the franchise, because real-world governments generally cannot be trusted in this field. We should instead address the problem of voter ignorance and bias by other means. It is also obvious that we are not going to get anywhere close to full freedom of movement for migrants anytime soon.
For these kinds of reasons, I think birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States is the best available option at this time. That's especially true because it does not preclude creating and expanding other pathways to residency, work rights, and citizenship. But we should be under no illusion that it is anywhere close to ideal, and we should remember that it includes an important element of unjust discrimination based on arbitrary circumstances of birth.
In this case, as with other situations involving unjust discriminatory immigration restrictions, the right approach to arbitrary discrimination is to "level up" rather than "level down." We should not deny birthright citizenship to those who currently enjoy its benefits. But we should also do all we can to expand these opportunities to others.
The post Birthright Citizenship as a Second-Best Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 4, 1861 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The debate over independent contractors is taking off again. In recent weeks, the Department of Labor issued its long-awaited independent contractor rule. The new directive reverses a Biden-era anti-contractor rule and thereby returns federal law to a more contractor-friendly posture. But as this federal regulatory seesaw plays out, state governments—and even Congress—provide the best hope for long-term change.
The debate over how to classify independent contractors dates far back in time. A 1947 U.S. Supreme Court case, Rutherford Food Corp. v. McComb, grappled with the issue of whether slaughterhouse workers were employees or contractors, and in the nearly 80 years since, the debate has never fully resolved. But in 2018, it received renewed attention in the aftermath of a decision by the California Supreme Court that created a new stringent three-part test that made it extremely difficult for workers to be classified as contractors.
This state court decision was eventually expanded through the now-notorious A.B. 5 law in California, which was a thinly-veiled attempt to prevent gig companies from classifying their drivers and deliverers as independent contractors. The argument in favor of worker reclassification is that independent contractors lack employment benefits such as health insurance, paid sick time, and more. California voters rejected the effort to reclassify gig workers as full-scale employees in a 2020 ballot referendum, but by that point independent contractor reclassification had already become a cause célèbre for the modern political left, with numerous states seeking to follow California's lead.
The Labor Department issued anti-contractor guidance during former President Barack Obama's second term, only to see the first iteration of the Trump administration issue a pro-contractor rulemaking at the very beginning of 2021. Once President Joe Biden took office shortly thereafter, the government suspended the Trump rule and eventually issued its own rulemaking that again had an anti-contractor bent. Now, to complete this bureaucratic whiplash, the Trump 2.0 Department of Labor suspended enforcement of the Biden-era rule last year and has issued a new proposed rule that essentially reinstates the Trump 1.0 rule.
The new rule concentrates on two key factors when it comes to determining whether a worker can be classified as an independent contractor under the Federal Labor Standards Act: first, the nature and degree of control over the work, and second, the worker's opportunity for profit or loss.
If a worker has substantial control over things like his or her work schedule, selection of projects, and ability to work for competitors, then this would lean toward a contractor-based rather than employee-based relationship. Likewise, if a worker has the opportunity to earn profits or incur losses based on his or her initiative (such as their business acumen and judgment), then this would again militate in favor of a contracting relationship. This type of pro-contractor legal standard would largely shield gig companies from federal attempts to reclassify their workers as full-scale employees.
The importance of maintaining independent contractor flexibility extends far beyond the gig context, too. Everyone from real estate agents to barbers have long operated under contracting models, and attempts to reclassify these workers as employees would create massive disruption across a broad swatch of industries.
One often overlooked example is financial advisors, many of which are independent contractors. Reclassifying them as employees could make these advisors less willing to work with lower-net-worth clients, which in turn would have underappreciated and widespread impacts on the potential retirement savings of millions of Americans
But while the latest rulemaking is sufficiently pro-contractor to protect against such negative impacts—at least at the federal level—it's worth noting that in our hyper-polarized era, it could well be reversed by subsequent administrations, just like its predecessor rules. The result is more uncertainty and paralysis for businesses and industries, which must endure a substantial rewriting of American labor law every four to eight years.
Fortunately, at the state level, more durable change is happening. Rather than trying to reclassify workers as employees, numerous states have begun experimenting with what's known as a portable benefits model. Under this framework, independent contractors in the gig economy are given access to SEP IRA–style accounts in which both they and gig companies can contribute. The funds from these accounts follow the contractors from job to job, rather than being tied to a single company, and they can be used for benefits like health insurance, retirement funds, or paid time off.
States as ideologically diverse as Pennsylvania, Utah, and Maryland have pursued this model in recent years, with more states set to join the ranks this year. The idea has even made its way to Congress in the Unlocking Benefits for Independent Workers Act that was introduced last year by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.).
The Department of Labor's new rule is a boon to independent contractors. But the real change is happening in the states. And, ultimately, it's up to Congress to step in any prevent this regulatory teeter-totter from becoming fully unhinged.
The post The Labor Department Just Freed Contractors—Again. Congress Still Needs To Act. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Karl Marx said that when history repeats itself, we're supposed to get tragedy first, then farce. But Donald J. Trump has spent his life flouting all the rules. Why should we expect him to obey the historical dialectic?
In Trump's two presidencies, farce came first. From the jump, his first turn at the helm was a head-spinning spectacle. He talked like a caudillo crossbred with an insult comic and seemed like a strongman auditioning for the part. In practice, however, Trump proved something of a "low energy" authoritarian. Very few of 45's autocratic fancies—from unilaterally revoking birthright citizenship to"hereby order[ing]" American companies out of China—ever made the transition from tweet to law of the land.
Trump 1.0 arguably ended up a less imperial president than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Even on COVID-19—a workable excuse for an executive power grab if ever there was one—45 proved the rare president willing to let a good crisis go to waste.
Midway through Trump's shambolic first term,I warned in these pages that we should count ourselves lucky things hadn't gone worse, and should "set about reimposing limits on the office's powers before a competent authoritarian comes along."
I never imagined it would be the same guy. And yet it's Trump's second presidency that's delivered a mix of tragedy and genuine peril. Somehow, during the interregnum, Trump discovered you can just do things. In the process, he's revealed just how few meaningful constraints remain against one-man rule.
On day 1 of his first term, Trump issued only a single executive order. The Beltway freak-out over the new administration was largely about presidential style rather than policy substance. An NPR item—"Yes, All This Happened. Trump's First 2 Weeks As President"—captured the reigning zeitgeist. "All This" included some pro forma hand-wringing about actual policies, like the travel ban, but the real focus was Trump's lack of decorum: Look at this guy with his "alternative facts" about the crowd size at his inauguration! He made a travesty out of the National Prayer Breakfast! ("And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those [Celebrity Apprentice] ratings, OK,' the president said.") You can't take him anywhere!
In the reality-show arc, Trump 1.0 showed us what happens when the presidency stops being polite; Trump 2.0 was when it started getting real. On Day 1 of his second term, Trump came out of the gate with 26 executive orders. By the 100-day mark he'd issued 143—more than triple Biden's near-record-setting pace—while signing fewer bills into law than any first-year president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Everything everywhere all at once—or "flood the zone with shit," as Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon once put it. All told, it was an unmistakable inflection point: the moment our long slide toward pen-and-phone governance took a dizzying lurch downward.
Crank tweets from the first term became executive orders in the second. One purported to rewrite the 14th Amendment by eliminating birthright citizenship; another dusted off the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as authority for summary deportations and warrantless searches of homes.
In his first term, Trump sent the markets into a tailspin with an August 2019 tweet ("Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China"), following up with a statutory citation: "try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!" Nothing came of it until 2025, when Trump recovered the presidential pen and issued a series of directives using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to hike duties on Mexico, Canada, and China, purportedly for failure to stem fentanyl trafficking, and then to impose new tariffs worldwide—declaring the longstanding U.S. trade deficit a "national emergency."
In so doing, he converted the 50-year-old foreign-policy sanctions statute into his personal Oval Office "tariff button"—allowing him to launch trade wars from his desk as easily as ordering a Diet Coke.
Outside U.S. borders, Trump forged new frontiers in presidential warmaking. With a September 2025 airstrike against a suspected cartel boat off the coast of Venezuela, he took the war on drugs from metaphor to reality. In January, Trump followed up by sending Delta Force to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Then, in the early morning hours of February 28, Trump unleashed Operation Epic Fury—a huge, coordinated U.S.–Israeli air bombardment that hit more than 1,000 Iranian sites and killed key regime figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Like the rest of us, Congress learned about Epic Fury from a video on Trump's Truth Social account, in which the president warned Iranian fighters to "lay down your weapons [or] face certain death" and urged the Iranian public, "When we are finished, take over your government." Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule is another the president considers optional: You can just break things, no need to buy them.
Some of these moves, like the president's IEEPA gambit, were genuinely new. But most of them tapped into a vast reservoir of power that presidents have always enjoyed—because we've let them.
The modern presidency comes preloaded with emergency powers, unilateral trade authority, administrative control over vast swaths of economic life, and the practical ability to wage war at will. If Trump has any claim to being a "transformational president," it's because his contempt for power-constraining norms has brought our dilemma into bold relief, revealing the dark possibilities the office has long contained.
Well before Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015, presidents enjoyed virtually unchecked power to wage war. The War Powers Resolution—passed over President Richard Nixon's veto in 1973—aimed to restore Congress' constitutional power to decide the question of war or peace, but it's barely inconvenienced any president in the five decades since. In our system, like it or not, one man decides.
Over the course of decades, Congress has handed the president a vast arsenal of statutory powers—more than 130, by the Brennan Center for Justice's count—that he can unlock by saying the magic words "national emergency." And yet, to date, nearly 70 percent of those powers have never been triggered.
The plain language of the Insurrection Act makes it shockingly easy for a president to put boots on the ground in American cities, using overt language of discretion (allowing military force "whenever the president considers" that unlawful assemblages "make it impracticable to enforce the laws"). Yet despite Trump's recent threats, it hasn't been triggered in over three decades.
Earlier this year, when asked whether anything meaningfully constrains his power, Trump told The New York Times: "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It's the only thing that can stop me, and that's very good."
That's not terribly comforting. Is there anything else that can do the trick?
In 1994, after market pressure forced the Clinton administration to dial back some of its more ambitious plans, James Carville cracked that if there's reincarnation, "I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
If the president can't be constrained by law, maybe a Wall Street sell-off can pull him back from the brink. That's what many people have been banking on lately, and that bet comes with a cutesy acronym: TACO, for Trump Always Chickens Out. The coinage comes courtesy of Financial Times reporter Robert Armstrong, who in May 2025 posited that the administration "does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain"—a prediction that was borne out through Trump's repeated post–"Liberation Day" climbdowns from his most aggressive trade threats.
There's another TACO dynamic at play with public opinion: Plummeting polls occasionally force presidents to back down. Earlier this year, some 1,500 U.S. soldiers stood ready to join the federal surge into Minneapolis, The New York Times reported, "but the shooting death by immigration officers of a second U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, on Jan. 24 galvanized public sentiment against the federal government's tactics and forced the administration to retreat."
Public opinion can stay the president's hand even where his powers are broadest. Since President Harry Truman got burned in Korea, no modern president has been stupid enough to risk a mass-casualty ground war without congressional authorization.
All of this is pretty cold comfort, however. Market discipline can occasionally force presidents into tactical retreats on a narrow suite of issues investors care about. Even there, it may have diminishing returns. "The TACO trade has proven a reliably winning one on Wall Street," the Los Angeles Times reported in January, but "if TACO means investors don't need to panic when Trump signals aggressive policy action after another, then there are no market collapses violent enough to spook him into backing down like he did on tariffs last year."
And while public backlash can sometimes compel presidents to stand down, that check has become steadily weaker. Modern presidents increasingly govern for the base. So long as he holds it, low-40s approval ratings overall seem not to have deterred Trump much.
At best, these informal checks add up to some reason to think "surely he won't do anything crazy." They're no guarantee he won't wake up one morning thinking, if you want to take Greenland, take Greenland.
In fact, the TACO discourse is itself a stark reminder of just how bad we've got it. Trump's second presidency has made clear that American prosperity and domestic tranquility rest on a brittle foundation of presidential self-restraint—and now we're framing forbearance as cowardice.
Perversely, Trump's political opponents have been using the acronym as a taunt. In June, the Democratic National Committee parked a taco truck, featuring a picture of Trump in a chicken suit, on Capitol Hill. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) used the gibe in an apparent attempt to scuttle negotiations over Iran's nuclear program: "If TACO Trump is already folding on Iran, the American people need to know about it." As Jim Antle put it in The American Conservative, "It is exceedingly strange to try to bait someone you regard as a narcissistic madman into pursuing policies you dislike and consider dangerous to the country."
Especially when the man is so eminently baitable. That same week, Trump blew up at a CNBC reporter who referenced the acronym. "He's clearly super irritated by it," a Trump ally told Politico, adding that "it's like a challenge to his very manhood now." Armstrong now wishes he'd never coined the term: "If this gets into [Trump's] head and he digs in his heels," he lamented last year, "that is really a disaster for which I am very, very sorry." It's surreal to think somebody might provoke a trade crisis—or a war—just by whispering "bawk bawk" at a thin-skinned 79-year-old man, but here we are.
Always was always doing far too much work in the acronym. The president shouldn't have unilateral power to drag us into economic or military disaster in the first place. To ensure he doesn't, there's no substitute for formal checks from coordinate branches of government.
Is the judiciary up to the task? Lately the courts have been doing a more than passable job living up to their assigned role as "bulwarks of a limited Constitution."
At the district-court level, Trump has suffered setbacks, some of them coming from judges he's appointed. In May 2025, the Supreme Court rebuffed his attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act for summary deportations; in February 2026, it rejected his attempt to convert IEEPA into an all-purpose trade-war weapon.
And yet historically, the Supremes have been much more effective at pulling recalcitrant states into line than picking fights with a "co-equal" branch. They tend to take that risk only when they're facing a weak president: ruling against an embattled Truman in the steel seizure case, yielding to a dominant FDR on Japanese internment.
And what Alexander Hamilton called "the least dangerous branch" offers no hope of restraining the president where he's most dangerous: his power to wage war. How could it? The president has the guns, while the courts have nothing but gavels. Meanwhile, Congress has the money and "all legislative power" granted by the Constitution. In order to check the president, we need it back in the game.
It's at this point that we're usually left delivering "a halftime pep-talk imploring [Congress] to pull up its socks and reclaim its rightful authority," as the legal scholar John Hart Ely once put it. We pay their salaries; why won't they do their jobs? Congress' long decline in public respect has roughly coincided with its total abdication of power and responsibility. Some years back, smart-aleck researchers at Public Policy Polling asked voters to rank Congress against a parade of maladies, and reported that, on the whole, Americans prefer witches, the IRS, and hemorrhoids to the federal legislature.
Congress has a terrible reputation, and it mostly deserves it. But its inability to check the president isn't entirely its fault. Look what happens when it tries.
