Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i Reason

IN 2020, THE U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Trump administration from unilaterally rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The administration’s attempted cancellation of DACA, which protects unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, was “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the executive branch’s lawful authority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. In February, the Supreme Court heard Biden v. Nebraska, another case with far-reaching implications for executive authority. Unfortunately for President Joe Biden, the case reminded Roberts of his 2020 ruling against Trump. At issue in Nebraska is Biden’s 2022 plan to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for every borrower who earns less than $125,000 a year. Pell Grant recipients would be eligible for up to $20,000 in debt relief.…

AN EPITHET HAS emerged on the post-liberal fringes of the online conservative movement: right-liberal. It’s a term these critics apply to libertarians, old-school Reaganite conservatives, and anyone else who prefers individualism to collectivism or believes that it benefits everyone to keep markets as free as possible from government meddling. Liberal in this context means classically liberal, the political outlook that emphasizes individual rights, limited government, and the rule of law. But the writers who deploy this supposedly disparaging sobriquet hope that rank-and-file conservatives will hear liberal and assume a leftist orientation. “America is an idea,” scoffed Newsweek Opinion Editor Josh Hammer in a recent tweet. He attributed that sentiment to “every right-liberal and left-liberal platitude-regurgitator ever.” Note the facile elision of any difference between the two groups: To be a…

THE 2024 REPUBLICAN presidential primary has largely been framed as a referendum on former President Donald Trump. He’s expected to face at least half a dozen serious rivals, with one possible contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, sometimes—but not always—out-polling him in head-to-head matchups. But Trump’s fate isn’t the only big question this primary could settle for Republicans. Arguably more important is the future of the party’s foreign policy. No consensus has emerged since Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, the drawdown of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the turn toward great power conflict, which was accelerated in 2022 by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the pattern of reciprocal provocations around Taiwan by Beijing and Washington. Two decades ago, the Republican perspective on military engagement abroad was unified and clear. Then-President…

Less than two weeks after a driver rammed into his Austin, Texas, home, Chris Newby got a letter from the city telling him his house was now in violation of city code and that he had 30 days to get it repaired or face $2,000 a day in fines. Officials said it is city policy to send such letters after a house is damaged in order to ensure homeowner safety. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission said it will no longer permit “simulated warfare or violence between opposing forces” on sites it controls. Historical reenactors say the new rules effectively ban reenactments of battles at state-owned historical sites. The commission voted in March to allow a 2023 event but plans to study the issue further before committing to reenactments in…

FROM HIS INAUGURATION to March 24, 2023, President Joe Biden increased the regulatory paperwork obligation by 220 million hours, reports American Action Forum’s Dan Goldbeck. The regulatory paperwork burden under Biden “exceeds the combined total accumulated under Obama and Trump in their opening years,” Gold-beck says. If that number seems incomprehensibly large, he notes that it equates to “roughly 25,000 years” of filling out forms and other compliance tasks. The figures in Goldbeck’s charts compare the three presidencies at the same point in their third year and are derived from regulatory notices published by federal agencies in the Federal Register. Final rules have gone into effect after a period of public comment, while final rule costs capture the estimated economic impact of regulations over a multiyear period established by the…

“CANCER SIGNAL NOT detected.” That was the happy finding of my Galleri multi-cancer early detection (MCED) blood test from the Silicon Valley biotech company GRAIL. The Galleri test presages an emerging wave of new precision biomedical tests produced by a panoply of biotech startups. GRAIL’s MCED test analyzes DNA shed by both normal and cancerous cells into a person’s bloodstream, looking for telltale epigenetic changes that affect the way genes operate. Specific changes are associated with the presence of cancer cells. Published research indicates that the test can detect a shared signal across more than 50 types of cancer. They include pancreatic, liver, and kidney cancers, which are difficult to diagnose early. The Galleri test not only detects a cancer signal but also provides two predictions of the cancer signal’s…

ON THE LEFT and the right, in Europe and the United States, a consensus is growing: People aren’t having enough kids—not enough to support the welfare state, not enough to preserve the culture, not enough to keep advanced economies young, thriving, and entrepreneurial. The last time the U.S. was at replacement level fertility (the number of kids the average woman must have to stave off population decline, without immigration) was 2007. Replacement level fertility is roughly 2.1 kids per woman. Since then, America’s total fertility rate dropped to 1.66. This, in turn, led to a lot of unanswered questions about the fate of federal entitlement programs, innovation, education, politics, and culture in an aging country. To many, the solution is obvious: Americans should have more children. Yet pro-natalist policies have…

