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education and schooling folly general freedom

School Choice Reform at Last

How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.

Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-choice legislation.

SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.

The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic Party chairman.

With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-choice team.

Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.

The net result? Of the current 21 anti-school-choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)

The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment Eighth Amendment rights general freedom

The Case of the Narrow Driveway

Sandy Martinez: mother of three, working hard to get by, whole life ahead of her — why would she sabotage it by failing to perfectly park her car in her narrow driveway such that two of the wheels edged onto the grass?

Think I’m making it up? 

No. It’s true. Some people get distracted and treat their grass as if it were gravel and let their car edge onto it.

Why’dja do it Sandy, huh? Why?

On the hand, it’s her property, so who cares? 

What difference does it make? 

Well, mucho . . . if you’re Lantana, Florida, which fined Sandy $101,750 for imperfect parking, $47,000 because of storm-inflicted fence damage, $16,000 for cracks in her driveway.

The good news is that Institute for Justice is litigating on behalf of Sandy Martinez and other homeowners being hit with plainly unjust fines for trivial code violations.

IJ argues that the state and local governments at fault are violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against excessive fines. And the Institute and its clients are winning. The U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled, in Timbs v. Indiana, that this Eight Amendment ban applies to cities and states as well as to the federal government. 

Many locales, perhaps including Lantana, Florida, may still try to get away with the grift despite this definitive ruling. But sooner or later, some judge will throw out the blatantly excessive fines and point to the recent Supreme Court decision.

Help is on the way, Sandy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Did Steve Baker Commit Journalism?

The safest thing to do — politically, anyway — is plant yourself in a corner and sit still. But people tend to want to move around, live, do their jobs.

Steve Baker, reporter for Blaze Media, recently was forced to “self-surrender” to federal authorities for committing initially unspecified crimes.

Was doing his job the crime? 

His fed-embarrassing journalism about the January 6 “insurrection” and the way many people have been incarcerated for years for little more than trespassing — was that the crime?

As video of the not-always- innocuous but often-innocuous goings-on of January 6 has been released, Baker has been among those examining the record and noting apparent contradictions in the official story.

When he turned himself in to the FBI last Friday, he was facing charges that the FBI had flatly refused to divulge. But now the Blaze reports that, three years after January 6 “insurrection,” Baker is being charged for things like “entering [restricted areas] without lawful authority” or “parading . . . in a capitol building.”

Trespassing. Arrested for trespassing three years later? 

Or arrested for his reporting on the events of January 6 and its sequels over the course of those three years?

Before Baker turned himself in, the FBI did give him the information that he should arrive in shorts and flip-flops. So that, Glenn Beck writes, “it would be easier for them to put on the orange jumpsuit and ankle irons. Suffice it to say, he wore a suit and tie.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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general freedom local leaders Tenth Amendment federalism

Utah and the Tenth

The trouble with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution — the last two items in the Bill of Rights — has not been lack of clarity. The Tenth, at least, is extremely clear: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The problem has been one of enforcement. How do the States prevent the federal government from overreach? Especially when the federal government acts as if no objection to a federal law could be brooked? Especially when the Supreme Court is, ahem, wrong, or hasn’t yet been approached with a challenge.

Utah has rediscovered an old technique. And revived it. Governor Spencer Cox signed into law the “Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act”: “The Legislature may, by concurrent resolution, prohibit a government officer from enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of a federal directive within the state if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty.”

Ultra clear. And by old precedent — the non-enforcement of The Fugitive Slave Act by some northern states — it provides teeth to the Tenth. If the federal government were to enact (just stretch your mind a bit!) something obviously unconstitutional, like, say, a gun confiscation, the state legislature would simply vote to prohibit any state employee, or subsidiary of the state (county, municipality) from working with federal agents. Federal government agencies don’t have enough manpower to enforce all the rules. The feds rely on the states.

CNN quotes a Democrat representative running against Governor Cox suggesting that the use of this technique would be overruled by the Supreme Court using “the Supremacy Clause.”

No. The Supremacy Clause only applies to the federal government regarding specified (“enumerated”) powers. 

Regarding matters not explicitly stated in the Constitution, it is the States that are supreme.

Or the People.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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defense & war general freedom international affairs

Panic at Sea

“The passengers later told local media they feared for their lives,” Newsweek reported.

Those 23 tourists, along with 11 crew members, were traveling from Taiwan’s Kinmen islands, located just six miles off the Chinese mainland, back to the big island of Taiwan, when a Chinese Coast Guard vessel stopped and boarded their boat . . . and for 30 minutes “reviewed their travel documents.”

The Chinese regime, “in response to the recent deaths of two Chinese fisherman, whose speedboat . . . capsized while being pursued by Taiwanese authorities for allegedly trespassing in restricted waters,” has threatened to “step up maritime law enforcement around Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen islands,” explains the magazine.

Kuan Bi-ling, head of Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, said the incident “caused unnecessary ‘public panic.’”

A bit dramatic for just checking people’s IDs. 

But context is everything. 

After all, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has repeatedly threatened a military invasion that would inevitably kill thousands upon thousands of Taiwanese. And China’s ever-growing military constantly stalks Taiwan, regularly encircling the island with its warships and planes.

The concern of Taiwanese officials is that China’s stepping up its harassment campaign. For 30 years there has been peace around Kinmen, which has become a tourist attraction memorializing Cold War times.

We don’t want to re-live that frosty period, just remember it.

“We urge the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan to reduce the risk of miscalculation,” declared a U.S. State Department spokesperson.

But the problem isn’t miscalculation. The Chinese calculate that they can get their way by threatening, bullying, and intimidating Taiwan, their neighbors, the U.S., and the rest of the world. 

Panic? Try not to . . . when Chinazis are checking your papers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Amazon’s Wide, Flowing, Constricted River

Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from censoring speech.

It often tries anyway. 

One of the ways, as we’ve learned, is by pressuring social media and other companies to suppress speech. Since the federal government can make life very difficult for any company, some companies are understandably reluctant to ignore such pressure.

Amazon did not. When asked by the Biden administration in the person of one Andrew Slavitt, an advisor for the White House’s COVID-19 “response team,” the company agreed to hide books critical of the COVID-19 vaccines

Among the emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee is Slavitt’s March 2, 2021, communication with Amazon complaining that “if you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up [books criticizing the vaccine]. . . . [I]f that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”

Amazon was reluctant to intervene “manually” to demote such books and worried privately that rigging the game against particular books because of their viewpoints might undermine the company. But it caved nonetheless, soon modifying its algorithm and advising the White House that “we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective.”

Are such decisions consistent with a “consumer-centric” approach that easily allows people to find just what they’re looking for? Which is Amazon’s big selling point?

Of course not.

But as it has done so often over the years, our government was putting its thumb on the scale.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Amazon, censor, censorship, surveillance, mind control

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