In Trump's first term, Congress passed resolutions reversing arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ending U.S. support for the Saudis' murderous war in Yemen, overturning the president's bogus border wall "emergency," and—after the drone strike assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani—restraining his ability to wage undeclared war on Iran. Trump nullified each of those measures with a stroke of his pen. Eight of the 10 vetoes that 45 issued during his first term beat back congressional attempts to reverse unilateral actions the majority opposed. The resolutions currently before the House and the Senate to cut off the illegal war with Iran face the same hurdle.
That's not the way it's supposed to work. The 1973 War Powers Resolution empowered Congress to halt hostilities via concurrent resolution; the National Emergencies Act of 1976 allowed Congress to terminate presidential emergencies at any time by majority vote. But thanks to a 1983 Supreme Court decision, a simple congressional majority isn't good enough anymore. Attempts to check presidential action, the Court held in INS v. Chadha, must themselves run the gauntlet of the ordinary legislative process, and be presented to the president for his signature or veto. Since the president can be expected to veto congressional attempts to restrain him, in practice it takes a veto-proof majority to undo what he's done—an even higher bar than impeaching and removing him from office.
The upshot is that wars and states of emergency are easy for the president to start and nearly impossible for Congress to stop. Chadha's effect was to flip the default setting of the American government toward one-man rule: The president proposes and the president disposes.
Even so, we don't lack for smart legislative proposals to shift it back. The path toward restoring congressional checks after Chadha is fairly straightforward: If we don't want the president to be able to unlock new statutory powers by declaring national emergencies, we can amend the National Emergencies Act so those powers quickly expire without affirmative approval from Congress. The REPUBLIC Act, which was introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and passed out of committee in the last Congress, would have zeroed out unapproved emergency declarations in 30 days and barred the use of IEEPA as a trade-war weapon. Other recent measures apply the same approve-or-expire framework to presidentially imposed trade restrictions and to domestic troop deployments under the Insurrection Act. The 2021 National Security Powers Act put forward by Sens. Mike Lee (R–Utah), Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) would give the War Powers Resolution teeth by linking presidential compliance to power of the purse, and automatically terminating funding for unauthorized military operations.
Of course, each of these reforms would also have to either win the president's signature or garner enough support to make it past his veto. Deimperializing the presidency is a manageable task in terms of legislative design; as a political matter, it's a dauntingly heavy lift.
That lift would be well worth the strain, because the dangers that Trump's reckless second presidency has revealed won't recede when he goes back up that escalator.
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek chastised "socialists of all parties" for embracing the comforting delusion that "it is not the system which we need fear, but the danger that it might be run by bad men." So too with our power-swollen presidency. Through multiple administrations I've made the case that our real problem is the office, not the man. Still, sometimes it's both/and.
It's true: We have a very bad man in the presidency. But an overwhelming focus on Trump's enormities, the view that he's sui generis, risks encouraging the comforting delusion that maybe we can wait him out. We can't.
Relimiting the presidency will take a large-scale reform effort that seems nearly unthinkable now. Yet as Jack Goldsmith wrote last year: "the consequential 1970s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate reforms of the presidency were unfathomable just a few years before they occurred. A reckoning after Trump 2.0—or after the retaliation it provokes—could mirror the 1970s moment and offer a chance to constrain the presidency and to restore congressional primacy."
Still, we should be clear-eyed about what getting to that constitutional moment might require. Last time around, it took Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Church Committee's revelations of mass domestic spying for America to hit the rock bottom that we needed to hit to admit we had a problem. The bad news is things may have to get a lot worse before America is ready for that reckoning.
The post Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mr. Riera was employed in a fixed term, non-tenure track faculty at Central Washington University (CWU)…. On the morning of April 1, [2024,] Mr. Riera called the CWU police to report an older, "apparently homeless," woman wandering around Samuelson Hall. He said he wanted to make a report "before things get … out of control." An officer reported to Samuelson Hall and confirmed the identity of the woman as a CWU professor. No further action was taken by campus police or Mr. Riera.
The CWU professor shared her experience with two colleagues. The colleagues immediately filed bias complaints with CWU, alleging the target of Mr. Riera's call—a Black woman—had been the victim of racial profiling.
This led to a great deal of institutional response, including a discussion at a faculty senate meeting. Defendant Erdman, "a lecturer at CWU and member of the faculty senate, emailed unofficial minutes [of the meeting] to non-tenured faculty," and her notes included this:
Welcome to the Deep South, Circa 1935
Without naming names or describing the incident, [CWU President] Wohlpart expressed his outrage at a recent unconscionable incident on campus.
From my own knowledge, I think I can tell you the basics: It was an incident of blatant racial profiling. Campus police were called because a person of color was sitting quietly in the lobby of a CWU building for a brief interval. The person turned out to be a highly distinguished faculty member—but was compelled to produce and show ID before being left in peace.
(I must remark that this is outrageous on multiple levels. All CWU buildings are public; they belong to the State of Washington and its people. Anyone may sit in the lobby of any of our buildings. There was no reason at all to call the police—except, I guess, that this was a person of color.)
Wohlpart called the incident "unacceptable" and said that Central is working to see to it that such a thing doesn't happen again on our campus….
Riera sued Erdman, among others, and the court allowed his defamation claim to go forward in part:
[M]ost of [Erdman's] statements cannot be characterized as false. The only exception is Defendant Erdman's statement that what happened on April 1 "was an incident of blatant racial profiling." A jury could conclude this statement falsely asserts that the person who called police on April 1 engaged in intentional racial profiling. And, given widely-shared public records revealed Mr. Riera as the caller, a jury could also conclude Defendant Erdman's statement was about Mr. Riera.
Defendants argue that regardless of truth or falsity, Defendant Erdman's statement cannot be considered defamatory because it falls under the common interest privilege. "The common interest privilege applies with the declarant and the recipient have a common interest in the subject matter of the communication." The privilege applies to "persons involved in the same organization, partnerships, associations, or enterprises who are communicating on matters of common interest." Examples include officers of a nonprofit association or partners to a partnership. The privilege arises "when parties need to speak freely and openly about subjects of common organizational or pecuniary interest." …
If the privilege exists, it can be lost in two circumstances (1) if the speaker is not acting in the ordinary course of their work or (2) the speaker's statement was made with actual malice; i.e., reckless disregard for the truth. Whether the privilege has been lost under either scenario is a question of fact.
Here, the parties appear to agree that members of CWU's faculty senate are members of the same organization who share a common interest. The dispute lies in whether an exception applies.
The Court concludes there are issues of fact regarding whether Defendant Erdman's statements fell outside the scope of the privilege. Going to the first exception, Defendant Erdman had no official responsibility for taking notes at faculty meetings and she was not required to share her notes with other members of the senate faculty. A jury could therefore conclude that her statements were outside the ordinary course of her work as a member of a senate. With respect to the second exception, Defendant Erdman was not a witness to the April 1 incident and no investigation had yet taken place. A jury could therefore conclude Defendant Erdman was reckless in asserting that the call to CWU police was an act of blatant racial profiling…. [T]he allegations against Defendant Erdman raise questions of fact that must be resolved by a jury.
The post Accusing Someone Who Called Police of "Blatant Racial Profiling" May Be Defamation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The U.K. will spend nearly 138 billion pounds ($183 billion) on retiree benefits this year, more than its entire education or defense budgets. Despite the eye-watering cost, British politicians are pledging to keep funding it.
On Thursday, Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage announced that his party, should it win the next election, would maintain the funding mechanism for the country's state pension program, known as the "triple lock." Under this system, the state pension rises every year at the same rate as inflation, average wages, or 2.5 percent, whichever is highest. Thanks to a 4.8 percent increase in average wages from May to July 2025, this year's state pension payments will rise by more than $60 per month, beginning in April. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects that by 2030, the triple lock will have added 15.5 billion pounds annually to the cost of the state pension program.
Government pensions are a scam.
Younger workers are paying more and more to fund a system that is mathematically impossible to sustain.
Would you scrap the triple lock? pic.twitter.com/2uwa6cSYn2
— Reem Ibrahim (@ReemAmirIbrahim) April 3, 2026
Like U.S. Social Security, the state pension is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, where the contributions collected from today's workers are used to pay today's retirees. The U.K.'s aging population, coupled with collapsing birth rates and shrinking labor markets, has resulted in fewer workers paying into the system, leading to higher taxes to fund increasingly expensive pensions.
What's more, 25 percent of these pensioners are millionaires. As the Intergenerational Foundation found in 2022, more than 3 million people over the age of 65 live in households with property and pensions worth more than 1 million pounds (about $1.3 million). Fifty-three percent of this population lives in households with over half a million pounds in assets (roughly $661,000), and the number of older people living in households with total wealth above 1 million pounds rose by 269 percent from 2010 to 2020.
Gold-plated pensions make little financial sense, but they make a lot of sense politically. According to YouGov, 42 percent of Brits think the triple lock "definitely should" be maintained. Another 23 percent think it "probably should" be kept. The program's favorability is likely to improve as more older people vote and politicians rush to please this demographic. (In the 2024 UK general election, people over 55 years old made up the majority of voters in most constituencies.)
But just because something is politically popular doesn't mean the government should keep funding it, especially given the state of the U.K.'s public finances. In 2024–25, public sector net borrowing was more than 153 billion pounds ($198 billion), a whopping 5.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and debt interest payments alone cost taxpayers an additional 110 billion pounds ($132 billion) a year. The Office for Budget Responsibility expects that if policy does not change, the fiscal challenges posed by an aging society would push borrowing above 20 percent and debt above 270 percent of GDP by the 2070s.
In a 2025 report, the Adam Smith Institute estimated that the state pension system will become "financially unsustainable by 2035," at which point "the state will be spending more on welfare payouts, the greatest proportion of which is the State Pension," than it receives. The same report offers a series of recommendations to fix the impending pension crisis, including ending monthly benefits to those with pensions of more than 1 million pounds and reforming the triple lock to a double lock that does not consider inflation in payment hikes.
Unfortunately for working-age Brits, it does not appear that policymakers are heeding such advice. Rather than reforming the broken system, politicians seem intent on keeping it.
The post The U.K. Is Set To Spend $183 Billion on Pensions This Year. Nigel Farage Vows To Keep Hiking Payments. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The day draws near for IJ's upcoming conference "The Other Declarations of 1776." As part of the nationwide celebration of 250 Years of America, we're partnering with the Liberty & Law Center at Scalia Law School for an examination of the various declarations of rights that the new states adopted in 1776. It's Friday, April 10 in Arlington, Va. You can still register here! And, if you want to learn more about those Other Declarations in the meantime, check out our series of blog posts, covering Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and, new this week, North Carolina.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: A certification request from the Eleventh Circuit to the Alabama Supreme Court radicalized IJ's Mike Greenberg into Erie abolitionism.
Victory! On Tuesday a federal court ruled that the town of Parksley, Va., and a city councilman violated the Fourth Amendment when the councilman cut a water pipe running from the Eben-Ezer Food Truck, causing more than a thousand dollars in food spoilage and damages. The court also found the violation was so outrageous that it denied qualified immunity. The food truck's owners, Theslet Benoir and Clemene Bastien, teamed up with the Institute for Justice (IJ) to sue in January 2024, after the councilman repeatedly harassed them, cut the pipe, and, according to Theslet and Clemene, told them to "go back to your own country."
The post Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
President Donald Trump is asking Congress to spend nearly $1.5 trillion on the military next year—a 43 percent increase to the Pentagon's budget.
The White House included that massive increase in military spending in a budget request sent to Congress on Friday. It formalizes the proposal that Trump has been teasing for months. In percentage terms, it would be the largest year-over-year increase in military spending since the Korean War.
Some of the new military spending would be offset by cuts to other parts of the discretionary budget. The White House's budget proposal would trim $73 billion from other programs. Overall, the White House's budget envisions discretionary spending increasing from about $1.9 trillion to nearly $2.2 trillion next year.
Trump's proposed military budget would be "an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars and would make Americans less, not more, safe," says Ben Freeman, coauthor of The Trillion Dollar War Machine and a director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Freeman says the proposal would encourage more aimless wars and would add to the federal government's already soaring debts.
"Fortunately, it's not going to happen," he added, noting that political and budgetary pressure make it very unlikely that Congress will be able to fulfill the White House's request. Right now, it's not even clear that Congress will approve the much smaller request for $200 billion in supplemental funding for the Iran war. "This is a negotiating tactic, not a serious request," Freeman believes.
Even so, the president has made it clear that boosting the military's budget is a top priority, even if it comes at the expense of other government programs.
While speaking at the White House this week, Trump said the military budget was his top priority. "It's not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare—all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal," Trump said. "We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country."
The impulse to push more responsibility to the state level is a good one, but Medicare and Medicaid will continue to be a huge part of the federal budget.
That's the real story here—and in every other debate over how much the federal government should be spending. So-called "mandatory spending" on entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will cost an estimated $4.8 trillion in fiscal year 2027, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest projections. Interest payments on the debt will cost another $1.1 trillion that year.
Meanwhile, the CBO expects the federal government to collect about $5.8 trillion in tax revenue that year.
It doesn't take a math whiz to see the problem here. The budget is already running a deficit before any discretionary spending, including the military, is on the table.
The White House proposes cutting hundreds of billions in spending from some discretionary programs to use for the military budget. In reality, the entirety of that $1.5 trillion proposal is being borrowed and added to the debt, because entitlement spending and payments on the national debt have effectively crowded everything else. We are putting the whole federal discretionary budget on the national credit card.
"Exploding the Pentagon budget will not make us safer. It will explode the debt. It will waste taxpayer dollars on programs that don't work or that we simply don't need," said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, in a statement on Friday. "It will crowd out funding for other national security priorities that the Pentagon doesn't address, like disaster mitigation and response, pandemic preparedness, food security, and reining in the debt."
In a historical context, Trump's military budget proposal looks less extreme. Spending $1.5 trillion on the military would mean the Pentagon consumes roughly 5 percent of America's total economic output. During the height of the Cold War, the military consumed up to 10 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP), as advocates of a beefed-up Pentagon budget like to point out.
Of course, the rest of the government cost a lot less back then, and it wasn't spending $1 trillion to pay interest on the national debt.
The post Trump's Call for a $1.5 Trillion Military Budget Is Irresponsible, Wasteful, and Unrealistic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
President Donald Trump's war of choice against Iran has already had negative consequences. Perhaps most visibly, we've seen higher gas prices after Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which 20 million barrels of crude oil once passed each day, constituting a quarter of the total global supply.
This week, Trump addressed the status of the war in a rambling, disjointed prime time speech largely free of specifics on how we would get out of the mess he got us into.
One thing he did say is that any country dependent on oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz should simply pivot and buy that oil from the U.S.
But that's not likely to happen, because we simply don't have it to spare.
"Under my leadership, we are [the] No. 1 producer of oil and gas on the planet, without even discussing the millions of barrels that we're getting from Venezuela," Trump boasted. "The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won't be taking any in the future. We don't need it."
