Last week, the Department of Justice announced a new policy regarding its approach to corporate criminal investigations. Instead of focusing first on the company and, having resolved that portion of the investigation, turning to the task of identifying potential individual criminal suspects, prosecutors are now directed to build their cases against individual wrong doers from the start. Media coverage of this policy statement has focused on criticism levied against the administration for being too soft on Wall Street and too cozy with corporate donors. The New York Times trotted out the old complaint that no one went to jail in the wake of the financial crisis (even though, to my knowledge, no one has ever identified a criminal law the violation of which caused any part of the crisis). While the administration’s rhetoric about equal justice before the law is admirable, the policy memo and its surrounding coverage have a distressing whiff of scapegoating about them.
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Under new rules in the District of Columbia, residents are allowed to possess, smoke, and grow marijuana, but they are not allowed to sell it. So, as Aaron C. Davis writes in the Washington Post, this presents an interesting question: How is the marijuana grown in D.C. supposed to get to people in the city who want to smoke it? And it turns out that in a few short months the enterprising people of Washington have found several opportunities:
Read the rest of this post →A fitness instructor who took up the hobby six months ago has amassed enough pot to make tens of thousands of dollars selling it. Instead, he’s begun giving away a little bit to anyone who pays for a massage. The instructor asked not to be named out of concern that he or his home, where he sometimes serves clients, could become targets for criminals.
A T‑shirt vendor in Columbia Heights who declined to comment may be working in a similar gray area. College students say the roving stand has become known to include a “gift” of a bag of marijuana inside a purchase for those who tip really well. And recently, dozens of people paid $125 for a class in Northwest Washington to learn about cooking with cannabis from a home grower. Free samples were included.
Andrew Paul House, 27, a recent law school graduate, may be the best early test case for whether home growers can find a way to make money from their extra pot.
House has started a corporation and a sleek Web site to order deliveries of homegrown marijuana to D.C. residents’ doorsteps — “free gifts” in exchange for donations to the company, akin to a coffee mug given to donors by a public radio station.
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Workers Shouldn’t Have to Jump through Hoops to not Fund Union Political Activity
If everyone agrees that forcing public employees to subsidize a labor union’s political or ideological speech impinges their First Amendment rights—and the Supreme Court has been unanimous on that point for decades—then what possible justification is there for requiring workers who’ve declined to join the union to go through the arduous process of opting out from making such payments year after year?
There is none, argues Cato’s amicus brief in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. As the Court recounted in Knox v. SEIU (2012), “acceptance of the opt-out approach appears to have come about more as a historical accident than through the careful application of First Amendment principles.” But as a matter of principle, opt-out plainly violates the cardinal rule that procedures involving compelled speech and association must be “carefully tailored to minimize the infringement” of First Amendment rights.
Under the opt-out approach, dissenting workers bear the risk that, if they are unsuccessful in following the opt-out procedure reluctantly administered by the union, their money will be used to further political and ideological ends with which they do not agree. The labor union, whose constitutional rights are not at stake, bears no risk at all—by default, it gets the money.
For example, a teacher who learns partway through the year that her payments to the union are being used to fund speech that she finds abhorrent—and the union here lobbies on controversial issues like abortion, gun control, and immigration reform—is still compelled by the government to continue funding that speech until the next opt-out period.
Unions, of course, favor opt-out precisely because it allows them to take advantage of inertia on the part of would-be dissenters who fail to object affirmatively. But that is no basis to countenance the wholesale violation of public employees’ First Amendment rights. Courts “do not presume acquiescence in the loss of fundamental rights,” and application of that principle here will spell the end of abusive opt-out regimes.
The Supreme Court will hear argument in Friedrichs in the middle of the upcoming term, likely in January. For more on the case and our argument, see this SCOTUSblog essay.
The Next Big Obamacare Lawsuit Lives
Lessig Strains to Compare His Campaign to Eugene McCarthy’s
Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is running for President on the single issue of adding restrictions to certain electoral speech. In his announcement video, he points to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 run for the White House. He says in that video:
In 1967 Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the primary here in New Hampshire to challenge his own party’s sitting president because he feared the most important moral issue of the time, the Vietnam War, was going to be invisible in that election. In four months McCarthy went from almost nothing in the polls to almost beating Lyndon Johnson in the primary and the one issue that no one wanted to talk about became the one issue that no one could ignore.
It seems clear that Lessig intends to set up a parallel between Vietnam and America’s insufficiently regimented electoral system. There’s just one problem with pointing to McCarthy in this case: Eugene McCarthy was able to make that historic primary campaign about Vietnam because a few rich anti-war guys gave his campaign massive direct contributions, something Lessig strongly opposes.
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast (Subscribe: iTunes/RSS/CatoAudio for iOS), I talk to John Samples about the facts of McCarthy’s candidacy and why Lessig’s example doesn’t hold up. We also discuss Stewart Mott, one of McCarthy’s financial backers, and his appreciation for less-than-fully-fettered political speech.
The Right to Anonymous Speech and Association
Since the Enlightenment, anonymous speech has been an integral component of social change, exemplified by Cato’s Letters, the Federalist Papers, and indeed the Anti-Federalist Papers. Accordingly, the Constitution provides a wide berth for the proper “breathing space” that “First Amendment freedoms need … to survive,” NAACP v. Button (1963), by protecting anonymous-speech rights and requiring judges to be skeptical regarding laws that compel disclosure of identifying information.
California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, has broken with this tradition in demanding that the Center for Competitive Politics (CCP), an educational foundation and public-interest law firm specializing in the First Amendment and political law, disclose its principal donors to the state. The federal district court determined that the demand for this information in the name of “investigative efficiency” was a valid use of state power, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed that ruling. Importantly, this rule applies to all nonprofit organizations soliciting donations or otherwise operating in California, so the associational chill reaches into the ability of every nonprofit to exist in California while preserving privacy through anonymity.
Cato, joined by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has filed a brief supporting CCP’s request that the Supreme Court review the case. The Ninth Circuit failed to give proper solicitude to CCP’s constitutional rights here by not applying what lawyers call “heightened scrutiny” at each turn of its analysis. Instead, the lower court applied a party-specific, “as-applied” exception to the general rule that’s only relevant if the compelled disclosure has already survived a broader, “facial” challenge—and it collapsed the clear distinction between the importance of the government interest in disclosure and the extent of the nexus between the disclosure and the asserted interest.
Reviewing Carter’s Deregulatory Record
As health concerns for former President Carter mount, it’s nice to be able to look back on his time in the White House and see something remarkably positive. Carter’s deregulation of air travel, commercial trucking, rail shipping and oil have delivered substantial and ongoing dividends to Americans. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast (Subscribe: iTunes/RSS/CatoAudio for iOS), Peter Van Doren discusses how those policy changes occurred.
An e‑mailer reminds me that Carter’s pen also sealed the deal ending the longstanding prohibition on home brewing of beer for personal consumption. Anyone who appreciates craft beer today owes a small thanks to Carter for getting the feds out of the way of the small-scale tinkerers who eventually became today’s craft beer entrepreneurs.