Columnist.
Three months ago, voters in Colorado and Washington approved ballot initiatives aimed at legalizing the possession, production and distribution of marijuana. A month later, Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department would settle on a response to this historic development "relatively soon." How soon is that? I have been trying to get a response to that question from Justice Department spokeswoman Nanda Chitre for about a month, but she is not returning my calls. Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney's offices in Colorado and Washington decline to give any indication of how they will treat the state-licensed marijuana stores that are scheduled to open next year.
Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced a new, supposedly improved version of the federal "assault weapon" ban that expired in 2004. But like that earlier law, which the California Democrat also sponsored, Feinstein's bill prohibits the manufacture and sale of guns based on characteristics that have little or nothing to do with the danger they pose. Although arbitrary distinctions are a defining characteristic of "assault weapon" bans, recent polls indicate that most Americans support them. New survey data suggest one possible explanation: Most Americans don't know what "assault weapons" are. Feinstein's bill would ban "157 dangerous military-style assault weapons" by name, along with other guns that meet certain criteria. A rifle is considered an "assault weapon," for example, if it has a detachable magazine and one or more of these "military characteristics": a pistol grip or forward grip, a grenade launcher or rocket launcher, a barrel shroud, a threaded barrel, or a folding, telescoping or detachable stock.
"The single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence and mass shootings," President Obama said last week, "is to make sure those who would commit acts of violence cannot get access to guns." Toward that end, he wants to require background checks not just for sales by federally licensed firearms dealers (as under current law), but for all gun transfers except those between relatives. This idea seems to be the most popular of Obama's gun control proposals, supported by nine out of 10 respondents in a recent CBS News poll. Yet it is unlikely to stop mass shootings, and enforcing it would require the sort of surveillance that has long been anathema to defenders of the Second Amendment, exposing millions of peaceful people to the threat of gun confiscation and criminal prosecution.
A limit on magazine capacity is emerging as a leading contender for the something that supposedly must be done in response to last month's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. A ban on "large-capacity ammunition feeding devices" is one of the new gun restrictions approved by the New York legislature this week and one of the measures President Obama wants Congress to enact. The rationale for such limits is that mass murderers need "large-capacity" magazines, while law-abiding citizens don't. Both premises are questionable, and so is the notion that politicians should be the arbiters of necessity under the Second Amendment. The problem with letting legislators decide what gun owners need is immediately apparent when we ask what qualifies as a "large-capacity" magazine. Under current New York law and under the federal limit that expired in 2004 (which Obama wants Congress to reinstate), more than 10 rounds is "large." This week, the New York legislature redefined "large" as more than seven rounds.
Will Barack Obama go down in history as our least merciful president? With less than two weeks to go in his first term, this reputedly progressive and enlightened man has a strong shot at winning that dubious distinction. December, a traditional season for presidential clemency, has come and gone, and still Obama has granted just one commutation (which shortens a prisoner's sentence) and 22 pardons (which clear people's records, typically after they've completed their sentences). Barring a last-minute flurry of clemency actions, his first-term record looks weaker than those of all but a few previous presidents. Which of Obama's predecessors managed to make less use of the clemency power during their first terms? According to numbers compiled by P.S. Ruckman Jr., a professor of political science at Rock Valley College in Rockville, Ill, just three: George Washington, who probably did not have many clemency petitions to address during the first few years of the nation's existence; William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia a month after taking office; and James Garfield, who was shot four months into his presidency and died that September.
The Medical Marijuana Grower's Stark Choice
The day of Adam Lanza's murderous assault on Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mike Rogers said stricter gun control would not be an appropriate response. "The more realistic discussion," said the Republican congressman from Michigan, "is how do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?" Last week, another Republican congressman, Howard Coble of North Carolina, agreed that "it's more of a mental health problem than a gun problem right now." And last Friday, when the National Rifle Association broke its silence on the Sandy Hook massacre, the group's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, called for "an active national database of the mentally ill." Psychiatrically informed policies aimed at controlling people rather than weapons are popular in the wake of mass shootings, especially among those who rightly worry that gun restrictions will unfairly burden law-abiding Americans while failing to prevent future attacks. Yet treating gun violence as "a mental health problem" presents similar dangers.