"So to those countries that can't get fuel," he added, "I have a suggestion. No. 1, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And No. 2…go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves." (This was a slightly softer tone than he took on social media just days earlier, when he told the United Kingdom, "Go get your own oil!")
"When this conflict is over," he optimistically predicted, "the strait will open up naturally."
It is a common refrain from this administration, that the U.S. makes all the oil it needs. "Most countries in the world are significant net oil importers," Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News last month. "Fortunately, the United States—we produce more oil than we consume. We're a net oil exporter."
This is not quite true—at least, not literally. And despite Trump's pledge, it doesn't mean we can start supplying the rest of the world.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), "the United States has been an annual net total energy exporter since 2019," but "U.S. crude oil imports and exports both increased in 2024, and the United States remained a net crude oil importer."
Part of the confusion stems from liquefied natural gas (LNG): The U.S. is currently the world's largest exporter of LNG. But while crude oil is refined into gasoline and diesel fuel, LNG is typically used to generate heat and electricity.
Our LNG output helps tip the balance and make us net fuel exporters, but with crude oil in particular, we still bring in more than we send out.
According to EIA statistics, in the week ending March 27, the U.S. produced about 13.66 million barrels of crude oil per day. But over that same time, we imported 6.45 million barrels per day and only exported 3.52 million—making us net importers by nearly 3 million barrels.
The reason is because not all oil is the same. "The type of oil produced in the United States tends to be higher-quality, so-called sweet oil, but domestic refineries are set up to handle heavy and sour oil," Emmett Lindner wrote at The New York Times. "It is often more cost efficient to sell the sweet and buy the heavy."
As recently as 2023, we received just over half of our oil imports from Canada.
"The amount of crude oil U.S. refineries process greatly exceeds U.S. crude oil production," requiring imports to make up the difference, adds American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a petroleum industry trade association.
In his speech, Trump noted "the millions of barrels that we're getting from Venezuela." In January, after ousting that country's leader, Trump claimed the U.S. would receive "between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels" of that country's heavy crude oil. The plan was light on specifics, but even if it's true, it does almost nothing to replace what has been disrupted in recent weeks.
Venezuela produced just over 900,000 barrels of crude per day in February—a slight improvement over the previous month. Even if Trump could lay claim to that country's entire output, it would pale in comparison to the 20 million daily barrels that until recently flowed through the Strait of Hormuz.
It makes sense that Trump would be desperate for a solution: In a CNN survey conducted before his address this week, only about a third of Americans felt he had a "clear plan," while two-thirds disapproved of the decision to pursue military action. But while a clear plan would certainly be an improvement, it should at least have some basis in reality.
The post Trump's Answer to Iran's Hormuz Crisis: Sell Oil We Don't Have appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Amid bipartisan backlash to AI from federal lawmakers, nearly a dozen states are considering legislation that would prohibit new data center construction for a period of months to years. Maine is poised to be the first state to pass such a bill.
On Tuesday, the Maine House of Representatives passed House Bill (H.B.) 307, largely along party lines, to prohibit "approval for the development, construction or operation of a data center with a load of 20 megawatts or more" anywhere in the state until November 2027. The bill also establishes the Maine Data Center Coordination Council, and tasks it with "protecting ratepayers, maintaining electric grid reliability, minimizing environmental impacts and enabling responsible and appropriately sited economic development."
H.B. 307 is expected to pass the Senate and be signed into law by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The bill, which was introduced in January 2025 by state Rep. Melanie Sachs (D–Freeport), chair of the Energy, Utilities, and Technology Committee, was carried over from last year's legislative session. In February, Sachs told Maine Public that the impacts that data centers have on the power grid and the environment inspired lawmakers "to take a proactive approach and do it unlike any other state has so far."
But just because states have the power to suspend data center construction doesn't mean doing so is a good idea. In fact, this precautionary approach imposes costs of its own.
State Sen. Matt Harrington (R–Stanford) said the statewide moratorium could cost his district 100 long-term jobs by shuttering the construction of a 100–300 megawatt facility that had already purchased land. The bill would stall development of the data center even though it would be powered by its own natural gas plant, reducing strain on the grid.
Still, Sachs told the Maine Morning Star that the Stanford data center, "could have serious potential impacts on Maine ratepayers [and] our electric grid." Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, tells Reason that Sachs' bill, not data centers, could actually raise electricity bills in the long run.
"Data centers are steady, long-term customers that give utilities the reliable income they need to invest in more power generation and grid upgrades, which benefits everyone," explains Chilson.
It's also worth recognizing that Sachs' panic over the environmental impacts of these facilities is overblown. As Christian Bristichgi wrote in a recent Reason cover story, "data centers consume a tiny portion of the nation's water. While they're not the prettiest buildings to look at, they mean less noise, fumes, and traffic than almost any other land use one could care to name." And as the technology improves, its environmental impacts will shrink. "In many ways this is the least efficient AI that we will ever have," says Jennifer Huddleston, senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute.
Huddleston also emphasizes that data centers are critical to existing technologies that involve cloud computing, not just AI. Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the R Street Institute, warns that blanket bans on data centers will function as "an actual Internet access kill switch" by undermining online services and raising costs.
Unfortunately, the Maine bill may be a sign of things to come. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) introduced a bill that would impose a nationwide moratorium on AI data centers until federal lawmakers implement a highly restrictive regulatory framework. His stated motivation is to, among other things, empower "communities that would be affected by the artificial intelligence data center…to approve or reject [its] construction."
Maine has demonstrated that state lawmakers are already empowered to regulate data centers. But just because they have that power doesn't mean they should use it.
The post Maine Bill Proves States Are Capable of Adopting Bad Data Center Policies Without Federal Intervention appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Colorado recently enacted a law protecting criminal defendants arrested due to roadside tests for drugs, becoming the first state in the country to recognize widespread instances of wrongful arrests due to police departments' use of unreliable drug field kits.
The Colorado House and Senate unanimously passed H.B. 26-1020 last month, and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law on March 26. Under the new statute, police can no longer make arrests solely for misdemeanor drug possession based on the results of colorimetric field drug tests and instead must issue suspects a summons to appear in court. The act also requires courts, before a defendant enters a plea in a case where a field test was used, to inform defendants of the known error rates for the tests and their right to request testing from a forensics laboratory.
The first-of-its-kind law is part of a growing bipartisan recognition of a problem that news investigations and lawsuits have documented for years: Police officers' use of unverified drug field tests is inevitably resulting in innocent people being arrested, jailed, and prosecuted.
This type of test kit uses color reactions to indicate the presence of compounds found in different narcotics. Several different companies manufacture them, and they're popular with police departments because they're cheap and portable, allowing officers to test suspected drugs on the spot and get results near instantaneously. But the problem is that the compounds the kits test for are not exclusive to illicit drugs, leading innocent people to be arrested for innocuous items. Over the years, police officers around the country have jailed innocent people after drug field kits returned "presumptive positive" results on bird poop, donut glaze, cotton candy, and sand from inside a stress ball.
The manufacturers warn that the tests should be verified by a laboratory, and they're not admissible evidence in most courts for that reason. But that's done little to protect criminal defendants from arrest and prosecution.
For example, Reason recently profiled the case of Bryan Getchius, who was wrongly arrested and charged with fentanyl trafficking after South Carolina sheriff's deputies ran multiple tests on a bottle of prescription pills in Getchius' luggage. Getchius was jailed for 15 days and held on house arrest for seven months. It would take the state forensics lab more than a year and a half to get official results back to county prosecutors showing that the "fentanyl" was in fact what the label on the bottle and imprints on the pills said: prescription medication for irritable bowel syndrome.
Getchius is now suing the sheriff's department and the county responsible for his wrongful arrest.
But it's the scope of the problem that's alarmed lawmakers and policymakers. The first effort to quantify how many wrongful arrests occur because of these tests—a 2024 study by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania—put the number at 30,000 people every year. The report estimated that the tests were used in roughly half of the 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. each year from 2010 to 2019.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the executive director of the Quattrone Center, said other states should follow Colorado's lead.
"While this reform may seem small and technical, for the people impacted, it is anything but," Bushnell wrote. "For a person handcuffed, jailed or publicly accused because the field test got it wrong, the consequences are immediate and lasting. A false positive can cost someone their job, destabilize their family, interrupt their education and damage their standing in the community long before a laboratory corrects the record."
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which advocates for free-market policies at the state level, introduced a model policy in January for state legislatures limiting the use of colorimetric field tests.
"By adopting these standards, Colorado policymakers are reinforcing the foundational concept that the states' burden of proof must be founded on accurate, verifiable evidence," Nino Marchese, the director of ALEC's judiciary task force, wrote in a blog post praising the passage of Colorado's bill.
Several prison systems and police departments around the country have stopped using these kinds of field kits, but they still remain widely used by law enforcement and accepted by courts as probable cause to make an arrest.
The post Colorado Becomes First State To Protect Defendants Against Faulty Roadside Drug Tests appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Why does everybody think America doesn't make stuff anymore? Where is this expressly disprovable idea dribbling in from?
The post Does America Still Make Stuff? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The first thing you need to know about The Drama is that it's not what you expect. Like really, really not what you expect.
The marketing has positioned the film as an awkward twist on the rom-com with a pair of hot young stars, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, batting eyes at each other as they stumble and mumble their way to a wedding. It's got the A24 imprimatur and a low-light, Instagram aesthetic that suggests a skeptical, modern take on young love. It's been sold as a very conventional kind of unconventional romance.
And, well, it is that—sort of. But it's much weirder, much darker, and much more uncomfortable than you've been led to assume. It's a movie about marriage and mind games, social taboos, and the difficulty of ever knowing, much less loving, another human being. It should have been called The Psychodrama.
Zendaya and Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, a young couple living in Boston. Their relationship begins with an amusing meet-cute in a coffee shop, when Charlie pretends to like the book she's reading even though he hasn't read it. Eventually he comes clean, they move in together, and soon they're engaged.
On the cusp of their wedding, as they're trying out wedding food with another couple—the best man and maid of honor—they have a little too much to drink and decide to play a game. What's the worst thing each of them has ever done?
They all reveal something suitably awful yet sort of funny, mostly impulsive, antisocial acts from their youth. And then Emma reveals, well, something about herself. Something that no one knows how to respond to. Something that changes everything.
To say much more would be to spoil the movie's central provocation, which amounts to the breaking, or at least bending, of a major cultural taboo. Neither Charlie nor the friends know quite what to do. And what ensues is, yes, a lot of drama.
Written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, whose last film was the surrealist Nic Cage picture Dream Scenario, the film traffics in a similar sort of psycho-social strangeness, with dreamlike imagery interspersing scenes of Charlie's escalating mania as he struggles to make sense of Emma's revelation.
It's a tricky tonal balance. Her confession is clearly meant to shock and upset viewers. It's also supposed to be funny. Borgli not only manages to achieve both, he often manages to achieve both at the same time, often without a single clear directive as to which is appropriate. It's a movie that's intentionally, and effectively, designed to make viewers feel emotionally confused.
That emotional confusion stems partly from a sort of social confusion, as both the characters and viewers are confronted with a scenario for which there is no clear cultural playbook. The movie seems to be reacting against the common-on-social-media notion of situations that demand a single, obvious, uniform social and emotional response. Sometimes there is no clearly correct way to respond to a difficult or upsetting event. Sometimes reality demands, or at least supports, multiple conflicting and contradictory responses.
Occasionally, the film strains credulity in its psychological complexities. There are Big Ideas that it gestures at but can't fully support. And the cringe-shock of its big reveal will almost certainly divide viewers, especially those expecting something more conventional.
But the movie's strength is in its human smallness. It never feels like a sociological treatise or a series of tweets about how We Live In a Society. Instead, it's a movie about people, and how they are strange and difficult and impossible to know. It's a movie about marriage and relationships, and how even the most intimate partnerships involve telling lies and stories about yourself, and reintroducing yourself over and over again.
It's drama. It's life. It's a pretty good movie.
The post The Zendaya Romance <i>The Drama</i> Is Weirder and More Uncomfortable Than You Expect appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Bondi out. Yesterday, after months of private complaints and rumors of tension, President Donald Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying that she will be taking a job in the private sector. It's not clear what the new job will be. Bondi's deputy, former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, will take over the Justice Department in an acting capacity. Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin is reportedly being looked at as a possible replacement.
The most straightforward way to understand Bondi's departure is to return to an unusual Truth Social post by Trump from September of last year. The post, directed to "Pam," was reportedly intended as a private direct message, and it gives an idea of what Trump was thinking and saying behind the scenes. The post urged the then-A.G. to move more quickly to prosecute Trump's political enemies, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James. "We can't delay any longer, it's killing our reputation and credibility," Trump wrote. "They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!"
Bondi used Justice Department muscle to pursue investigations into Trump's enemies, but it wasn't enough for Trump. As Politico notes, "Trump's second term has been marked by an unprecedented assertion of executive power. But that hasn't translated into the cascade of criminal prosecutions Trump has long demanded against his enemies."
The president saw Bondi as "weak and ineffective," according to The Wall Street Journal, because she hadn't successfully prosecuted his foes. Trump views the Justice Department as a vehicle for his personal grievances; he felt Bondi wasn't aggressive enough in driving that vehicle.
As Reason's Joe Lancaster wrote yesterday, Bondi's handling of the Epstein files was also a factor.
But even if you set aside her efforts to pursue Trump's personal grievance agenda, Bondi was not exactly a champion of American freedom, especially on issues related to speech.
She suggested that it was legal to prosecute an Office Depot employee for declining to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk memorial vigil. She made utterly bogus claims about hate speech. She once suggested that "domestic terrorists" could be characterized in part by "extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment."
Bondi was simply unmoored from any sort of coherent constitutional view of freedom of expression. That's worrying for any law enforcement official, and especially dangerous when that person is the attorney general. Federal officials should be in the business of protecting American rights and freedoms, not misconstruing them.
Tariff man. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of what Trump once referred to as "Liberation Day"—the start of his sweeping, and often shifting, tariff regime. The initial justification for those tariffs was struck down by the Supreme Court, but Trump has plowed forward with new (also dubious) legal arguments—and new tariffs.
Yesterday, he announced that he would place tariffs up to 100 percent on some brand-name drugs, and would make further adjustments to existing tariffs on steel and aluminum. These are the first significant changes to Trump's tariff regime since the Supreme Court ruling in February.
The details are somewhat complicated. As The Wall Street Journal reports, "the consequences of the tariff changes will vary widely depending on the product." It's an understatement to say that the words "consequences" and "will vary widely" are not exactly what businesses want to hear right now.
It is worth reiterating that the sheer confusing complexity, combined with the uncertainty of constantly shifting policies, of these tariffs has been a big part of what has made these levies so costly and burdensome. When tariff policy changes repeatedly and without warning, it's very difficult for businesses to plan.
Higher costs get passed off to consumers, and trade pipelines slow down or break down. America is deeply enmeshed in the global economy; Trump's trade policies have mostly served to gum up the works.
