legislation
I spent some time last week at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) summit, which attracts state lawmakers and legislative staff from around the country and was held this year in Louisville, Kentucky. The event's expo hall was packed with hundreds of booths, largely featuring the sorts of associations, businesses, and nonprofits you might expect to be trying to influence state policy. Perhaps not as expected was a sex worker rights group. Not as expected, that is, if you don't know anything about Decriminalize Sex Work (DSW). Since its founding in 2018, the organization has bee...
Reason
Last month, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed a bill mandating that a copy of the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms in Louisiana. The law, House Bill 71, requires that the religious scripture be displayed on a poster or frame sized at least 11 inches by 14 inches and in a "large, easily readable font." Apparently anticipating a First Amendment challenge to the mandatory religious text, lawmakers included several provisions that attempt to strengthen the law against a constitutional challenge. For example, the law prohibits schools from using taxpayer funds to fi...
Reason
TikTok is in trouble: In April, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation that forces ByteDance, the popular social media app's Chinese parent company, to sell its majority stake to a U.S.-based firm. If it fails to do this, the app will be banned in the United States. Various dubious arguments have been deployed against TikTok, but Congress' stated prime motive to force its divestiture is that the app's Chinese owners are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and thus having their tech on so many Americans' phones is a dire national security risk. The CCP is an authoritarian ...
Reason
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a plan to close convenience stores in a 20-block area of the Tenderloin district between midnight and 5 a.m. for the next two years. Officials say convenience stores attract nighttime illegal drug activity. Restaurants, bars, and non-retail businesses will not be affected by the law. The post Brickbat: How Inconvenient appeared first on Reason.com.
Reason
The question of why the chicken crossed the road is of secondary importance to who gets to claim the bird's carcass if it's killed while attempting the crossing. For a long time, the rule in a majority of the country was the government got to keep the deceased animal. State laws prohibited drivers from claiming the meat of animals killed on public roads and highways for food. Instead, ownership of the corpses defaulted to whichever agency maintained the roads, wasting countless tons of farm-fresh, slightly battered flesh to rot. In recent years, a growing number of states have been loosening t...
Reason
Though still on the books, Arizona's near-total ban on abortion was buried deep in the state's history—until recently. An April decision from the state's Supreme Court breathed new life into this long-dormant law. The ban in question—first passed by the territory of Arizona in 1864 and later codified into Arizona state law—mandated two to five years' prison time for intentionally acting "to procure the miscarriage" of a pregnant woman "unless it is necessary to save her life." This law became unenforceable in 1973 when Roe v. Wade recognized a federal right to an abortion. Since then, the stat...
Reason
The California state Senate has passed a bill that would require speed governors on all new cars manufactured or sold in California by 2032. These devices would give drivers "audible and visual signals" when they exceed the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), says the measure will reduce traffic accidents and deaths. The post Brickbat: Life in the Slow Lane appeared first on Reason.com.
Reason
U.S. Reps. Grace Meng and Tim Kennedy, both Democrats from New York, have introduced a bill that bar the sale, transfer, or possession of Level 3 body armor to anyone but the military or police officers. Level 3 armor is designed to stop rifle rounds such as 7.62 mm. The bill is named for Aaron Salter Jr., a retired police officer who died trying to stop a 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo. Kennedy said Salter fired on and hit the gunman but the gunman was wearing body armor and was not stopped. The post Brickbat: Naked and Afraid appeared first on Reason.com.
Reason
Today's technology companies are increasingly sandwiched between the regulatory requirements of the European Union (E.U.) and those of California. While the U.S. federal government may adopt a light touch, pro-innovation approach, California's state legislation can undermine this with a regulatory approach with impacts far beyond its borders. A new California bill imposes a rigorous regulatory regime on Artificial Intelligence (AI), making it the latest technology caught in this potentially innovation-stifling squeeze between Brussels and Sacramento. The term "Brussels Effect" often refers to ...
Reason
It was impossible to avoid the "strange bedfellows" cliché when reading about the criminal justice reform movement in the 2010s. Conservatives and evangelicals worked alongside bleeding-heart liberals and civil libertarians to fix what they all (at the time) agreed were unjust prison sentences and punitive policies. Fast-forward a decade, and the bipartisan sleepovers are over. Most of the same advocate groups are still lobbying for reform—and notching victories in some states—but the broad-based path for criminal justice reform bills has narrowed or altogether disappeared in other places. Cla...
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