THE STORY WENT something like this: A white woman pulled up to a Black Women Matter protest in Charlottesville and told attendees they would make “good fucking speed bumps.” When protesters confronted her, the driver cried and called the police. If you were a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) during summer 2020—as I was—you almost certainly heard this tale. It was repeated hundreds of times, over group chats and Instagram posts and viral tweets. The rumors were given a sheen of legitimacy by local news reporting and were acknowledged by the university administration. The allegations first attracted attention after Zyahna Bryant, a 19-year-old UVA student and social justice activist, made them on Twitter during the demonstration. Her account would be retweeted more than 1,000 times. “The woman in…

THE JUNE FORECAST calls for plenty of rainbows, regardless of the actual weather. Once a small and highly political gesture of defiance against a government and culture that refused to grant gay and transgender people the same rights and respect as other citizens, Pride Month has become a big, heavily branded celebration of anything connected to any gender or sexual orientation that isn’t conventionally heteronormative. Some of the rainbow branding veers into the absurd: electric toothbrushes, bottles of wine, CBD oils, hamburgers. Skittles, already rainbow-colored, hilariously decided during 2020’s Pride Month to eliminate all its colors and sell specialty packs full of pale gray candies with the motto, “Only one rainbow matters during Pride.” That motto isn’t really accurate: There are dozens of different rainbows now. The past few years…

THE CANNABIS LEGALIZATION bill that New York enacted in 2021 included a provision that was supposed to help people convicted of marijuana felonies by downgrading their records in line with current law. But a typo-graphical error made that relief harder to obtain than legislators promised. The section of the law dealing with prior marijuana convictions describes two situations. Paragraph 2(a)(i) refers to a person convicted of a marijuana offense that “would not have been a crime” had the 2021 changes been in effect. Paragraph 2(a)(ii) refers to a person who “would have been guilty of a lesser or potentially less onerous offense” under current law. Paragraph 2(b) says a court that receives a petition from someone convicted of a marijuana offense that no longer exists “shall…. grant the motion to…

WHEN PRESIDENT JOE Biden sparred with Republicans during his State of the Union address in February, he vowed to veto any attempt at cutting Social Security benefits. Yet the budget proposal he unveiled in March lacked a plan to avert the mandatory Social Security benefit cuts that are quickly approaching. Social Security will become insolvent in the early 2030s without policy changes, but no one in Washington wants to make those changes. Do nothing, and benefits will need to be cut by about 20 percent across the board within a decade or so, according to estimates by the Social Security Administration’s trustees. If your ship is taking on water, you can try bailing it out, which in this case means changing the program’s parameters to better balance revenue and spending.…

MOVIE PINBALL JASON RUSSELL Many things were banned in New York City for much of the 20th century but are legal today. Pornography. Recreational marijuana use. Pinball? As if his namesake airport isn’t bad enough, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia led the crusade against pinball in 1941 on the supposed grounds that it was a mob-backed gateway to get kids hooked on gambling. Pinball was seen as a game of chance, not skill. La Guardia told cops to make the seizure and destruction of pinball machines their “top priority,” and cities across the country followed his lead. Reason’s own Bragg brothers, Austin and Meredith, directed and wrote a fantastic film about the wonderfully mustachioed man most responsible for overturning the ban in the 1970s, Roger Sharpe. Available to stream on various…

Diana Alvarez’s son always wanted to go to college, so she started working in a smoke shop to earn some extra cash. What started as a part-time job evolved into a full-time family business: Lit City Smoke Shop, located in Washington, D.C. When the city passed Initiative 71, making it legal to possess up to two ounces of marijuana for personal use, the law allowed stores to “gift’’ small amounts of weed as long as a customer bought another item. Now Lit City is part of D.C.’s thriving gifting industry. While reporting a video for Reason in November, Justin Zuckerman visited Alvarez at her shop to talk about the hardships of running a small business that’s part of a new industry. Q: What is your relationship with the police? Has…