Tech bro$. Tech industry-focused podcast TBPN sold to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, for an undisclosed sum. The Financial Times reports the sale was in the "low hundreds of millions." Reports say the deal allows TBPN to maintain full editorial independence.
The podcast, which began in 2024, broadcasts live for three hours every weekday. It has a relatively modest audience but has become influential inside the world of frontier, big-money tech, in part because it's perceived as more friendly to new tech and business building than other tech-focused outlets.
It's boosterish at times, but it's also fun, informative, and most importantly, optimistic—not just about tech, but about business and capitalism more generally.
I'm a casual fan and admirer of the show, and it's pretty clearly a response to the militantly anti-tech, anti-business attitude that so many tech-and-business-focused publications have taken over the last 15 years or so.
The show's core premise is: What if we covered technology—but didn't utterly loathe technology and everyone who makes it? Sounds crazy, but it works.
Scenes from Washington, D.C.: In January, a D.C.-area sewer line failed, resulting in a massive spill of untreated wastewater into the Potomac. D.C. Water, the utility responsible for the pipe, had previously noticed corrosion and applied to fix the sewer line.
But a Washington Post investigation finds that the project was delayed multiple times "as federal officials studied potential environmental impacts, including risks to a blue wildflower and an endangered bat species." In short, a prolonged and politicized environmental review process made it impossible to prevent an environmental disaster.
The post Bye-Bye, Bondi appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
During my younger days as a soccer dad, I got to watch the variety of ways that people handled the inevitable wins and losses. The trophy my daughter won after a big championship game is packed in a box somewhere in the garage, but the memories remain. Life is about more than winning—and indeed most people involved in the games were good sports.
But I remember some teams for which winning was everything. Their players would punch, kick, and trip our players whenever the referees weren't looking. The coaches constantly intimidated the refs. What's the likelihood that one's team is right on every single call? Not high, but these competitors never conceded anything. That experience reminds me of the modern Republican approach to elections.
Under Donald Trump's leadership, the GOP's outlook is simple: Every election they win is a reflection of the will of the people. Every election they lose is rigged. The president never conceded the 2020 election, nor apologized for the January 6 Capitol attack. That was the result of angry partisans taking seriously Trump's bogus election-fraud claims. Trump continues to push the tiresome rigged-election narrative even though he failed to win the dozens of court cases making such claims.
Lately, Republicans aren't doing well at the polls. A Democrat just won a statehouse victory to represent the Florida district that includes Mar-A-Lago. She's the 30th Democrat since 2025 to flip a seat in a heavily Republican district. That's not surprising. The party out of power often does well in special elections and midterms. Republicans have pushed an unusually divisive agenda, inflation is high, gas prices are soaring, ICE raids are frightening, and the president has launched a Middle East war. So, yeah, there's going to be electoral pushback.
Instead of moderating their policies or engaging in normal soul searching, Republicans are doubling down—and trying to nationalize elections by promoting something called the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) America Act. It would impose draconian voter-identification requirements. The bill would require voters to provide a birth certificate or passport for registration, with the potential for disenfranchising vast numbers of voters, as many Americans don't have a passport or can no longer find their birth certificate.
When Congress required a Real ID for traveling, it provided years for Americans to comply. This legislation would take effect before the midterms.
It's also a red herring. One can always find examples of illegal voting in a nation with 340 million people, but there's no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens. Even a major MAGA-aligned think tank can only find a tiny number of incidents. (Ironically, some of the most prominent illegal-vote examples involve Republicans.) There is no voting crisis that demands federal intervention.
The legislation also takes aim at mail-in voting, which is ironic given that Trump himself used that system to cast his vote in Florida. Again, there's no evidence that vote-by-mail is any less secure than traditional in-person voting systems. Given the bill's iffy chances of passage, Republicans are cynically trying to build a case to challenge an election they believe they are going to lose. They'll blame losses on Congress' failure to fix a supposedly broken election system. It's politics as performance art. But if it does pass, it could lead to serious voter suppression.
Our Constitution—you know, the document that Republicans continually attack—gives state legislatures the primary power to determine the election ground rules, although it does provide Congress with a role. There's certainly no role for presidential executive orders, as the president prefers. As the Institute for Responsive Government notes, the nation's decentralized election system also makes a federal takeover impractical. The current process, run by local civil servants, is designed to make it harder for fraudsters and partisans to engage in shenanigans. Conservatives used to understand that federalism is one of the core founding principles that protects our freedoms, but not any more.
Of course, Democrats have in the past also tried to nationalize elections, with one onerous example occurring during the Biden administration. I grew up in Philadelphia, which is known for the election antics of its Democratic political machine. But the answer isn't for Republicans to one-up those efforts with their own election-rigging measure.
Unfortunately, we've reached a situation best described by the New America group: "When two-party competition becomes an existential zero-sum contest over the rules of the game itself, the incentive shifts from persuading voters to controlling the machinery of voting." I have no real problem with Voter ID if it boosts Americans' confidence in elections, but this measure would erode trust in the process. Trump has been disturbingly clear that this isn't about creating better elections. He's trying to control the voting machinery to achieve his desired results.
Like with soccer, playing dirty only undermines the sanctity of the game. In democracies, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But if the GOP succeeds with its Trump-inspired dirty tricks, then we're all at risk of losing our democracy.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
The post The Republican Plan To Nationalize Elections Is Performative Nonsense appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 3, 1962 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
It's not a good sign when a 50-year-old Senate committee report on illegal government activities is relevant and timely enough for a new release. The Church Committee Report: Revelations from the Bombshell 1970s Investigation into the National Security State has, alas, arrived at the right political moment. This new, abridged version of the infamous 1976 report appears as the Trump administration pursues retaliatory investigations into political opponents and so-called domestic terrorists.
The committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D–Idaho), was formed after Watergate to answer basic questions about domestic surveillance: Who was the government spying on? How was it spying? What was it doing with the information? And was it following the law?
"The answer to each of these questions is disturbing," the report concluded. "Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power."
The report aired some of the FBI and CIA's dirtiest laundry, including illegal wiretapping, unethical medical experiments, and covert programs to disrupt lawful political organizing. As the editors of this new edition—the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Matthew Guariglia and Georgetown's Brian Hochman—write in their preface, "No government document has done more to expose the mechanisms behind America's aspirations of political supremacy in the twentieth century."
Guariglia and Hochman have stripped the 3,100-page report down to its core revelations, along with case studies on such scandals as the FBI's blackmail operation against Martin Luther King Jr. This new edition will be an eye-opener for anyone who's not paranoid enough yet.
The post Review: Church Committee Report on Illegal Spying Is Relevant Again in the Trump Era appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Willy Wonka's "three-course dinner gum" captured my imagination when I first saw the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a kid. Violet Beauregarde—one of the many unappealing children in the film and the Roald Dahl book it was based on—steals and consumes the gum, which tastes like tomato soup, roast beef, and blueberry pie.
When I heard that flavor-changing gum approaching that fantasy was now real, I hoped to achieve my lifelong goal of becoming Beauregarde. But 5 GUM Evolution Sour to Sweet Berry Flavor Changing Sugar Free Chewing Gum ain't it. The only thing it has in common with Wonka's gum is that the berry flavor at the end is wildly out of control to the point it becomes quite unpleasant for the chewer and everyone around them.
We live in a time where science increasingly approximates magic, but "three-course dinner gum" is a milestone in food science we have yet to reach.
The post Review: Flavor-Changing Gum Is Finally a Reality appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Prosecutors have charged former Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) Police Officer Deion Alexander with multiple traffic-related offenses, including first-degree vehicular homicide and reckless driving, following an on-duty crash that killed a pedestrian in February. At the time, Alexander was responding to a distress call from a fellow officer. Police say that on the way, he drove through 11 red lights in just 93 seconds, and traffic camera footage shows he entered an intersection against a red light and drove into oncoming traffic, causing a crash that killed one person and injured others. Investigators say he was using his lights and sirens but still drove too recklessly, and he has been fired. "Just having the blue lights and sirens on doesn't give you carte blanche to run through an intersection without slowing down or yielding," said MARTA Police Chief Scott Kreher.
The post Brickbat: Dangerous Hurry appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Wednesday, the 60-year-old Ms. Bondi, downcast but determined, joined Mr. Trump for a glum crosstown drive to the Supreme Court, where they watched arguments in the birthright citizenship case. In the car, Mr. Trump told her it was time for a change at the top of the Justice Department.
Ms. Bondi hoped to save her job or, at the very least, buy a little more time — until the summer — to give herself a graceful exit.
She ended up with neither, and grew emotional Wednesday in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out. The next morning, Mr. Trump made it official, and fired her via social media post.
Bondi then sat next to Trump for nearly an hour. Several reports indicated that Trump sat emotionless during the oral argument. But what was Bondi's demeanor?
Life comes at you fast.
The post The President Told The AG She Would Be Fired During The Car Ride To SCOTUS appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The World Bank recently published a 276-page report supporting the idea that industrial policy belongs "in the national policy toolkit of all countries." This is a significant reversal for an institution that spent decades pushing developing nations toward fiscal discipline, open trade, and market liberalization. When the World Bank seems more interested in engaging with right- and left-wing populism than in promoting good economics, it tells you a lot about the era in which we live.
Industrial policy refers to government officials channeling resources to particular industries that the market would not. Arguments like national security or protecting "strategic" industries from competitors are often used to justify the policy. Whatever one thinks of these excuses, industrial policy is funded by taxpayers when the chosen instrument is subsidies, funded by consumers when the tool is tariffs, and always funded by the other domestic firms quietly crowded out as capital flows toward their politically favored competitors.
Every dollar directed by bureaucratic decree is a dollar that's no longer directed by people spending their money on what most deserves it. Which, of course, is what makes markets work.
To be clear, the World Bank's reversal wasn't because a new generation of economists finally cracked open the historical record and discovered that state-led industrialization works. It's because the World Bank's most powerful shareholders, the United States and Western Europe, turned toward openly and aggressively practicing industrial policy.
With a cascade of green industrial subsidies during the Biden and Obama administrations, and protectionist tariffs and "golden shares" under the Trump administration, it became impossible to lecture developing countries about the dangers of letting governments pick winning businesses. In other words, the intellectual reversal followed the political reversal, not the other way around.
The World Bank's report thus exists as a manual for governments that are going to do industrial policy regardless of what anyone tells them. It starts with the acknowledgment that all 183 countries surveyed boost at least one industry. But it stops arguing about whether industrial policy is legitimate and instead tries to diagnose which tools governments are capable of using without doing more harm than good. Mapping 15 different policy instruments along a spectrum from simple and low-risk to complex and demanding, the report warns governments repeatedly against blunt instruments that are politically easy but economically costly and urges governments to listen.
They won't listen, and here's why.
The report acknowledges that governments regularly botch industrial policy, yet it expresses hope that rising global education levels are giving more countries the human capital to make certain tools work. For example, a software tax exemption in Romania succeeded partly because a critical mass of people was now capable of becoming software engineers. Fair enough.
But while education raises the ceiling on what is theoretically achievable, it does nothing by itself to change a government's incentives. The obstacle has never primarily been a shortage of capable technocrats or populations. The real hindrances are well documented, structural, and bipartisan.
The first obstacle is what economists call the "knowledge problem." As the Cato Institute's Scott Lincicome notes, centralized attempts to identify critical technologies repeatedly fail because governments cannot predict which will end up being most valuable or how markets will develop. In the 1990s, governments picked the right industries—semiconductors and supercomputers—but the wrong products and companies. No amount of educational attainment by bureaucracies or workers solves this. Only markets aggregate untold amounts of economic knowledge through rough, supply-and-demand responsive prices and voluntary exchange.
The report never grapples with this, suggesting tools like industrial parks aimed at coordination failures and skills-development programs aimed at under-investments in human capital. Someone must still decide where the park goes and which skills get funded for which sectors. These are predictions about what the economy will need, made by the same officials facing the same information constraints as any other planner. They are dressed in more sophisticated language than a tariff but are no less vulnerable to being wrong.
The second obstacle is politics. Educated people, bureaucrats, and CEOs operate under and inside governments where industries lobby, ministers have constituencies, and failing programs are far easier to throw more money at than to kill. The World Bank's report concedes as much in calling the bluntest instruments "notoriously difficult to unwind." But that's not a technical or educational problem; it's a political one.
Even in a country as educated as the U.S., a steel industry that has enjoyed decades of political protection does not quietly accept a withdrawn subsidy. It assumes the role of political actor, pressuring politicians for more. As protectionism dulls the industry's genuine competitiveness, politics matter even more. This is bad even for nations rich enough to shoulder the cost.
The World Bank spent 276 pages telling governments how to do more of what governments most want to do but rarely do well. For developing nations, it's like receiving a lifejacket that works better for people who already know how to swim and can afford to paddle around.
COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM
The post The World Bank Used To Champion Markets. Now It's Surrendering to State-Led Industrialization. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is replacing Pam Bondi as U.S. attorney general.
"Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year," he wrote on Truth Social. He added that she would "be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future," and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would take over as acting attorney general.
Despite Trump's kind words and assurance that "we love Pam," Bondi has been fired, as news outlets reported was imminent.
Bondi ultimately became the face of a persistent scandal about the government's files on deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and though she was one of Trump's most vocal supporters, it wasn't enough to keep her job.
As the nation's highest law enforcement officer, Bondi was a vociferous booster of Trump's agenda. During a televised Cabinet meeting in May 2025, Bondi sang the president's praises to the cameras, bragging that in just his first few weeks back in office, Department of Justice (DOJ) seizures of illicit fentanyl had "saved…258 million lives."
The claim was ludicrous, seemingly assuming all seized fentanyl would otherwise have been divided equally among 258 million people with no opioid tolerance, who would each take the entire dose at once. But it served the purpose of fulsomely defending her boss and pursuing his priorities, which Bondi did throughout her tenure in office.
While nobody would ever confuse government attorneys with saints, Bondi's DOJ gained a reputation for pursuing Trump's personal grievances above all else.
With Bondi at the helm, DOJ attorneys pursued indictments against Trump's enemies, and those who didn't were quickly replaced with less qualified toadies. When Trump tried to circumvent federal law that kept him from installing U.S. attorneys in a long-term capacity without Senate confirmation, Bondi went along, firing the legal replacements so Trump could reappoint his picks.
That level of disdain apparently carried over into the courtroom. "The arguments that are being made…by the Department of Justice attorneys under Pam Bondi are contemptuous," former 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig said in October. "Not just of the Constitution and the rule of law, but contemptuous of the federal courts, and even, if not especially, contemptuous of the individual judges that are hearing the cases."
Former U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner added, "It's not just an issue of the arguments they're making. They're lying. They are misrepresenting things."
But ultimately, it was Epstein that Bondi's career apparently couldn't survive.
Epstein died in custody in 2019, and conspiracy theories have persisted ever since. On the campaign trail, Trump suggested he would release federal documents on Epstein's case, including a long-rumored client list.
