In Albany, Georgia, five police officers were fired after an internal audit found they had used the department’s Flock license plate reader system for personal reasons. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also arrested all five former officers on charges of misuse of license plate data and violation of oath of office. The Albany Police Department said it will strengthen oversight and training to prevent similar incidents in the future.

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In May of this year, a federal judge ruled that Cook County, Illinois, is liable for constitutional violations when it seized people’s homes over property tax debts and left them with nothing. That scheme—sometimes referred to as home equity theft—sounds nightmarish. The reality is harsher, however, when you consider the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled the practice unconstitutional nearly three years before this recent ruling.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker last week signed a bill into law that finally brings the state into the present. The legislation promises homeowners will receive the surplus proceeds when the government takes their home to satisfy a debt and paves the way for those with previous claims to receive compensation.

In May 2023, the high court said in Tyler v. Hennepin County that the government could not justify keeping the profit after seizing and selling an elderly Minneapolis woman’s condo to collect on a modest tax debt. The plaintiff, Geraldine Tyler, had relocated to a retirement community after various neighborhood incidents, including a shooting, left her feeling unsafe. But she struggled to pay both her new rent and the taxes on her property. A $2,300 tax debt became about $15,000 with penalties, interest, and fees—after which the government took possession of the home, sold it at auction, and kept the surplus.

“A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the Court. “The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.” The ruling was grounded in the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which promises “just compensation” when private property is taken for public use.

Yet Illinois was an example of how a state could cynically keep home equity theft on life support. Local governments there would sell tax liens to private investors. After a redemption period, if the debtor could satisfy what is owed—including steep interest and fees—then the investor would petition for the deed to the home, having effectively purchased the property for the value of the debt. With limited exceptions, the former owner was then left with nothing.

“Thousands of Illinois homeowners have lost an average of 85 percent of their equity due to unconstitutional property tax forfeiture laws — over unpaid tax bills that amounted to a fraction of their property’s value — together exceeding $303 million,” said Kileen Lindgren of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented Tyler, in a statement. “This new law recognizes that the government is entitled to collect what it is owed, and not a dollar more.”

The post Illinois Will Finally Stop Stripping People of Their Home Equity—3 Years After the Supreme Court Outlawed It appeared first on Reason.com.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday to temporarily halt vehicle stops in response to two fatal shootings less than a week apart. 

The DHS originally planned to keep the directive in place until ICE officers receive additional training on conducting vehicle stops, reports CBS News. But some exceptions apply: “ICE will continue conducting vehicle stops only for those considered to be the most egregious targets with serious or violent criminal histories,” according to Fox News. 

Critics of the sudden change argue the new policy will lower ICE’s arrest and removal rate, which rose to over 10,000 arrests in just five days at the end of June. President Donald Trump contradicted the order on Wednesday, calling traffic stops “one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools.” He ordered ICE to “go back and do your very important job” in a Truth Social post, saying the policy, supported by “Radical Left Dumocrats” wouldn’t happen on his watch, apparently overturning the pause to vehicle stops by ICE.

But others on the right support the pause on vehicle stops, such as border czar Tom Homan, who told Fox News he’s confident the change will ultimately improve officer training and outcomes without affecting ICE arrests. Those critical of Trump’s immigration crackdown also support the pause and have called for even more restrictions and accountability for immigration agents’ controversial enforcement tactics in the wake of the two fatal shootings. 

The DHS has claimed the officers involved in the shootings feared for their lives in both the Houston, Texas, and Biddeford, Maine, vehicle stops, but eyewitness accounts have complicated this narrative. In Houston, passengers in the vehicle driven by 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dispute ICE’s account of the incident. “They confirmed that at no point was there ever an ICE agent directly in front of the vehicle,” Hugo Balderas, the lawyer for two of the three passengers, told Houston Public Media. And in Maine, one witness told [new link] CBS News he heard 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero tell officers “I tried to stop” when he was pulled from the vehicle shortly after the shooting took place. 

No video footage exists to corroborate the accounts of either vehicle stop, despite former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem expanding the body camera program nationwide in early February in response to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good. Over five months later, the agency has failed to implement the fairly standard police tech—a particularly egregious failure considering the agencies’ combined $240 billion immigration enforcement budget as of May, including $20 million specifically to equip agents with body cameras. But the DHS has recently renewed its promise in response to the most recent fatal shootings.

According to an emailed statement by Mike Fox, a legal fellow in the Cato Institutes’ Project on Criminal Justice, “in both fatal shootings…agents used excessive force, proving that the [DHS’] robust use-of-force policy is virtually meaningless to the extent its agents are free to violate it with impunity.”

Since Trump took office in January 2025, the DHS and its subsidiary agencies have violated more than just their use-of-force policies. Amid a campaign to hire over 12,000 new officers, the agencies have been accused of not only using excessive force against undocumented immigrants and American citizens, but also conducting arrests without probable cause in violation of federal law, and repeatedly violating court orders regarding unlawful detentions. Earlier this year, a leaked ICE memo revealed the agency had secretly adopted a policy allowing immigration agents to forcibly enter homes without first obtaining a judicial warrant, in contradiction to earlier training guidelines and Fourth Amendment law. 

“Because the [DHS] has repeatedly proven itself incapable of abiding by the letter and spirit of the law,” says Fox, temporary pauses and internal guidelines, like the pause on vehicle stops or Noem’s pledge to deploy body cameras, are “entirely insufficient.” 

“It is now incumbent upon Congress to step in and clearly legislate when, where, and if at all, [federal] immigration enforcement agents…should be permitted to conduct traffic stops,” he continued. 

Trump replaced Noem earlier this year due to mounting concerns over her performance, and named Mullin as her successor. But even Mullin’s attempts at a lower-profile approach to immigration enforcement haven’t been enough for the agency to outrun what Fox calls a “deep-seated crisis of federal accountability.” 