"These tragedies must end," says President Obama, referring to Adam Lanza's horrifying assault on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last Friday. Although it is hard to disagree with that sentiment, the measures Obama favors cannot reasonably be expected to prevent such thankfully rare but nevertheless appalling outbursts of senseless violence. After the massacre, press secretary Jay Carney reiterated Obama's support for reinstating the federal "assault weapon" ban that expired in 2004, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., promised to introduce a bill aimed at doing so next month. But we know for sure that an "assault weapon" ban would not have stopped Lanza or made his attack less deadly, because it didn't.
Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed for the first time to take on the issue of gay marriage. No matter how it rules in the two cases it will hear next spring, polling data suggest it is only a matter of time before legal recognition of same-sex unions is the norm throughout the country. Something similar is happening with marijuana, which became legal in Washington last week and in Colorado on Monday. With both pot and gay marriage, familiarity is breeding tolerance. The cases before the Supreme Court deal with popular reactions against gay marriage: the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law that barred the federal government from recognizing state-licensed gay marriages, and Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that amended California's Constitution to eliminate same-sex couples' right to marry, which the California Supreme Court had recognized that year. But something interesting happened after those measures passed: Surveys now indicate that most Americans support gay marriage.
Since Republicans are pushing entitlement reform and Democrats like taking money from rich people, you might think they could agree on means-testing Medicare and Social Security as part of a deficit reduction deal. Yet many Democrats are surprisingly hostile to the idea of tailoring these programs to help people who actually need them. There are two main reasons for this resistance -- one strategic, the other ideological. Neither is persuasive, even from a progressive point of view, at a time when trillion-dollar deficits are the norm and publicly held federal debt is projected to reach 150 percent of gross domestic product within two decades.
In 1986, The American Banker defined email as "a trademark of CompuServe," Computerworld noted that sending a single message required a 10-minute phone call, and InfoWorld described "a pilot scheme that will allow users of one system to send messages to mailbox holders on another." That was the year Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), so it is hardly surprising that the once forward-looking law seems antiquated today. In fact, ECPA is so out of date that it has left us vulnerable to government snooping in ways most Americans do not appreciate. With the Senate Judiciary Committee considering possible fixes this week, now is a good time to reflect on how technological advances and misguided legal reasoning have eroded the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches of our "papers and effects," which nowadays take forms the Framers could not have anticipated.
At the Cosmopolitan, a luxury hotel and casino in Las Vegas, "just the right amount of wrong" is the naughty fun you get for $200 a night. At the $57-a-night Motel Caswell in Tewksbury, Mass., just the right amount of wrong is what the federal government says it needs to take the business from the family that has operated it for 57 years. That amount, it turns out, is tiny. During a recent trial before a U.S. magistrate judge in Boston, a federal prosecutor cited one heroin overdose and 14 incidents in which guests or visitors were arrested for drug crimes at the motel from 1994 through 2008 -- a minuscule percentage of the 200,000 or so room rentals during that period -- to show the business is a "dangerous property" ripe for seizure.
Colorado and Washington Show Us the Way Out of the Senseless War on Marijuana
Our dog, a Maltese/Yorkshire terrier mix named Lana, knows one trick: She sits on command. Sometimes this will get her a peanut, but it does not really do anything for me. When Aldo and Franky sit, by contrast, they accomplish something important for their police handlers, signaling the presence of illegal drugs and justifying searches that would otherwise be prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Two cases the Supreme Court heard last week offer an opportunity to impose long overdue restraints on this amazing ability to transform a cop's hunch into probable cause, which is based on serious misconceptions about the meaning of a police dog's "alert." Aldo, a German shepherd, was riding with Officer Todd Wheetley of the Liberty County, Fla., sheriff 's office on June 24, 2006, when Wheetley pulled over a pickup truck driven by Clayton Harris because of an expired tag. Harris seemed nervous to Wheetley, who later said he was shaking, restless and breathing rapidly.