In February 2025, when Fox News asked about releasing "the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients," Bondi replied, "It's sitting on my desk right now to review." The DOJ later walked back Bondi's comments in July when it announced there was no Epstein "client list."
"She was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper in relation to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes," not a particular client list, explained White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Bondi couldn't escape that unforced error. In subsequent congressional hearings, both Democrats and Republicans excoriated her for her apparent lack of transparency, and Bondi never quite came up with an acceptable answer. Testifying before the House in February, she tried to deflect from Democrats' questions about the Epstein files by, perplexingly, pointing to the stock market.
"The Dow is over 50,000 right now" and the Nasdaq is "smashing records," she said. "That's what we should be talking about."
Ultimately, this was not enough for her to keep her job. "Trump had grown 'more and more frustrated' with Bondi, one person familiar with White House deliberations said, adding that while he likes her as a person, he doesn't think she 'executed on his vision' in the way that he wanted," reported NBC News. "Since the Jeffrey Epstein files saga, Bondi had struggled to regain her footing with the president and deliver wins."
The post Pam Bondi's Loyalty to Trump Wasn't Enough To Save Her Job appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The Alabama Supreme Court could soon hear a case to determine the future of birthing centers in the state.
In 2023, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) proposed setting strict requirements on the state's birthing centers. By regulating them as hospitals, the rule would require these centers to have a physician or consultant physician on staff, as well as a registered nurse and board-certified midwife. Birthing centers would also have to be within a 30-minute drive of a hospital.
The rule was quickly challenged by a group of Alabama birthing centers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The plaintiffs argued that the rule created a de facto ban on birthing centers in the state (because the ADPH refused to issue new licenses) and violated their constitutional rights, as well as the rights of their patients. The suit also argued that the ADPH exceeded its statutory authority in making the rule. Under Alabama law, the agency is allowed to regulate general and specialized hospitals, rehab facilities, and abortion and reproductive centers, among others. It makes no mention of birthing centers. Any ambiguity on the question seemed to have been settled in 2017. That year, the Legislature authorized certified midwives to attend home births independently and "did not authorize ADPH to license or regulate that care—which involves the same midwifery care and patient populations as [freestanding birthing centers]," says the ACLU.
In a 2023 complaint filed before an Alabama circuit court, the plaintiffs provided several practical issues with the ADPH's rules. One birthing center in rural Sumter County would have to close or relocate because it is 12 miles "farther from the closest hospital-based labor and delivery care than permitted under the proposed regulations." Another center would have to undergo costly and extensive renovations to comply with the new rule.
As Victoria Tice, a doula in Huntsville, recently told WSFA 12 News, the rules would require birthing centers to meet standards that do not reflect how birth centers function. "For example, the width of doorways for hospital beds to fit through when hospital beds don't exist in birthing centers and width of hallways and specific equipment that is not necessary to attend low intervention physiological birth."
The circuit court sided with the plaintiffs in 2025 and struck down the rule, which the court said was "beyond the scope of ADPH's statutory authority to license and regulate 'hospitals.'" However, in January 2026, an appeals court reversed this decision and allowed the ADPH rule to stand.
Now, the group is appealing this decision to the state's high court. "If the Alabama Supreme Court decides to hear this case and sets aside the appellate decision, it would permanently protect the ability of freestanding birth centers across the state to continue providing essential midwifery care to their communities," said the ACLU in a recent press release.
If the state Supreme Court sides with the ADPH, however, Alabamians can expect birthing center services to get more expensive and their care more sparse, which would be devastating for the nearly 60 percent of Alabama counties that lack "any hospital-based obstetrical care."
"It shouldn't be this hard to give birth safely in the state of Alabama, and it doesn't have to," Whitney White, the ACLU's lead counsel on the case, told WSFA 12 News.
The post Alabama Birthing Center Regulations Are Nearly Impossible To Comply With. State Supreme Court Could Intervene. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The Satanic Temple scored a legal victory on Tuesday when a federal judge ruled that Arkansas must remove a Ten Commandments monument from its state Capitol. The ruling comes after a nearly decade-long battle over the religious display on government grounds.
In 2017, the Arkansas Capitol erected the privately donated monument after the state's Legislature passed the Ten Commandments Monument Display Act, which authorized the installation. In response to the religious display (which was originally destroyed by a man unaffiliated with The Satanic Temple and installed again in 2018), The Satanic Temple offered to install its own statue, a 7.5-foot-tall bronze statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed creature with wings and an Iggy Pop–inspired human chest. In 2018, the group temporarily brought Baphomet to the state Capitol on a forklift to protest what they argued was unequal treatment by the state. If the Ten Commandments could be displayed on government property, the group argued, then why not show off Baphomet too?
A rally organizer explained, "If you're going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don't agree with that then let's just not have any at all."
The Satanic Temple's offer to privately donate Baphomet was ultimately rejected, prompting it to join the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Ten Commandments Monument Display Act.
Tuesday's ruling by District Judge Kristine G. Baker sided with The Satanic Temple, along with the American Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers. Baker ruled that the installation of the Ten Commandments Monument "conveys a message that the Christian religion is favored, and the Display Act is coercive in violation of the Establishment Clause."
She also noted that The Satanic Temple was "prevented from competing with Christianity on an equal footing for placement of its Baphomet monument on State Capitol grounds," which meant the state had also violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
Baker's ruling orders Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester to remove the Ten Commandments statue "immediately," but the order is on hold pending a potential appeal. Jester has already said that his team is "working closely with the Attorney General's Office to protect [the] critical part of the Capitol in the courts," reported the Arkansas Advocate.
Former Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R–Conway), who originally sponsored the monument, said the ruling during Holy Week was a "slap in the face" to Jews and Christians. He vowed that he, along with the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, would continue to fight the ruling.
For now, The Satanic Temple is celebrating the win. The group's website says the case "will have reverberations far and wide, validating the fundamental strength of our arguments and mission."
The Baphomet saga is just one of the ways The Satanic Temple has sought to "defend pluralism" and challenge Christian hegemony in America. The Temple first garnered national attention in 2013 for trolling former Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott over his support for prayer in Florida's public schools. The same year, Temple members held a "pink mass" to criticize Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps. In the made-up ritual, same-sex couples kissed over the grave of Phelps' mother, which The Satanic Temple claimed would turn Phelps' mother gay in the afterlife. In 2014, members attempted to host a "black mass" at Harvard University, which prompted protests by outraged Catholic groups.
In 2019, Penny Lane, the director of Hail Satan?, which chronicles The Satanic Temple's many media stunts, told Reason that despite being founded "as a prank," The Satanic Temple has "very quickly gained a huge amount of authentic followers."
"They're not going to stop," Lane said. "I think most politicians are just kind of like, 'If we wait this out, they'll go away.' And I'm telling you, they're not going away."
Tuesday's decision seems to confirm Lane's prediction.
The post Satanic Temple Wins Legal Fight Over 10 Commandments Monument in Arkansas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The challenge of new technology is a recurring theme in Fourth Amendment law. This case raises a host of new and important questions, and this brief hopes to help frame the issues and provide directions for answering them.
The first set of questions considers whether obtaining Chatrie's Location History records was a Fourth Amendment "search" of his "papers." There are two different arguments to evaluate. The first is the virtual private locker question. Did Chatrie store his Location History records in a virtual private locker with Google, such that he had Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of the virtual locker just as he would with an equivalent physical locker? This brief concludes that the answer is likely no. Although the record is murky on the point, Chatrie likely lacked the control over the records needed to have Fourth Amendment rights in them.
The second search argument considers whether Chatrie had Fourth Amendment rights under the limits placed on the third-party doctrine by Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). This brief argues that he did not. Carpenter does not apply because Chatrie voluntarily opted in to have Google create and store his Location History records.
The next set of issues considers the lawfulness of the warrant, assuming that one was needed. The brief argues that a properly drawn geofence warrant can satisfy the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment does not present an all or nothing choice between zero protection and absolute protection. Where the law requires a warrant, it also provides a means to draft a lawful warrant.
On the specifics of the warrant in this case, the warrant was properly drawn as to Step 1 because it was sufficiently narrow in both time and space. The constitutionality of the warrant at Step 2 is uncertain, however. It is not clear that the Fourth Amendment allows multi-stage warrants, and the particularity of Step 2 debatable. Chatrie may not have raised these issues as to Step 2, however, so they may be waived.
The fact that this case reaches the Court so late in the Term, and that it raises so many complex issues, suggests that there may be value in pointing to a resolution that might plausibly reach consensus. If so, amicus suggests that the Court might want to resolve this case by focusing primarily on the warrant issues. The legality of the warrant implicates fewer contested questions and has a more complete factual record. For the sake of completeness, however, this brief covers both issues.
The post My Amicus Brief in the Geofence Warrant Case, <i>United States v. Chatrie</i> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
As many Americans have learned over the past year since "Liberation Day," tariffs can warp supply chains in a variety of ways.
Most importantly, they raise prices for consumers. In fact, consumers end up paying the full cost of a tariff and then some.
That's according to a recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that tracked how tariffs impact producers, importers, distributors, and consumers. To do that, the paper's five authors tracked a single bottle of imported wine as it moved through the global supply chain.
Consider it a boozy, tariff-themed recreation of "I, Pencil."
What they found is that foreign producers absorb some of the cost of a tariff by reducing prices. That's an argument that President Donald Trump and his allies have made: that foreign companies "eat" the cost of a tariff and reduce prices to remain competitive.
However, the researchers found that consumers ended up paying higher prices anyway. "Our main finding is that the markups along a distribution chain make it possible for the consumer to fully pay for the cost of the tariffs in dollar terms even when the foreign supplier partially absorbs the tariff by lowering its price," they conclude.
Here's how that happens:
The study began with a bottle of wine that, before tariffs, would have been exported for $5 and would have cost an American consumer $23 on a liquor store shelf.
After a 25 percent tariff on wine was implemented, the researchers found that exporters would reduce their prices. The $5 bottle of wine now gets exported for an average price of $4.74, which means the producer is losing 26 cents per bottle.
When the wine is imported to the U.S., a 25 percent tariff is applied to the price. The government makes $1.19 per bottle, and the cost is passed down the supply chain.
Taxes and other markups apply, just as they did before the tariff was in effect. After those are taken into account, the retail price of that same bottle of wine is now, on average, $1.59 higher than it was before the tariff.
As a result, "tariff revenue for this particular tariff event was more than fully offset by increases in consumer prices," the authors conclude. Consumers end up paying an average of 134 percent of the tariff increase, even though foreign producers lowered their prices.
The study illustrates a key economic problem with tariffs. They make almost every party in the transaction worse off. Producers lose out by lowering export prices, and consumers are harmed by higher retail prices.
Only the government, which now gets to collect more taxes, comes out ahead.
The post Infographic: Who Really Pays for Tariffs? These Scholars Tracked a Bottle of Wine To Find Out. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Earlier this week, the Daily Mail published the following headline: "Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did NOT match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims."
That may strike the casual reader as a significant finding and one that casts doubt on whether the authorities have apprehended the correct person. Connecting Robinson's gun to the crime is obviously a key piece of evidence. If the bullet that killed Kirk came from some other gun, which is implied by this headline, then the conspiracy theories advanced by Candace Owens and others suddenly seem more plausible.
Right on cue, Owens shared the story, claiming vindication.
Where are all my neocons who have been "overwhelmed" by the non existent evidence against Tyler Robinson?
You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Hope the money was worth your soul. https://t.co/C88xGoigdR
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 31, 2026
Where to begin? This headline is woefully dishonest and clearly intended to generate massive numbers of clicks from gullible people. But the actual news is much less sensational: A report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives failed to match a recovered bullet fragment to the gun in Robinson's possession. This is not all that noteworthy. The bullet that killed Kirk did not exit his body, rendering it "more of a fragment, not a round," according to NewsNation's Jennifer Coffindaffer, a retired FBI agent. In other words, it was not necessarily expected that the bullet fragment would match the weapon. A nonmatch signifies an inconclusive result, not that the bullet is provably from some other gun.
If this were the only piece of evidence against Robinson, I suppose I could understand why it might give people pause. But the case against Robinson is extremely solid because he confessed to his family and his roommate/lover. Indeed, the prosecution plans to call his father and ex-roommate to testify against him. The prosecution possesses text messages that Robinson sent to his roommate in which he explains in detail why and how he committed the murder. Robinson is entitled to the presumption of innocence and should have every opportunity to defend himself, but people who seriously doubt that he's the killer are deluding themselves.
I'm aware that it's no use arguing with Owens. But in theory, at least, the Daily Mail's editors should be capable of feeling shame over this.
Check out the latest episode of Free Media with Amber Duke and Freed Up with Christian Britschgi and subscribe to our channel!
The Reason staff and I saw Project Hail Mary earlier this week: It was really good! I had no idea what to expect and was totally unspoiled. That's definitely the right way to see it, so I won't say much more about it.
The post The <em>Daily Mail</em>'s Dishonesty About Charlie Kirk's Alleged Killer appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
In the first six months of President Donald Trump's second term, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has closed over 23,000 criminal cases while shifting resources to immigration, according to a new ProPublica analysis. The majority of these cases, the analysis found, were closed without prosecution, further calling into question the Trump administration's commitment to the rule of law.
In February 2025, within weeks of Attorney General Pam Bondi being sworn in, the DOJ declined to prosecute nearly 11,000 cases, ProPublica found. The number of declined prosecutions is higher than any other month as far back as 2004 and is nearly double the previous high of around 6,500 declined cases during Trump's first term in September 2019.
When compared to the average of the last three administrations, ProPublica found that the second Trump administration has refused to prosecute more cases across a wide variety of crimes. Interestingly, crime categories with above-average declinations include areas that Trump has often spoken of as high priorities for his administration, including a 45 percent increase in dropped drug cases, a 59 percent increase in dropped white-collar crime cases, and a 93 percent increase in dropped national security cases.
The one area in which ProPublica found that the DOJ took on more cases than the last three administrations was immigration. During the first six months of Trump's second term, the agency declined to prosecute 22 percent fewer immigration cases than average and prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases, almost three times the number under the Biden administration and a 15 percent increase compared to Trump's first term.
Although the DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for a variety of reasons and makes policy changes to reflect differing priorities between administrations, the report suggests that the extent of declined cases and priority overhaul is unprecedented. In a statement to ProPublica, a DOJ spokesperson said the number of declined cases is due to "an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorney's cases management system," and that the agency "remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe." At the time of publication, the DOJ had not responded to Reason's request for comment.
But critics of the recent DOJ changes, including 295 former employees, say the agency is no longer fulfilling its mission "to uphold the rule of law, to keep our country safe, and to protect civil rights." Although the shift to focus on immigration is unsurprising given Trump's ongoing and unpopular immigration crackdown, the administration's decision to trade off against prosecuting other major crimes is perplexing, particularly as state law enforcement agencies are also being incentivized to focus their limited time and resources on immigration enforcement.
