Today is Michelle Rhee’s last day heading up DC’s public schools, and her departure should serve as a stern reminder: We’ve been forcing children to wait for Superman — or Wonder Woman — for far too long. There are no superheroes, and even when we think we’ve found one, they are almost always defeated by teachers unions, or internecine politics, or just plain burnout.

Rhee is a classic case of the first two, with her bold reforms raising the ire of the local union and eventually bringing the might of the American Federation of Teachers to bear in the mayoral election. But unions aren’t the only powers that ended Rhee’s crusade. Long-simmering divisions over the perceived aloofness of Rhee’s boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, also landed huge political punches that eventually knocked Rhee out.

Rhee certainly isn’t alone in the Hall of Defeated Heroes. Alan Bersin stormed into San Diego’s superintendency in 1998, but his hard-charging style eventually divided the city and created an intense political backlash. He was gone in 2005. Carl Cohn, Bersin’s replacement, quit just two years into the job. “I don’t have the energy, heart and passion that I did when I first took the job,” he said. And then there’s Rudy Crew, who was ousted in Miami-Dade after four years. In that time the district was thrice named a finalist for the Broad Prize, which recognizes urban districts for major achievement gains. But Crew became embroiled in racial and ethnic tensions, as well as caught in a budgeting morass, and was booted. 

But if there is no super-being to save the children, who can? Sadly, no one in a government monopoly, which is what public schooling is. In such a system only political power matters — after all, politicians make all the rules — and most of that power resides with teachers, administrators, and other public school employees. Because their very livelihoods come from the government system, they are the most motivated to engage in political combat, and through unions and other associations they are best able to organize. And because they are human, their natural proclivity is to fight for the most generous compensation, and least accountability to others, possible.

Parents and children — the people for whom the public schools are supposed to work — simply can’t counter that politicking force. They can’t constantly run political ads, work for campaigns, lobby, and take to the streets the way unions and other organized interests can. And that means polticians who side with parents against unions and administrators are taking a politically perilous — and often fatal — risk. 

So the problem is not a lack of heroes. It’s that public schooling inherently crushes not just heroes, but the very people our educators are supposed to serve — parents and children. 

Thankfully, knowing that makes the solution clear: We must take education money away from politicians, give it to parents, and in so doing take away the death ray, or robot army, or whatever you want to call the incredible power that government monopolies bestow on special interests. We must give parents school choice not so that they can become superheroes, but so that superpowers are no longer required to get their kids the education they need.

That’s the proposal Benjamin Wittes makes in today’s Washington Post. Wittes says that by splitting the legal baby, by “charging the 9/11 case in both military commissions and federal court,” the Obama administration can satisfy political considerations on both sides of the aisle.

This is a path fraught with legal issues. The constitutional bar against double jeopardy would prevent a trial in one forum and re-trial in the other for the same actions. Wittes spells out his proposal in greater detail in this post at the Lawfare blog, and he acknowledges this risk. The same sovereign cannot try someone twice for the same crime and Wittes acknowledges that the “John Allen Muhammed Model,” named after one of the Beltway snipers, used the separate sovereigns doctrine in ways that do not apply to Guantanamo. The Beltway snipers were liable for separate crimes in Maryland and Virginia in a way that does not translate directly to the 9/11 conspirators.

Wittes recognizes these legal issues and proposes that federal prosecutors and military commissions prosecutors clearly separate the crimes they respectively charge.

I’d go further. The clearest way to make this work is not to “charg[e] the 9/11 case in both military commissions and federal court.” This proposal only works if you charge pre‑9/​11 conduct in an Article III court and the 9/11 attacks in a military commission.

The Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment would prevent “charging the 9/11 case in both military commissions and federal court.” Federal prosecutors charged Khalid Sheikh Mohammed well before 9/11 for his participation in the Bojinka Plot, a plan to blow up airliners over the Pacific Ocean. To the extent that he and other 9/11 co-conspirators can be charged with crimes related to Bojinka or other pre‑9/​11 attacks, this would pass constitutional muster. Otherwise, this is a not an advisable course of action.

Where Double Jeopardy is a concern, the broad sweep of Material Support of Terrorism (MST) charges works against the government, not for it. If an MST charge is used in federal court in anything 9/11-related, the defendants have an excellent case that it bars any charges related to that attack in a military commission and vice versa. MST charges don’t even belong in a military commission, as Assistant Attorney General David Kris warned Congress before it revised the commissions with the Military Commissions Act of 2009. So if you’ve got MST on your mind, best to keep it in a civilian court. The Court of Military Commissions Review is getting ready to weigh the validity of MST in the commissions in the case of Ali al Bahlul, so stay tuned.