During the final presidential debate, the moderator asked Mitt Romney about President Obama's policy of killing suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, with missiles fired from unmanned aircraft. "I believe we should use any and all means necessary to take out people who pose a threat to us and our friends around the world," Romney replied. "I support that entirely." In other words, Romney has no qualms about trusting one man with the power to order the summary execution of anyone, anywhere in the world, whom he deems "a threat to us." This bipartisan disregard for civil liberties is the rule rather than the exception for the two major presidential candidates, who are about equally bad when it comes to respecting constitutional rights, although in somewhat different ways.
A year before Mitt Romney picked him as a running mate, Paul Ryan gave a speech in which he discussed the promise and peril of the Arab Spring. "It's too soon to tell whether these revolutions will result in governments that respect the rights of their citizens or in one form of autocracy ... supplanting another," he said. "While we work to assure the former, American policy should be realistic about our ability to avert the latter." More generally, Ryan said, "American policy should be tempered by a healthy humility about the extent of our power to control events in other regions." It was hard to discern any such reticence in this week's presidential debate, during which Romney agreed with President Obama that the U.S. government has a duty to liberate and pacify the world, by force of arms if necessary.
Next week, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are scheduled to meet for their third and final presidential debate, this time focusing on foreign policy. Although he will be on the ballot in at least 48 states on Nov. 6, Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's nominee, was not invited, lest an actual debate about foreign policy break out. Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, believes that so-called defense spending should be used for defense, that the United States "should resort to military action as the last option and only as provided in the Constitution" and that our foreign policy should be "reoriented toward the protection of U.S. citizens and interests." Obama and Romney, by contrast, believe "it is the responsibility of our president to use America's great power to shape history," as Romney put it in a recent speech.
During last week's presidential debate, Mitt Romney repeatedly promised to "lower taxes on middle-income families" without reducing "the share paid by high-income individuals." But this combination will prove difficult, if not impossible, for the Republican candidate to deliver given the other elements of his tax reform plan -- especially his illogical definition of "middle-income families." Romney's basic idea, which in broad outline has bipartisan support, is to "lower tax rates" and "broaden the base" by reducing deductions, credits and exemptions. He proposes cutting individual income tax rates by 20 percent, so that the top rate would be 28 percent rather than the current 35 percent and the bottom rate would drop from 10 percent to 8 percent. He also wants to abolish the estate tax, repeal the alternative minimum tax, and eliminate taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for taxpayers earning less than $200,000.
Addressing the U.N. General Assembly last week, President Barack Obama tried to explain this strange attachment that Americans have to freedom of speech. He was handicapped by his attraction to a moral principle whose dangers the journalist Jonathan Rauch presciently highlighted in his 1993 book, "Kindly Inquisitors": "Thou shalt not hurt others with words." During the past few weeks, the widespread, often violent and sometimes deadly protests against "Innocence of Muslims," a laughably amateurish trailer for a seemingly nonexistent film mocking the Prophet Muhammad, have demonstrated the alarming extent to which citizens of Muslim countries -- including peaceful moderates, as well as violent extremists -- embrace this injunction against offending people. "We don't think that depictions of the prophets are freedom of expression," a Muslim scholar explained to The New York Times. "We think it is an offense against our rights."
By the time the 21st Amendment ended national alcohol prohibition in December 1933, more than a dozen states had already opted out. Maryland never passed its own version of the Volstead Act, while New York repealed its alcohol prohibition law in 1923. Eleven other states eliminated their statutes by referendum in November 1932. We could see the beginning of a similar rebellion against marijuana prohibition this year as voters in three states -- Washington, Colorado and Oregon -- decide whether to legalize the drug's production and sale for recreational use. If any of these ballot initiatives pass, it might be the most consequential election result this fall, forcing both major parties to confront an unjust, irrational policy that Americans increasingly oppose.
