Indice dei contenuti per February 2021 in Reason

ACCORDING TO THE conventional wisdom, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett successfully bobbed and weaved her way through her Senate confirmation hearings without really sharing any of her substantive legal views. But Barrett did disclose one big thing: She thinks the Supreme Court got it wrong when it protected the constitutional right to economic liberty in the famous 1905 case Lochner v. New York. On October 14, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) asked Barrett to “talk just a little bit about how a court could substitute its own views on economic policy for those of a law-enacting body, of a legislature or of Congress.” Barrett replied that “in the Lochner era” and “in Lochner itself,” the Supreme Court “was standing in the way of reforms for workers that legislatures were enacting.”…

FEW JOURNALISTS ARE more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald, who shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden revelations. Though unapologetically progressive, the 53-year-old former lawyer never shrinks from fighting with the left. A week before the 2020 election, he quit The Intercept, the online news organization he cofounded in 2014, because, by his account, it refused to run a story unless he “remove[d] all sections critical of” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Denouncing what he called “the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality” that led him to be what he characterized as “censored” by his own media outlet, Greenwald railed that “these are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom.” Like a growing number of refugees from more-traditional…

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned on a promise to reduce the city’s dependence on fines and fees to balance its budget, noting that fines and fees fall disproportionately on the poor and minorities. Now that Lightfoot is facing the possibility of a more than $1 billion deficit in 2021, her budget proposal calls for $35 tickets for anyone the city’s speed cameras detect driving as little as 6 mph over the limit. When Geauga County, Ohio, Juvenile Court Judge Timothy J. Grendell ordered two teenage boys to resume visitation with their estranged father, they refused. So Grendell had them locked up in a juvenile detention center for the weekend instead. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, District Attorney David Prater has charged two former detention officers and their supervisor with cruelty to a…

AFTER RISING FOR three years in a row, marijuana arrests in the United States fell by 18 percent in 2019. Police made about 545,600 such arrests in 2019, according to the FBI, compared to about 663,400 in 2018. As usual, the vast majority of those arrests—92 percent—were for possession rather than manufacture or sale. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws reported that “much of the national decline resulted from a drop-off in marijuana arrests in Texas,” where the total fell by more than 50,000. Nationwide, marijuana arrests peaked at nearly 873,000 in 2007; the 2019 number was 37 percent lower. While the odds that any given cannabis consumer will be arrested have always been low, they are getting lower. Possession arrests in 2007 represented about 3 percent…

WHILE EATING FROM cans is far from my preferred sustenance, putting my own food into them for later consumption is a different matter. Throughout 2020—a year we could have skipped—my family took to home-canning food even as we expanded a garden that we hope will provide us with more to store. It’s a means of armoring ourselves against a world that seems determined to throw every possible challenge our way and of turning our focus from insane headlines to comforting home activities. For us, a big spur was the supply disruptions, when chicken, ground beef, canned goods, and other foods disappeared from markets and were rationed when available. We got in the habit of grabbing and storing goods as they appeared. But the chest freezer has limited capacity. And what…

PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE BIDEN has indicated that he will use his executive authority to reverse many of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Biden likely will move quickly to scrap the ban on travel from 13 countries, most predominantly Muslim, and to reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that granted temporary legal status and protection from deportation to residents brought to the United States without authorization as minors. Another issue that deserves Biden’s urgent attention is stalled legislation in Congress that would expedite green cards for Indian and Chinese professionals, the former facing waits of well beyond their lifetimes. The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act overwhelmingly passed the House in fall 2019. But a companion Senate bill that then–Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) co-sponsored was derailed partly because of resistance…

MY FELLOW AMERICANS, our long National Infrastructure Week is over. The whole thing’s been exhausting: a four-year assault on the sensibilities and senses at a relentless death-metal pace. Every day brought a new enormity, from that uncomfortably Freudian spat with Kim Jong Un about whose “nuclear button” was “bigger & more powerful” to the eerie “I’m meltinggg!” rants about voter fraud near the end. Midway through Donald J. Trump’s tenure, in a desperate attempt at self-care, I moved my iPhone from nightstand to dresser—just to delay my what-fresh-hell-is-this early morning scan of the president’s Twitter feed until I was actually upright. But was it all as radically disjunctive as it felt? Humor me: Try, if you can, to mentally mute @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter feed; conjure up a President Trump who in…

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, a Syrian rebel group called the Hamza Division showed up in an unexpected place: the disputed post-Soviet territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, 600 miles from Aleppo. The rebels had been offered $1,500 per month each to fight for Azerbaijan against Armenia in the two countries’ border war over that disputed territory, several different news outlets reported. Sayf Bulad, commander of the Hamza Division, has an interesting past. He served as a commander in a CIA-backed rebel group, appeared in pro–Islamic State propaganda, trained with the U.S. military, and fought other U.S.-backed rebel groups in Syria on behalf of the Turkish government. Now he was helping two former Soviet republics fight each other for money. Bulad’s story is a symbol of the chaotic U.S. policy toward Syria and its unintended…

YOU MIGHT HAVE missed it amid all the shouting about the 2020 election, but the most populous county in the United States will now have a reform-minded district attorney. Challenger George Gascón beat incumbent Jackie Lacey 54–46 percent in November to become the top prosecutor of Los Angeles County, which has a population of 10 million. It was the most significant win of the cycle for criminal justice reformers who in recent years have focused on local prosecutor races. D.A.s wield an enormous amount of power and discretion in the criminal justice system, deciding which crimes to prioritize, how to charge defendants, and whether to seek high bail amounts. During the last few election cycles, a wave of well-funded progressive candidates have run for prosecutor’s offices in major cities, turning…

WITH FRESH FACES in the White House and Congress, many Trump-era political agendas will soon be discarded. But the desire to use antitrust law against popular tech companies isn’t likely to go anywhere. In recent months, Republicans and Democrats have both been itching to flex their regulatory muscle against the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. In October, 11 state attorneys general—all Republicans—and the Department of Justice filed a civil suit against Google, accusing the internet search giant of maintaining a digital search and ad monopoly “through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices,” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But the lawsuit fails to explain either how Google’s practices amount to anything other than normal business deals or how consumers are being harmed. The bar for showing consumer harm “is…

IN A SPEECH delivered almost exactly one year before the 2020 election, Vice President Mike Pence outlined the stakes of a potential tech cold war between the United States and China. China had “smashed the barriers between civilian and military technological domains,” Pence said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, just around the corner from the White House. “By law and presidential fiat, companies in China—whether private, state-owned, or foreign—must share their technologies with the Chinese military,” Pence said. Those technologies, in turn, were being weaponized by the Communist regime in Beijing to hone its authoritarian conduct at home—and, Pence added ominously, were being increasingly exported “to countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.” Pence went on to say that America did not seek a technological “decoupling” from…

TV JEOPARDY! ROBBY SOAVE On November 8, 2020, Jeopardy!’s legions of fans received the devastating news that beloved quizmaster Alex Trebek had passed away after announcing a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer two years earlier. The 80-year-old hosted Jeopardy! for 37 seasons. The show had recently begun airing new episodes again, after halting production from March to August due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jeopardy’s current stock of pre-taped episodes—enough of them to last until Christmas—will constitute Trebek’s final appearances. These episodes include some social distancing (contestants’ podiums are farther apart) but are otherwise comfortingly the same as always. Indeed, Jeopardy! has changed very little since Trebek took over for Art Fleming in 1984. The show enjoyed decades of cultural relevance, in large part due to its host. A consummate professional, Trebek…