Data have repeatedly debunked the Trump administration's claim that it is arresting and detaining "the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens." According to an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, only 5 percent of immigrant detainees from October to mid-November of last year had a violent criminal conviction, and 73 percent had no criminal conviction at all. Similarly, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that nearly 74 percent of over 68,000 immigrants detained in early February had no criminal convictions.
Of course, Trump is not the first president to shift the priorities of federal law enforcement. Several presidents, for example, have chosen to more strictly enforce drug laws, a tactic that has fallen well short of its intended aim. But just as empowering the government to go after drug crimes has hurt civil liberties and failed to make Americans safer, Trump's immigration crackdown is having the same effect.
The post Justice Department Drops 23,000 Cases To Make Room for Trump's Immigration Crackdown appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The report is also a fount of information about how section 702 and the statutory changes adopted in 2024 are working.
All in all, the PCLOB report provides a detailed picture of section 702 as it stands today. It may be particularly valuable to members of Congress who didn't want to support reauthorization without an assurance that this administration was implementing the 2024 act's reforms in good faith. The PCLOB report leaves little doubt on that score.
The post A new report on section 702 of FISA from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Stephanie Foster has a sweet tooth, and she wanted to sink her teeth into a mouthful of chocolate. By the sound of things, Foster is a foodie. She didn't want just any chocolate. She wanted 100% real chocolate.
Foster went shopping at nearby Target and Jewel Osco stores, searching for the best that the cacao bean had to offer. She bought several bags of chocolate chips manufactured by Nestle USA, Inc…. Each bag had a label promising any hungry consumer that the bag contained "100% real chocolate." …
Foster apparently was none too pleased when she realized that the chocolate chips contained soy lecithin and natural flavors. As Foster sees things, chocolate that contains soy lecithin and natural flavors isn't "100% real chocolate." In fact, it's not chocolate at all. So Foster brought Nestle to federal court. She sues on behalf of herself and a putative class [on various misrepresentation-related theories].
For the reasons below, the motion to dismiss is granted. The complaint is half-baked, and is 100% dismissed….
Foster thinks that "chocolate" means that it can "only have ingredients sourced from cacao beans," meaning cocoa butter and cacao. But Foster points out that Nestle chocolate chips also contain soy lecithin or natural flavor.
Soy lecithin is a food additive made from genetically modified soy. It makes chocolate products more viscous, to mimic the consistency of chocolate products that contain only the more expensive cocoa butter.
And "natural flavors" are highly processed food additives that enhance the products' sweet chocolatey taste. Foster says that Nestle uses natural flavors in the products to cut manufacturing and ingredient costs.
In short, Foster alleges that soy lecithin and natural flavors are "inexpensive substitutes for ingredients found in chocolate products that actually contain 100% real chocolate." …
Foster's claims … require a false or misleading statement that deceives a reasonable consumer…. No reasonable consumer would need protection from Nestle's bag of chocolate chips….
Foster believes that she got duped by the phrase "100% real chocolate." … As she sees things, chocolate doesn't have soy lecithin or natural flavors. Chocolate "only ha[s] ingredients sourced from cacao beans, which include cacao (or cocoa) and cocoa butter." …
That theory comes out of thin air. The complaint doesn't cite anything for the notion that chocolate only contains ingredients that come from cacao beans, and nothing else. She doesn't cite a definition of "chocolate." She offers no source for her idiosyncratic understanding of the essence of chocolate. She doesn't cite a consumer survey, either.
No reasonable consumer thinks that chocolate "only" contains the byproduct of cacao beans. For starters, cacao beans aren't sweet. They need sugar. Sugar is a necessary ingredient of chocolate. And sugar doesn't come from a cacao bean….
Chocolate is a composite product. It contains other ingredients, by definition.
The FDA has had a thing or two to say about the essence of chocolate. The FDA recognizes that chocolate is a mixture of many things. See 21 C.F.R. § 163.123 (defining "sweet chocolate" as a mixture of chocolate liquor and "optional ingredients" including cacao fat, sweeteners, spices, natural and artificial flavorings, dairy ingredients, and emulsifying agents). The FDA accepts that chocolate can include "natural and artificial flavorings" and "emulsifying agents."
Soy lecithin—one of the ingredients that Foster challenges—is an emulsifying agent. See National Confectioners Association, Ingredients in Chocolate, https://candyusa.com/story-of-chocolate/what-is-chocolate/ingredients-in-chocolate/ ("Lecithin: An emulsifier, often made from soy, that makes the ingredients blend together.").
The FDA also requires "milk chocolate" and "sweet chocolate" to contain a minimum amount of "chocolate liquor" to be legally labeled "chocolate." In turn, chocolate liquor contains "cacao nibs" and "cacao fat." And chocolate liquor may contain alkali ingredients (i.e., ammonium and potassium), neutralizing ingredients, "spices, natural and artificial flavorings, butter, milkfat, and/or salt."
True, the FDA's definition is hyper-technical, and contains some scientific mumbo-jumbo. The agency uses terms like "semiplastic," "nutritive carbohydrate sweeteners," and so on. But the key point jumps off the page: chocolate is a composite product…. Dictionaries agree that chocolate includes cacoa beans, plus a number of other ingredients.
The fact that chocolate contains more than cacao beans isn't a news bulletin to anyone. "Chocolate is a solid mixture. In its basic form, it is composed of cacao powder, cocoa butter, and some type of sweetener such as sugar; however, modern chocolate includes milk solids, any added flavors, modifiers, and preservatives." See What is chocolate?, MIT Laboratory for Chocolate Science, https://chocolate.mit.edu/science/. In fact, soy lecithin "is quite a common chocolate ingredient, even in the realm of craft chocolate." …
[A] consumer doesn't have to read the fine print on the back of the bag of chocolate chips to figure out that chocolate contains more than cacao beans. The front of the bag tells the consumer everything that he or she needs to know.
"Chocolate" appears on the front of the bag. And reasonable consumers know that chocolate is a composite product and contains several ingredients.
"What matters most is how real consumers understand and react to the advertising." Figuring out that chocolate is more than cacao beans doesn't require consumers to "question the labels they see and to parse them as lawyers might for ambiguities."
Courts don't have to treat consumers like eggshell-skull plaintiffs, wandering bewildered down the grocery aisle in the Land of Confusion. And at some point, it is not asking too much to expect a reasonable consumer to read the list of ingredients if they're unsure….
No reasonable consumer would read the phrase "100% real chocolate" as a representation that the bag contains only the byproducts of cacao beans. A true chocolate lover wouldn't believe that, and a reasonable consumer wouldn't either….
Jared Reed Kessler and Ronald Y. Rothstein (Winston and Strawn LLP) represent Nestle.
The post Claim That "100% Real Chocolate" Can't Include "Soy Lecithin and Natural Flavors" "Is Half-Baked, and Is 100% Dismissed" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Plaintiff Aneesa Johnson, an African American and Muslim woman of Palestinian origin, alleges that Georgetown discriminated against her when it fired her [from her position as Assistant Director of Academic and Faculty Affairs at Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service] after discovering eight-year-old social media posts that described her "hat[red]" for Zionists.
{Three of Johnson's posts are relevant here. The first read, "Ever since going to [Northwestern] I have a deep seeded [sic] hate for Zio bitches. They bring out the worst in me." The second elaborated, "You know why I call them Zio bitches, because they're dogs." And the third post was a repost of another user's Tweet, which included a photograph of a scowling Orthodox Jewish man with the caption, "When the whole world hates you bc you a thief and grow up looking like a shaytan #GrowingUpIsraeli." ("Shaytan" means devil or demon in Arabic.)}
She also brings a bevy of related hostile work environment, retaliation, and tort claims against Georgetown and a constellation of other defendants, including Rachel Jessica Wolff and Ilya Shapiro, individuals who publicized Johnson's old posts on Twitter; Canary Mission, a controversial organization that creates online profiles of students and professors on college campuses who have been critical of Israel; and a handful of Canary Mission's donors….
Upon consideration of the voluminous set of briefs in this case, the Court concludes that Ms. Johnson's claims against the movants must be dismissed with prejudice. Among myriad grounds for dismissal, the complaint does not make out any claim that Johnson was discriminated against based on her race, religion, or national origin, nor can she proceed in tort against Georgetown or other defendants due to procedural and substantive defects in her claims….
The opinion is over 20K words long, and I can't do it justice here. But I thought I'd pass along this passage, which is relevant to some of the First Amendment / tort law discussions we've had on this blog in past years:
After Johnson was introduced to the SFS community by email, Rachel Wolff—a Jewish dual degree student at SFS and Georgetown's law school—looked Johnson up online. The top search result was a profile of Johnson on the website of Canary Mission, which the complaint characterizes as an "anonymous cyberstalking and blacklisting" operation that "targets" individuals who advocate for Palestinian rights. [The profile contained Johnson's three Twitter posts. -EV] …
Alarmed at what her Google search turned up, Wolff took to Twitter herself. Late in the evening on November 1, she posted screenshots of Johnson's college-era Tweets, retrieved from Canary Mission, with some added commentary: "Not to be outdone by Harvard, Georgetown @georgetownsfs just hired this antisemite to be the 'primary point of contact for all MSFS Students on everything academic.' As an SFS student, I'd rather fail my master's program than speak to someone who says this about my people."
Wolff's Tweet went viral, garnering over a million views. She followed up with additional posts, calling SFS and Georgetown "shameful" for their hiring decision. According to the complaint, Wolff's Tweets were amplified by Canary Mission, the Israeli government, and other users. One of those users was Ilya Shapiro, a former Georgetown law school lecturer and administrator, who reposted Wolff's initial Tweet, adding "Her name is Aneesa Johnson, @Georgetown School of Foreign Service's new assistant director of academic affairs." …
Johnson alleges that Wolff tortiously interfered with her contract with Georgetown by targeting her online, accusing her of being antisemitic, and thereby pressuring the university to terminate her…. "[U]nder D.C. law, a prima facie case of tortious interference with a contract or business relationship requires (1) existence of a valid contractual or other business relationship; (2) the defendant's knowledge of the relationship; (3) intentional interference with that relationship by the defendant; and (4) resulting damages." … The D.C. Court of Appeals has clarified that "D.C. law permits claims for tortious interference with an at-will employment relationship[,]" at least against "third parties." … [T]he D.C. Circuit has suggested that a plaintiff need not allege interference "through egregious means"—for example, through libel, slander, coercion, fraud, misrepresentation, or disparagement—to survive a motion to dismiss….
[But e]ven if Wolff's conduct qualifies as intentional interference with Johnson's contract and proximately caused her termination, it was not improper or wrongful… [and was thus] "legally justified or privileged," which renders [it] inactionable [citing D.C. precedents]…. {The propriety of a defendant's interference is an affirmative defense, rather than a prima facie element of tortious interference…. [But] it is clear from the face of Johnson's complaint that Wolff's Tweets do not constitute improper interference in her contract with Georgetown and thus cannot sustain her tortious interference claim.}
D.C. law follows the Restatement (Second) of Torts in "determining whether interference with a contract is 'improper[.]'" Courts must consider several factors, including "(a) the nature of the actor's conduct, (b) the actor's motive, (c) the interests of the other with which the actor's conduct interferes, (d) the interests sought to be advanced by the actor, (e) the social interests in protecting the freedom of action of the actor and the contractual interests of the other, (f) the proximity or remoteness of the actor's conduct to the interference, and (g) the relations between the parties." The list is not exhaustive, and courts are to evaluate impropriety based on a "judgment and choice of values in each situation."
Considering the facts in the light most favorable to Johnson—without crediting her legal conclusions and speculative or threadbare assertions—Wolff's behavior is a far cry from wrongful or improper. The nature of her conduct was not unusual: She complained to other social media users about an issue that upset her, though her posts did go viral along the way. Wolff's motive was clear from the face of the complaint: She perceived Johnson's online activity as an affront to her Jewish identity, especially in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, and publicly vented her objection to Georgetown placing Johnson in a position of responsibility vis-à-vis Jewish (and other) students. Though there may have been less provocative means of voicing her opinion, she was entitled to do so the way she did.
Relatedly, Wolff's individual interest in speaking out had a constitutional valence, which dovetails with the societal interest in protecting her freedom of speech, especially on a matter of public concern like an elite university's hiring decisions. After all, "in public debate [we] must tolerate insulting … speech in order to provide adequate 'breathing space' to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.'" These factors strongly outweigh Johnson's interest in bringing an affirmative tortious interference claim against Wolff, who, at best, played only an indirect role in her firing. {The Court will not fulsomely address Wolff's First Amendment defense, other than to note that it packs a strong punch.}
Imagine the road we would travel if any exasperated social media complaint about a university personnel controversy could give rise to a tortious interference claim. The risk of such suits would undoubtedly chill campus speech, contravening the well-established principle that the "college classroom," along with "its surrounding environs," is "peculiarly the 'marketplace of ideas[.]' " To put an even finer point on it, imagine if student activists for the Palestinian cause could be sued in tort if they condemned their university's decision to hire a vocal supporter of Israel.
This cannot be the result Johnson truly seeks, especially given her own history of campus organizing. Indeed, her opposition stresses that she "does not challenge Defendants' right to speak" and acknowledges that defendants "may express their views about Palestinian advocacy, about [ ] Johnson's political positions, about Israel-Palestine dynamics." If Johnson instead aims to curb the "use" of "employment authority to retaliate against protected-class membership[,]"an iffy tortious interference claim against Wolff—who Johnson concedes had no employment authority whatsoever—widely misses the mark.
And from the Conclusion to the opinion:
The Court [earlier noted] Shakespeare's admonition in Henry VIII to refrain from letting the heat of passion cloud the pursuit of our adversaries, lest we go too far and bring harm upon ourselves. That advice rings true no matter how righteous we believe our cause to be. Litigation can right many wrongs. But not every wrong can be righted by a lawsuit….
There are still other lessons to be drawn from this case.
We should all cherish free speech yet recognize that speech is not free. It has consequences. It reflects who we are. And especially if conveyed over the Internet, it can follow us forever. If our words are caustic and hurtful, they may not only injure others, but also sully our own reputations and cost us valuable opportunities and benefits, including in employment. As elementary as it may seem, we should think twice about what we say and how we say it.
Choosing words wisely is especially important for those entrusted with the education of our students and future leaders. Members of the academy—and, yes, judges and other public figures whose words reach impressionable ears—should model respectful discourse for those next up the rungs. But that is sometimes lacking in this age when hot takes on social media pass for analysis of fraught and complex issues. While most of us appreciate a turn of phrase and even a zinger or two, pith alone is usually a poor substitute for reasoned commentary.
We might remember as well that free speech is for me and for thee. There is a tendency for those whose words are censured to seek refuge in the First Amendment. Yet some seem unwilling to extend like protections to those whose speech they find objectionable. The "cancelled" become the censors. That double standard pops up on both sides of this suit.