The Double Jeopardy bar in prosecuting before a military commission and then in a civilian court is also grounded in first principles. When Benedict Arnold betrayed General Washington and the fortifications at West Point, he escaped. His co-conspirators did not. British Major John André was tried and hanged by a military commission. Joshua Hett Smith, a citizen of New York and citizen of what would become the United States, was likewise tried by a panel of military officers. The panel found insufficient evidence to convict him. The prosecution failed to establish that he knew the true object of André’s meeting with Arnold, and might have reasonably believed that he was ferrying a British officer to negotiations with an American officer without knowledge of Arnold’s betrayal. When Smith transferred to a local jail, the civilian grand jury found that he could not be tried for treason for the actions that previously subjected him to a military trial; his protection from Double Jeopardy stood firm.

Keep in mind, I’m not endorsing Wittes’ plan. Wittes has a lot of “creative” ideas that I think are destructive of the liberty we’re trying to protect. He says in his book, Law and the Long War, that the “psychological Rubicon” of preventive detention is something “we simply need to cross.” Count me opposed, as I said in this post. But it’s worth noting that, before anyone gets too excited about a bipartisan compromise, there are serious issues with two sets of trials for KSM and the rest of the 9/11 co-conspirators.

The Office of Senator Tom Coburn (R‑OK) has released an appropriately timed report on federal subsidies that have gone to the deceased. From the introduction:

In the past decade, Washington sent over $1 billion of your tax dollars to dead people. Washington paid for dead people’s prescriptions and wheelchairs, subsidized their farms, helped pay their rent, and even chipped in for their heating and air conditioning bills.

In some cases, these payments quietly gather in a dormant bank account. In many others, however, they land in the pockets of still-living people, who are defrauding the system by collecting benefits meant for a now-deceased relative.

Since 2000, the known cost of these payments to over 250,000 deceased individuals has topped $1 billion, according to a review of government audits and reports by the Government Accountability Office, inspectors general, and Congress itself. This is likely only a small picture of a much larger problem.

As a Cato essay on fraud and abuse in federal programs discusses, these problems are endemic because the federal government is a “vast money transfer machine.” While federal subsidy programs should be cut because they harm the economy and are unfair to taxpayers, Coburn’s findings of pure waste represent one more reason to pursue terminations of federal programs.

In the past 15 years, I’ve debated in favor of a national sales tax, testified before Congress on the merits of a national sales tax, gone on TV to advocate for a national sales tax, and spoken with dozens of reporters to explain why a national sales tax is a good idea. Even though I prefer a flat tax, I’ve been an ardent defender of sales tax proposals such as the FAIR tax because it would be a great idea to replace the current system with any low-rate system that gets rid of the tax bias against saving and investment. I even narrated this video explaining that a national sales tax and flat tax are different sides of the same coin — and therefore either tax reform proposal would significantly improve prosperity and competitiveness.

I will continue to defend the FAIR tax and other national sales tax proposals that replace the income tax, but I wonder whether this is a losing battle. Every election cycle, candidates that endorse (or even say nice things about) the FAIR tax wind up getting attacked and put on the defensive. Their opponents are being dishonest, and their TV ads are grossly misleading, but they are using this approach because the anti-FAIR tax message is politically effective. Many pro-tax-reform candidates have lost elections in favorable states and districts, largely because their opponents were able to successfully demagogue against a national sales tax.

The Wall Street Journal reaches the same conclusion, opining this morning about the false — but effective — campaign against candidates who support a national sales tax.

In 16 House and three Senate races so far, Democrats have blasted GOP candidates for at one point or another voicing an interest in the FAIR tax. …FAIR tax proponents are right to say these Democratic attacks are unfair and don’t mention the tax-cutting side of the proposal, but the attacks do seem to work. Mr. Paul’s lead in Kentucky fell after the assault, and the issue has hurt GOP candidate Ken Buck in a close Colorado Senate race. In a special House election earlier this year in Pennsylvania, Democrat Mark Critz used the FAIR tax cudgel on Republican opponent Tim Burns. In a district that John McCain carried in 2008, Mr. Critz beat the Republican by eight points and is using the issue again in their rematch. This is a political reality that FAIR taxers need to face. …[I]n theory a consumption tax like the FAIR tax is preferable to an income tax because it doesn’t punish the savings and investment that drive economic growth. If we were designing a tax code from scratch, the FAIR tax would be one consumption tax option worth debating. But … voters rightly suspect that any new sales tax scheme will merely be piled on the current code.

We won’t know until next Tuesday what is going to happen in Kentucky and Colorado, and we won’t know until then what will happen in the other campaigns where the FAIR tax is an issue. But if there are two tax reform plans that achieve the same objective, why pick the approach that faces greater political obstacles?

