REASON – Free Minds & Free Markets | This, That and The Other

One problem, these days, is that there is so much "shit" that is "flooding the zone" - Steve Bannon's metaphor, I  believe - that it is very difficult to know, from day to day, which amazing and unprecedented events matter, and which don't. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson's opinion for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Abrego Garcia case matters. Eugene has already excerpted much of the opinion here, and the full text is available here. Though it was issued yesterday (!), it already feels like old news, superseded by Trump's attacks on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, Senator van Hollen's visit to the El Salvador mega-prison where Abrego Garcia is being held, A U.S. threat to pull out of the negotiations to end the Ukraine war, etc. etc. But I urge you, if you have not done so already, to spend a little of your time and attention on it. … ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Writing in The Federalist this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio brags that he is protecting freedom of speech by ending his department's misbegotten crusade against "disinformation." Yet Rubio is simultaneously undermining freedom of speech by targeting anti-Israel activists for deportation because he deems their opinions harmful to U.S. foreign policy interests. More generally, Rubio's ringing defense of First Amendment rights is hard to take seriously given all the ways his boss has sought to punish people for speech that offends him, whether through deportation, regulation, litigation, criminal investigations, or executive decrees targeting disfavored lawyers and journalists. Rubio says he is "taking a crucial step toward keeping the president's promise to liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC)." Congress defunded the GEC last year based on concerns that its efforts to combat "disinformation" had targeted constitutionally protected speech. But as Rubio notes, the State Department during the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on April 2 instituting tariffs on a wide range of countries. ( Andrew Leyden/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom)   Today, the Liberty Justice Center and I filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, temporary restraining order, and summary judgment in our case challenging Donald Trump's massive "Liberation Day" tariffs. The motion sets out our arguments in greater detail than the complaint filed on Monday.  For a shorter and more accessible overview of the reasons why these tariffs are illegal, see my just-published Lawfare article "The Constitutional Case Against Trump's Trade War." The case is entitled VOS Selections, Inc. v. Trump. We are litigating the case (pro bono) on behalf of five US businesses that import goods from many of the countries targeted by the tariffs. As explained in today's motion, the new tariffs are inflicting grave harm on them, and in at least some cases threaten their viability.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice. New on the Short Circuit podcast: The eternal return of a qualified immunity case plus the long shadow of Judge Bork's VHS rentals. Come for the D.C. Circuit smackdown of a NEPA challenge to a decade-long, ultra-voluminous environmental review that the court already signed off on once. Stay for Judge Randolph's tutorial on "Knightian uncertainty," and what it means for the possibility of quantifying carbon impacts of natural-gas exports from Alaska. Man buys NYC house in 2014. When he goes to sell it in 2021, he discovers (for the first time) a $1,000 penalty from the city for failing to file a report about a boiler that had been removed before he bought the house. City: A third-party contractor's third-party contractor mailed the violations in 2015, so he… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate who died this past Sunday, spent the better part of his literary career novelizing the history of Latin America. It's curious, then, that when he reflected on Latin America's traumatic past in a 1995 essay for Reason, Llosa diagnosed its root cause as an excess of fiction. Llosa agreed that when Spanish inquisitors set about suppressing the novel in their new colonies, they were targeting a subversive art form. A classical liberal through and through, he saw only problems and unintended consequences resulting from this government prohibition. "In repressing and censoring the literary genre specifically invented to give 'the necessity of lying' a place in the world, the Inquisitors achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted," wrote Llosa. "Theirs was a world without novels, yes, but also a world into which fiction had spread and contaminated practically everything: history, religion,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.