This case also illuminates the plight of university administrators these days, who must navigate fractured student bodies and faculties, demanding donors, ever-increasing intrusions by the federal government, and more. They deserve a measure of grace. They will occasionally falter, of course, and when they do in ways that violate the law, they should appropriately be held to account. But hasty social media posts and grasping lawsuits are perhaps not the best ways of confronting their missteps.
As the Court presaged at the outset, this case has become a proxy war of sorts for the conflict that continues to play out on college campuses over events in Israel and Gaza. That conflict has embroiled students, faculty, and staff with deeply held but diametrically opposed views on a seemingly intractable dispute halfway around the globe.
The nation's great colleges and universities are uniquely situated to offer the competing constituencies a shared environment to learn about and debate the underlying struggle and its historical origins, which of course long predate October 7, 2023. They can also provide space for time-honored expressions of protest within bounds of reason and respect.
Fashioning such an environment has proven difficult on some (though not all) campuses. But where school and student leaders can together strive to create conducive settings to achieve these goals, there may be no better place than the university to temper the "fire of passion" with the "sap of reason," in the words of the Bard. At the very least, a college campus is almost always a more appropriate venue for venting ardent political opinions than a court of law.
The post Court Rejects Lawsuit Over Firing of Georgetown Administrator for Old "Hate for Zio Bitches" Posts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
This week on Freed Up, the opening skit makes its triumphant return before Robby and Christian dive into the latest on Iran, Robby's trip to Vegas, and two major court cases involving birthright citizenship and conversion therapy. They also get into former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's husband becoming an unexpected topic of conversation, swap horror stories about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and debate whether they've found the stupidest tweet ever. Later, they take on youth curfews, surprisingly fit members of Congress, and wrap with a discussion of Project Hail Mary.
0:00—The opening skit is BACK, baby
3:25—The war in Iran, again
10:27—Robby went to Vegas
15:57—Birthright citizenship case
25:38—The conversion therapy case
30:36—Noem's husband gets everyone's attention
41:02—The worst TSA experiences
50:01—The stupidest tweet ever?
1:00:43—Debating youth curfews
1:19:20—Project Hail Mary
The post Birthright Citizenship, Noem Family Circus, and <i>Project Hail Mary</i> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
A Palm Beach County detective was disciplined for farting in a fellow deputy's face, public records obtained by Reason show.
A Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office (PBSO) personnel complaint filed on November 17, 2025, alleged that Detective James Coppola had "engaged in horseplay by passing gas in Deputy [Joshua] Mohammed's face" in the PBSO's District 9 detective bureau.
The complaint was not filed by the target of Coppola's rude eruption, but rather the District 9 division commander. The commander also filed a complaint against Mohammed for prohibited horseplay, presumably launched as a counter-offensive.
According to the report, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw authorized an internal investigation into the rowdy officers, and on January 21, the lieutenant assigned to the investigation sustained the allegations against Coppola and Mohammed, finding both had violated PBSO Rules & Regulation "VII(15) Horseplay."
The report did not detail the exact nature of Mohammed's horseplay.
On both reports, under a section titled "final disciplinary action taken by agency," the option "Training Counseling" was circled.
In response to an inquiry, the PBSO did not elaborate on what training or counseling Coppola and Mohammed received. However, a PBSO spokesperson said in a written statement to Reason:
"The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office holds all employees to the highest standards in its commitment to maintaining the public's trust. While the vast majority of our employees uphold these expectations, there are instances when poor decisions result in misconduct. In this case, the actions of our deputies; James Coppola and Joshua Mohammed, were identified, thoroughly investigated, and determined to be clear violations of our agency policies and procedures. We remain committed to accountability and will continue to ensure that our actions reflect the professionalism and integrity our community expects and deserves."
Reason obtained the reports through a public records request under Florida's Sunshine Law for recent complaints and disciplinary records.
The state's relatively broad freedom of information law is often cited as one of the reasons Florida is an epicenter of weird news. These sorts of internal records are nearly impossible to get in some other states, blocking the public from getting information on police misconduct far more serious than two officers playing Terrance and Phillip. (The PBSO records included other, more serious infractions as well, such as a deputy arriving to work drunk or negligently discharging a taser.)
Unfortunately, the Florida Legislature and Governor's Office have been ceaselessly chipping away at the Sunshine Law, but for now we can still enjoy its bounty.
See the reports below:
The post Florida Cop Punished With 'Training/Counseling' for Farting in Colleague's Face appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
President Donald Trump made history yesterday at the U.S. Supreme Court when he became the first sitting president on record to attend a SCOTUS oral argument. Unfortunately for Trump, his presence, however attention-grabbing, is unlikely to sway the outcome of a case that he has always deserved to lose.
At issue in yesterday's oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara is the president's 2025 executive order that purports to deny the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children whose parents are unlawful immigrants or lawful temporary visitors.
According to Trump's solicitor general, John Sauer, the overriding factor for determining birthright citizenship should be whether or not a newborn's parents were "domiciled" in the United States, a term he defined to mean "lawful presence with the intent to remain permanently."
Yet as Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed out, "you don't see domicile mentioned in the [congressional] debates" over the 14th Amendment, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution. "We have the—the child's citizenship, and the focus of the clause is on the child, not on the parents," Gorsuch said. "The absence" of the word domicile—a word which is the centerpiece of Trump's entire case—"is striking."
Gorsuch also noted another fatal flaw in the government's position. "Today, you can point to laws against immigration that are much more restrictive than they were in 1868," Gorsuch said. "If somebody showed up here in 1868 and established domicile, that was perfectly fine without respect to anything, any—any immigration laws." Which means, Gorsuch told Sauer, "why wouldn't we, even if we were to apply your own test, come to the conclusion that the fact that someone might be illegal is immaterial?"
In other words, if the Supreme Court sticks to the circa-1868 meaning of domicile, which Sauer himself said that it should, then that term, as originally understood at the time of the 14th Amendment's ratification, would cut against Trump's executive order.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett then raised an even more ominous issue for the Trump administration. What about "the children of slaves who were brought here unlawfully…in defiance of laws forbidding the slave trade," Barrett asked Sauer. "You can imagine that their parents were not only brought here in violation of United States law but were here against their will and so maybe felt allegiance to the countries to where they were from." And "let's say they don't have an intent to stay. They want to escape and go back the second they can. Are they domiciled?"
This was a very dangerous query for Sauer, and his struggle to respond to it coherently suggested that he understood the peril he was in. After all, if the Trump administration's theory is correct, and "domicile" requires "the intent to remain permanently," as Sauer said it did, then the U.S.-born child of an enslaved person who wanted "to escape and go back" would clearly not qualify for birthright citizenship under the Trumpian view. And the descendants of such persons, born today, would also be ineligible for birthright citizenship under the Trumpian view, if applied retroactively.
The reason why that logic is so disastrous for Trump is because the Trump administration has repeatedly conceded that one of the undeniable purposes of the 14th Amendment was to make citizens out of all enslaved black Americans and their descendants. Yet if Trump's theory wins, that one undeniable purpose of the amendment would be nullified because the U.S.-born children of some enslaved people would not qualify for birthright citizenship after all.
That line of questioning from Barrett might be enough by itself to spell legal doom for Trump's executive order.
Chief Justice John Roberts offered another damning analysis of the Trump administration's case. After Sauer claimed that "the 19th century Framers of this amendment" could "not possibly" have approved of "birth tourism" or other supposed modern problems that have been allegedly caused by birthright citizenship, Roberts observed that such contemporary policy arguments have zero bearing on the case at hand. "You do agree," Roberts pressed Sauer, "that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us?"
Sauer struggled a bit in response to that one, too, before finally asserting that "we're in a new world now," one "where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a—a child who's a U.S. citizen."
"Well, it's a new world," Roberts replied. "It's the same Constitution."
That reply by the chief justice perfectly illustrated the bankruptcy of Trump's entire position. Instead of following the straightforward text and history of the 14th Amendment, the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to adopt a tortured and unpersuasive new theory that rests on a different word that appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution and, as Gorsuch noted, is also strikingly absent from the relevant congressional debates. At the same time, in a case that's supposed to be about the original meaning of a constitutional provision, the Trump administration is wasting the Court's time with non-legal, modern-day anti-immigration arguments that, as the chief justice pointed out, are totally irrelevant to the originalist and textualist analysis that the Supreme Court is actually performing.
Gorsuch, Barrett, and Roberts probably hold the swing votes in this case. If they remain as skeptical of Trump's position as they sounded during oral arguments, the president's executive order is in big trouble.
The post Gorsuch, Barrett, and Roberts Raise Fatal Objections to Trump's Birthright Citizenship Order appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
President Donald Trump delivered a prime-time address about the Iran War that could have been a Truth Social post.
The rambling 19-minute speech resembled Trump's frequent social media posts: vaguely belligerent and at times contradictory.
The U.S. will continue to hit Iran "extremely hard over the next two to three weeks," Trump threatened, while simultaneously promising that "discussions are ongoing" to end the war. As he's done in recent weeks, he threatened to target Iran's civilian infrastructure, including power plants, which would be a war crime. However, he seemed to downplay the significance of Iran's nuclear weapons program, which is ostensibly the reason why the war was launched in the first place.
As for the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now fully controls, Trump simply said "it will just open up naturally."
Well, I guess we can hope so.
That's what the speech included. Here's what was missing: any indication that the Trump administration has a functional plan to end the war and/or restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. There were no details about what a prospective peace deal might look like (significant, since U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly determined that the Iranian government is not currently willing to negotiate with Trump, despite what the president has said). There was no acknowledgement of the fact that the war still lacks congressional authorization.
A speech like this might have helped sell the American public on the necessity of this war before it began. A month in, however, I don't get the sense that it will move the needle on the war, which is deeply unpopular:
Only 62 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of MAGA support the Iran war. Sounds like a lot but Republican support for the Iraq war was much higher. And other polls show even these Iran war supporters have concerns.
Oh, and only 28 percent of Americans support the war. pic.twitter.com/Fx8hlDEEGD
— Andrew Day (@AKDay89) April 1, 2026
At least 13 Americans have already died in this conflict, which is costing billions of dollars every day and disrupting global markets for oil, helium, and more. What are the American people gaining to offset all that? If Trump has an answer to that question, he didn't articulate it on Wednesday night.
"We're going back to the fuckin' moon." We sure are. The Artemis II mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday night, beginning a planned 10-day, 240,000-mile journey that will take four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth.
Liftoff.
The Artemis II mission launched from @NASAKennedy at 6:35pm ET (2235 UTC), propelling four astronauts on a journey around the Moon.
Artemis II will pave the way for future Moon landings, as well as the next giant leap — astronauts on Mars. pic.twitter.com/ENQA4RTqAc
— NASA (@NASA) April 1, 2026
The first manned mission into Lunar orbit since 1972, Artemis is the culmination of a very expensive, decade-plus effort to get there. "It marks the first time astronauts will fly aboard NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, and it is the first real test of Orion's life-support systems with humans on board," writes Reason's Natalie Dowzicky. "It is less a triumphant return to the moon than a high-stakes systems check."
One problem has already cropped up: The ship's fancy zero-gravity toilet wasn't working, but was quickly fixed.
This whole thing strikes me as pretty wasteful—strip away the romance of going to space, and this is just another way for government contractors to milk taxpayers.
But it is also undeniably cool that humans can do this:
The coolest orbital animation I've seen of Artemis 2
Just really shows you how far away they're flying today and also how precise they need to be to go to the moon pic.twitter.com/fBTYHbcGoQ
— delian (@zebulgar) April 1, 2026
Scenes from D.C.: Unhappy first anniversary to this bit of insanity, when Trump stood outside the White House to announce a policy even more poorly planned than the war in Iran, if you can believe that.
Yes, it's Liberation Day. Every day is a good day to remember that tariffs are taxes paid by Americans, but we've got extra coverage of the topic to mark the occasion:
If that's not enough tariff content for you—and, really, is there ever enough?—then let me also recommend Phil Gramm's and Don Boudreaux's take in The Wall Street Journal: "Most economists predicted that the economy's performance would be negatively affected. Thus far data overwhelmingly indicate that is what has happened," they conclude.
The post War and/or Peace appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A couple points. First, this is not, formally speaking, a religion case. It's a Free Speech Clause case. Indeed, as far as I can tell, the word "religion" does not even appear in the Court's opinion. But the case is religion-adjacent. Chiles described herself in the litigation as a practicing Christian whose views about sex and gender are informed by her faith, and she said that some clients seek her out because they want counseling consistent with those convictions. So although religion is not part of the Court's doctrinal analysis, it is very much part of the background.
That feature places Chiles in a familiar line of First Amendment cases. Think of 303 Creative, another Gorsuch opinion. Or Barnette, the WWII-era flag salute case. Both were free speech cases in doctrinal terms, but religious conviction supplied much of the underlying human drama. One sees something similar here. Disputes touching religious freedom often come to the Court not under the Religion Clauses, but in the guise of free speech. Religion influences what people say--or don't say.
The key to the Court's reasoning is viewpoint discrimination. Colorado's law allows counseling that affirms a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity, but forbids counseling that seeks to help a minor change or redirect sexual orientation or gender identity. For the Court, that means the State is not simply regulating treatment as such. It is permitting one side of a contested moral and psychological question while suppressing the other. That, the Court says, is about as serious a First Amendment problem as one can have.
Second, it's notable how little work the formal strict-scrutiny framework seems to do once the Court reaches that conclusion. The Court says that content-based restrictions ordinarily trigger strict scrutiny, and that viewpoint discrimination is an especially egregious form of content discrimination. But it does not linger over the familiar steps of balancing: compelling interest, narrow tailoring, least restrictive means. Instead, once the Court identifies viewpoint discrimination, the case is largely over. The rest of the opinion is devoted mostly to rejecting Colorado's efforts to characterize the law as regulation of professional conduct rather than speech. Chiles thus resembles 303 Creative in this way as well. In 303 Creative, too, the Court avoided applying the strict-scrutiny balancing test in a serious way.
For those interested, I discuss Chiles in a short Legal Spirits episode, here.
The post A Short Take on Chiles v. Salazar appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
A year ago today, President Donald Trump unveiled steep tariffs on imports from most countries. With these duties, he declared, "jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country." The president's tariffs have fallen well short of this goal.
From April 2025 to February 2026, the U.S. lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That's an average of about 9,000 jobs lost per month since Liberation Day. Meanwhile, overall blue-collar employment has declined by around 190,000 jobs since April 2025. These numbers reflect what many manufacturers warned would happen after Trump announced his so-called reciprocal tariffs.
Last June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond published data showing that 41 percent of firms had adjusted their hiring plans in response to Trump's tariff policies. The next month, automakers cited tariffs as responsible for 4,975 job cuts. In August, John Deere laid off 238 workers across three of its plants, after the firm reported its "operating profit decreased due to higher tariffs."