FAIR tax proponents presumably could defuse some of the attacks by refocusing their efforts so that repealing the income tax is the top priority. This would not require any heavy lifting since all honest proponents of a national sales tax want to get rid of the 16th Amendment and replace it with something that unambiguously prohibits any direct tax on income. So why not lead with that initiative, and have the national sales tax as a secondary proposal? This is what I propose in the video, and I think it would be much harder for demagogues to imply that a FAIR tax would mean a new tax on top of the corrupt system that already exists.

At his must-read blog Future of Capitalism, Ira Stoll points out (reprinted by permission) an instance in which the news-side WSJ uncritically accepts at face value the claims of New York City politicos:

“Council Aids West Side Housing” is the headline over a news article in the Wall Street Journal reporting, “A change to city zoning laws aims to preserve affordable housing for a large swath of the West Side, blocking new development in the Garment District, West Chelsea and Hudson Yards.…The City Council voted on Wednesday to extend a zoning-law amendment that previously has been applied to Clinton, a midtown West area also known as Hell’s Kitchen. It now will also restricts landlords or developers from changing more than 20% of any multi-family building in the additional West Side neighborhoods. Council members say the rules will allow for building renovations but not demolitions.….About 1,500 units in 108 buildings will fall under the new amendment.…The vote on Wednesday was an extension of the 1974 Clinton Special District amendment, which was passed to protect that area’s low-rise character and affordable housing.”

A free-market-oriented economist with some common sense might point out that restricting new high-rise development may preserve “affordable housing” for the lucky few occupants of the 1,500 units now locked into place. But this free-market-oriented economist with some common sense might also point out that by restricting the supply of new housing units, the change in the law won’t “Aid Housing,” as the headline claims, but it will actually hurt housing by making it illegal to build much more of it. People living outside these neighborhoods who would like to move in will have a harder time doing so now that the government has artificially restricted the housing supply. The Journal article doesn’t get into this.

A commenter further points out that the land-use freeze will cut into the property tax base on which the city can draw, meaning that the city will raise funds by taxing someone else — another reason to expect that life for city newcomers will be less affordable in coming years, not more.

Many people feared that President Rafael Correa would unleash a witch hunt in Ecuador after the police uprising of September 30th that his government quickly dubbed a “coup attempt.” As my colleague Gabriela Calderón wrote a few days after those incidents, the government’s narrative that Correa was kidnapped in a hospital by rogue elements of the national police has been severely undermined by several witnesses who claim that Correa stayed voluntarily in the building and was in control of the situation the entire time. Mary O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal also mentioned this in her weekly column.

One of these critical witnesses is César Carrión, director of the hospital where Correa was supposedly being held against his will. Carrión had not been implicated by the authorities in the police riots—until last week. On October 21st Carrión declared in a special report aired on CNN en Español that Correa hadn’t been kidnapped or faced any threat. A couple of days later, Correa lambasted Carrión on national TV, calling him a “conspirator” and warning him that “he better know who he’s dealing with, I’m the president and you’re my subordinate… you can’t make your boss look like a liar.” Carrión was fired from his post soon afterward, and yesterday he was arrested for “attempting to murder Rafael Correa.”

Many other people, including journalists, who dared to question the government’s dubious claim that there was a coup attempt (for example, the military high command gave its full support to the president the day of the supposed coup) have also been harassed by the authorities. However, some government officials apparently didn’t get the memo of the official coup attempt allegation. On the day of the uprising, Doris Soliz, minister of Political Coordination told CNN en Español that there wasn’t a coup under way. Also that day, Vinicio Alvarado, secretary of Public Administration denied on public TV the possibility of a coup, saying that the protest was simply “a specific demand from a government institution.”

International observers have also raised many doubts about the seriousness of Correa’s coup allegation. But what seems clear now is that the Ecuadorian government is dead serious in its efforts to use the incident to persecute political opponents and independent media. Those who challenge the official narrative, face the consequences.

Cato Fellow Radley Balko highlighted the trend toward heavy-handed police practices in Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Radley continues to chronicle police abuses at The Agitator and Reason. Recent examples of police excesses include the unnecessary death of seven-year old Aiyana Jones in Detroit and this raid on an innocent elderly couple in Chicago (immigrants who fled the Soviet Union because of oppression).

One of the fruits of Radley’s research was the Raidmap, a Google map application that allows you to see the scope of this epidemic of “isolated incidents.” You can also sort botched raids by category: death of an innocent, raid on an innocent suspect, death or injury of an officer, death of a nonviolent offender, unnecessary raids on doctors and sick people, and other examples of paramilitary police excess.

View Original Map and Database

Now you can embed the Raidmap on your website or blog as seen below. The code is on the Raidmap page.

Pass it on.