Tariffs don't just hit finished imported products like TVs, furniture, and cars; they also hit those imported goods that American manufacturers use to make things, which is one reason why manufacturers are shedding employees.
"The vast majority of bike components…have never been produced in the USA and are all manufactured in Asia," explains Hanna Scholz, the president of Oregon-based custom bike manufacturer Bike Friday. Every additional dollar spent on imported parts is a dollar that must be cut somewhere else—or passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
Indeed, federal data show that prices have risen for many imported manufacturing inputs.
For example, the price of imported inputs to the primary metal manufacturing subsector, which includes iron, steel, and aluminum manufacturing, increased by 17.41 percent from April 2025 to January 2026. Meanwhile, electrical equipment manufacturing, which includes household appliances, generators, and batteries, and clothing stores saw the price of their imported inputs rise by 9.90 percent and 15.27 percent, respectively. (From April 2024 to January 2025, the price of imported primary metal manufacturing inputs increased by 2.15 percent, while the price of imported electrical equipment and clothing store inputs remained basically constant.)
Trump's defenders might point out that manufacturing jobs were already in decline before Liberation Day. That's true. After rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, an average of 9,583 manufacturing jobs were lost each month from 2023 to 2025.
The difference lies in the cause. While Joe Biden's economically regressive policies did not stave off manufacturing job losses, Trump billed his protectionist policies as a way to reverse this (long-running) trend.
In reality, Trump's tariffs not only imposed costs on American manufacturers but also introduced uncertainty. After initially imposing his reciprocal tariffs on April 9, Trump unilaterally paused, resumed, and modified them throughout 2025. Scholz tells Reason that this "chaotic storm of uncertainty" forced her to fire 10 percent of her workforce in 2025.
If Trump wants to increase American manufacturing production and employment, then he might want to reconsider his trade policies. Otherwise, expect the job losses to continue.
Even though Liberation Day tariffs are no longer in effect, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling them illegal in February, Scholz says "the impact of the tariffs in 2025 are still trickling through the whole supply chain in the form of cost and price increases, supplier inventory shortages and uncertainty." One of the ways manufacturers are mitigating this risk and cutting costs is by laying workers off. Last month, Whirlpool fired around 350 workers at its Amana, Iowa, factory.
Unfortunately for manufacturers, things could get worse before they get better. After his reciprocal tariffs were voided, Trump doubled down on his protectionist policies by levying more duties under a different statute. In some cases, these tariffs, which will expire in July, are even higher than the ones they replaced. Kacie Wright, one of the owners of Houghton Horns, a musical instrument retailer based in Keller, Texas, tells Reason her business was "paying a flat 15% on everything from the European Union" under the old regime, but is now charged a total of 16.5 percent.
Scholz says that, compared to "the storm of constant tariff change in 2025," things are relatively calmer, "but since it is temporary I still can't plan well long term."
The post On 'Liberation Day,' Trump Promised a Manufacturing Boom. The Data Tell a Different Story. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 2, 1980 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
As the Supreme Court was striking down many of the tariffs that President Donald Trump tried to impose one year ago today—on what he called "Liberation Day"—Justice Neil Gorsuch called attention to the most fundamental problem with the president's tariff regime.
"Most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason," Gorsuch explained.
The year-long saga of Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs raised some major legal and political questions about the limits of executive power and the balance of powers. As an economic matter, the tariffs remain a foolish policy that has harmed American businesses and consumers, all while subjecting supply chains to an expensive, ever-changing tangle of regulations.
Beyond all that, however, Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs also asked a basic question about what makes government policy legitimate—a question that has been fundamental to the American experiment for nearly 250 years, ever since the founders told King George III that governments must justly derive their power "from the consent of the governed."
That is the "reason," as Gorsuch put it, that major legislative decisions are funneled through Congress.
"Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises," Gorsuch wrote. "But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design."
Before, during, and after Liberation Day, Trump has steadfastly refused to subject his tariff plans to that deliberative process.
Instead, he's tried to force the tariffs through various loopholes created by Congress over the decades—like the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which was the legal basis for most of the tariffs Trump announced during 2025. The Supreme Court shut that down in February, but the Trump administration quickly pivoted to another questionable mechanism: Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
There is no doubt that Congress has traded away a lot of its authority over trade policy in the past few decades. But, as the Trump administration is now learning, those policies do not allow for the open-ended, anything-goes approach that Trump wants to take. The IEEPA tariffs were tripped up by the plain text of the underlying law, which courts at all levels agreed did not include the power to tariff. The new Section 122 tariffs face a similar legal challenge over the administration's attempt to read broad powers into a narrowly tailored law.
There is an easy solution to all this. Put a tariff bill in front of Congress.
Of course, there is an equally obvious reason why Trump has refused to do that. It would be unlikely to pass.
Polls show that Trump's tariffs are broadly unpopular. About 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of tariffs in general, and only 36 percent have a favorable view of Trump's use of tariffs, according to one poll released this week. Other polls show that many Americans believe tariffs have increased prices and have not provided much benefit.
All that means that getting a tariff bill through Congress would be a difficult task—though certainly not an impossible one, as Congress passes plenty of unpopular laws.
Republicans in Congress have been happy to stand aside while Trump has threatened and imposed tariffs against longtime allies and major trading partners. Behind the scenes, however, it is clear that many Republicans are opposed or at least uncomfortable with how this has all gone down.
In the absence of a congressional vote, however, Trump's tariffs will never have legitimacy. It's not quite as simple as saying that policies must be popular to be legitimate—but the whole point of a republican form of government is to limit the ability of leaders to impose wildly unpopular whims upon the country as a whole.
The legislative process, wrote Gorsuch in the concurring opinion, "tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws
must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day."
As Trump has pursued this tariff regime, he and his allies have often pointed to President William McKinley and the late-19th century as an inspiration. "President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs," Trump claimed in his inaugural address last year. "In the 1890s, our country was probably the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs," he said last year on the campaign trail.
As an economic matter, that claim has been widely debunked. Tariffs did not make America rich, and did not make American manufacturing strong.
Less frequently considered is the political angle of that analogy. The tariffs of the 1890s were not implemented by executive fiat. They were the result of congressional actions—major tariff bills were passed by Congress in 1890 (which McKinley was instrumental in passing during his time as a representative from Ohio), 1894, and 1897 (which McKinley signed as president). There are literally dozens of other examples. Sometimes those bills were pushed by presidents, like McKinley. Other times, Congress took the initiative and forced the president's hand. Special interests always played a major role (some things never change) in determining which tariffs would be charged and what products would be exempt.
Whatever you think of those historical tariffs as economic or fiscal policy, they all had something that Trump's tariffs lack. They were legitimate policies, passed by Congress and signed by the president.
Trump could send his tariff plan to Congress tomorrow and tell legislators to vote for it. If that happened, Reason would argue against the bill's passage. Others would support it. At the end of the process, we'd learn whether the president's idea is a popular one—and in a republic, that's what matters—and we'd see which members of Congress were willing to be held accountable for the consequences of that policy.
Without that, Trump's tariffs will remain illegitimate—no matter how many different legal loopholes the administration tries to find.
The same could be said for any number of other things. Trump should get permission from Congress to go to war or to build a ballroom at the White House.
Yes, the legislative process is annoying, slow, and deliberative. That, as Gorsuch put it, is "the whole point."
The post A Year After 'Liberation Day,' Trump's Tariffs Will Never Be Legitimate Without a Vote in Congress appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
As President Donald Trump told it, his "Liberation Day" tariffs aimed to correct "unfair trade practices by other countries." But there was little rhyme or reason to the widely varying tariff rates he announced on April 2, 2025, and a long line of subsequent revisions compounded the confusion and uncertainty, wreaking havoc with the plans of American businesses that rely on international trade.
Trump's executive order imposed a 10 percent "additional ad valorem duty" on all but a few trading partners, without regard to whether they had adopted policies or practices that unfairly impeded imports from the United States or artificially boosted exports. Imports from Singapore, for example, were subject to the 10 percent tax even though that country was collecting zero tariffs on "nearly 100%" of imports. Brazil likewise was hit by the 10 percent tax, even though it was running a trade surplus with the United States.
An annex to Trump's executive order listed higher, supposedly "reciprocal" tariffs on goods from 57 countries. Those tariffs were based on Trump's longstanding but economically fallacious belief that bilateral trade deficits are inherently unfair and problematic. When the value of goods imported from any given country exceeds the value of U.S. exports to that country, Trump assumed, the explanation must be "non-reciprocal trading practices."
The formula that generated Trump's country-specific tariffs, which ranged from 11 percent for Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to 50 percent for Lesotho, reflected that simple-minded assumption. To arrive at those rates, the Trump administration divided the U.S. trade deficit with each country by the value of U.S. imports from that country, then arbitrarily halved the result. In many cases, the rates produced by that formula were puzzling.
In 2024, for example, Lesotho exported about $237 million in goods, primarily clothing and textiles, to the United States. That same year, Lesotho imported about $9 million in U.S. goods, which consisted mainly of vehicles, "milling products" such as malt and starches, machinery, and chemicals. Lesotho is a very poor country, with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of about $972 in 2024, and that fact alone goes a long way toward explaining the high ratio between its exports and imports.
At the time, Lesotho was taxing U.S. imports at a rate of 10 percent. Trump's decision to tax Lesotho's exports at a rate five times as high looked anything but "reciprocal." Last July, he implicitly acknowledged that point, reducing Lesotho's rate to 15 percent—a 70 percent drop.
Or consider Israel, which Trump had previously described as "our best ally" and "a fair-trading partner." In anticipation of Trump's tariff announcement, the Israeli government made its trade policy even friendlier to the United States by eliminating all remaining import taxes on U.S. goods. Israel nevertheless got hit by a 17 percent "reciprocal" tariff. That rate was subsequently cut to 15 percent, then cut again for certain categories of goods.
There were many such adjustments, not always in a downward direction. In July, for instance, Trump dramatically increased the tariff on Brazilian goods, from 10 percent to 50 percent. He also raised the tariff rate for seven other trading partners, including Canada (from 25 percent to 35 percent), the European Union (from 20 percent to 30 percent), and Mexico (from 25 percent to 30 percent). At the same time, he cut the rate for a dozen countries, including Cambodia (from 49 percent to 36 percent), Bangladesh (from 37 percent to 35 percent), and Sri Lanka (from 44 percent to 30 percent).
The timeline of Trump's tariffs is perplexing, even if you focus on a single country. Less than a week after "Liberation Day," Trump raised the country-specific tariff rate for China from 34 percent to 84 percent. The next day, the rate became 125 percent, in addition to the 20 percent tariff that Trump had imposed on Chinese goods in the name of reducing the flow of illicit fentanyl, for a total of 145 percent.
In May, Trump extended those tariffs to low-value packages from China, which had previously been exempt under a "de minimis" exception. Ten days later, Trump cut the 125 percent tariff to 10 percent for a 90-day period, after which it would rise to 34 percent—the rate he had initially announced on April 2. In August, he extended the 10 percent "reciprocal" tariff for another 90 days. Three months later, he cut the 20 percent "drug trafficking" tariff in half and extended the 10 percent "reciprocal" tariff until November 10, 2026.
That deadline was obviated by the Supreme Court's February 20 decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, which held that the law the president had invoked to justify both the "reciprocal" and "drug trafficking" tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), did not authorize import taxes at all. Although the impetuous, haphazard, and zigzag pattern of Trump's IEEPA tariffs was not relevant to the Court's interpretation of the statute, Chief Justice John Roberts thought it was worth noting.
"Since imposing each set of tariffs," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, "the President has issued several increases, reductions, and other modifications. One month after imposing the 10% drug trafficking tariffs on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20%. One month later, he removed a statutory exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing the reciprocal tariffs, the President increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34% to 84%. The very next day, he increased the rate further still, to 125%. This brought the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145%. The President has also shifted sets of goods into and out of the reciprocal tariff framework. And he has issued a variety of other adjustments."
It was a bewildering ordeal for exporters, importers, and the U.S. businesses that rely on them for materials, parts, and finished goods. Faced with a mercurial president whose decrees were unpredictable yet crucial to their bottom lines, those businesses had to make decisions about purchases, investments, and prices in highly uncertain, constantly changing conditions. And although Trump has switched tracks, turning to other tariff options now that IEEPA is off the table, that wild ride is not over yet.
The post Trump's Mercurial, Constantly Changing Import Taxes Took American Businesses on a Wild Ride appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Former New Haven, Connecticut, Police Chief Karl Jacobson is facing criminal charges for allegedly embezzling $85,500 from city funds, nearly all of it from funds meant to pay confidential informants. Prosecutors charged him with two counts of larceny, saying he took the money for personal use. When other police officials confronted him about the missing money, Jacobson allegedly admitted taking $10,000 for personal use, and he retired that same day. Investigators also found additional evidence linking the money to him, including two checks deposited into his personal bank account.
The post Brickbat: Cop and Robber appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Tuesday, the Court decided Chiles. The 8-1 vote was quite lopsided. Only Justice Jackson was in dissent. She articulated a very cramped conception of free speech in the commercial context. Justices Kagan and Sotomayor joined the majority opinion in full. They even wrote that Jackson "reimagin[ed]—and in that way collaps[ed]—the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions." I think Kagan and Sotomayor were correct. Indeed, it was very significant they felt compelled to respond forcefully to Justice Jackson. There have been press reports of how Justice Kagan and Sotomayor are unhappy with Justice Jackson. This opinion may represent those tensions boiling over.
Given that this case was so straightforward, why didn't the Court grant Tingley in 2023. The legal issues are the same. There has been no intervening free speech precedent.
I would posit that the legal landscape for transgender cases has changed since 2023. President Trump's executive order from January 2025, rejecting the entire concept of gender identity, reflects a broader societal shift. In the span of about a year, the Court will have decided Skrmetti, Mahmoud, Chiles, Mirabelli, and the Title IX case. While Srkmetti and Mahmoud split 6-3, I think the Title IX case may also be lopsided. Based on the oral argument, Justice Kagan seemed sympathetic to the view that Title IX bars biological males in female sports.
The legal landscape for transgender cases has shifted since 2023. Most Americans, and even legal elites, see a distinction between gay and lesbian rights and transgender rights. You can support gay marriage but oppose providing puberty blockers to minors. You can support gay troop leaders but oppose drag queen storytime. You can oppose electro-shock therapy for gay teens and also oppose public schools secretly transitioning teens without telling parents. You can oppose firing a person because they're gay but favor excluding biological males from female spas. And so on.
I've never fully understood why LGB was merged with T. Sexual orientation and gender identity are such different concepts. For gays and lesbian people, the mantra is "we were born this way, so accept us as we are" But for transgender people, the message is the opposite: "we were not born this way, so accept us as we tell you we are."
I think the schism between LGB and T is now inevitable. At some point, gay rights groups might re-evaluate their priorities.
The post If <i>Chiles</i> Was So Lopsided, Why Did The Court Deny Cert In <i>Tingley</i>? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