Although the temporary pause on vehicle stops “will undoubtedly save lives, and additional training is a welcome step,” says Fox, it will “not solve the underlying issue.”

“True reform requires Congress to take up the Bivens Act…[and] pursue the wholesale abolition of qualified immunity,” he adds. These changes would allow individuals to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights,  including officers who use excessive force. 

“True justice and systemic change cannot be achieved through temporary agency memos,” says Fox, “but only through permanent legislative guardrails that subject federal officers to real, external accountability measures.” 

The post ICE Keeps Shooting People. Here's a Way Congress Can Rein It In. appeared first on Reason.com.

“I’m his lawyer,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, describing his relationship with President Donald Trump. Blanche quickly corrected himself: “Was his lawyer,” he clarified. But the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche’s nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump’s personal interests?

Probably the latter, judging from Blanche’s central role in Trump’s brazenly corrupt “settlement agreement” with the IRS, which a federal judge this week condemned as the “improper” product of blatant self-dealing. That cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers’ expense.

One of those favors was a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which was designed to reward the president’s allies and supporters by compensating them for their alleged persecution by the Biden administration. Blanche approved that scheme and repeatedly defended it. But it provoked an intense bipartisan backlash that persuaded him to ditch the plan two weeks after announcing it.

As Williams noted, Blanche’s unilateral abandonment of the Anti-Weaponization Fund confirmed that Trump’s “settlement with myself” had nothing to do with a genuine legal controversy between adverse parties. According to Blanche, the deal was the result of a lawsuit in which Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization alleged damages from an IRS contractor’s illegal disclosure of their tax returns. But if that were true, Blanche would not have the authority to modify the agreement without the plaintiffs’ explicit and documented consent, which he did not bother to obtain.

Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), a former judge, underlined that point during Blanche’s confirmation hearing. “The president of the United States, who is the plaintiff in this lawsuit, has not agreed in writing to delete the weaponization fund,” Cornyn said, so “there is no guarantee that he or one of the other plaintiffs” will not “raise that issue by way of a lawsuit” for “breach of contract.”

Blanche nevertheless insisted that the Anti-Weaponization Fund was dead for good. “There is no fund,” he said.

Cornyn did not seem to accept that assurance. During a recess, he told reporters it still seemed like the fund “could be revived at a future date.” But even if we take Blanche at his word, his avowed ability to kill the fund on his own authority contradicts his claim that it was part of an “agreement” between two sides in a bona fide legal dispute.

Although “a party may not unilaterally repudiate a settlement agreement once it is reached,” Williams noted on Monday, the cancellation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund “has not been memorialized or adopted by Plaintiffs or their lawyers.” Blanche’s decision therefore “demonstrates his confidence that he could speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter,” she wrote. “This certitude supports the conclusion that the Parties worked in tandem and were never actually adverse.”

There were other reasons to reach that conclusion. Trump had “direct, unassailable control” over the defendants, Williams noted. The government’s lawyers also answered to Trump, who had issued an executive order that crippled their ability to represent the IRS by forbidding them to take legal positions at odds with the president’s. Although Trump’s lawsuit was fatally flawed because he missed the statutory deadline for filing it, the Justice Department never bothered to contest his claims, in sharp contrast with the way it usually handles such cases.

Blanche actively participated in this scam, which he compounded by issuing an order that purported to shield Trump and his relatives from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses they may have committed. Blanche presented that sweeping grant of immunity, which could save Trump more than $100 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties, as an addendum to the “settlement agreement.” But unlike the main agreement, it was signed only by Blanche, reinforcing the point that he was simultaneously acting as the head of the Justice Department and as Trump’s personal lawyer.

According to Blanche, the jaw-dropping immunity deal, which had nothing to do with Trump’s claims against the IRS, remains in place. During Wednesday’s hearing, Cornyn noted the broad language of Blanche’s order, which says “the United States” is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump or his family regarding “any matters currently pending or that could be pending” before the IRS, the Treasury Department, or “other agencies or departments.”

In addition to protecting Trump and his relatives from the IRS, Cornyn suggested, that commitment would shield them from actions by other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so, Blanche said, contradicting the language of his own order. “I hear what you’re saying,” Cornyn replied, “but that’s not what I’m seeing in the agreement.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) gave Blanche an opportunity to rebut Williams’ characterization of the IRS lawsuit as nothing more than a pretext for “a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.” Blanche insisted that the outcome was “not at all” a result of collusion, saying it complied with the letter of the law, which “absolutely allows what happened here to happen.”

Blanche, in short, blessed a flagrantly dishonest and grossly unethical “settlement” that personally benefited his boss, then repeatedly misrepresented the nature of that arrangement. Although Trump may think Blanche’s eagerness to please makes him eminently qualified to run the Justice Department, senators should question that premise.

The post During His Confirmation Hearing, Todd Blanche Defends Trump's Blatantly Corrupt IRS 'Settlement' appeared first on Reason.com.

In this segment of Free Media, Senior Editor Robby Soave and Daily Caller Editor in Chief Amber Duke discuss Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed, who avoids calling himself a democratic socialist but embraces many socialist policy ideas.

The post Abdul El-Sayed Exposed After Rejecting Socialism Label appeared first on Reason.com.

As the U.S. begins a “new war“ against Iran, lawmakers want to know: Why did a Tomahawk cruise missile strike an elementary school in Minab, reportedly killing more than 100 Iranian schoolchildren?

Since the February 28 deadly missile attack on the school, calls for transparency surrounding the strike have largely quieted, as national attention remains focused on each new round of strikes and control over the Strait of Hormuz.

In late March, a group of lawmakers requested a bipartisan investigation of the incident, but the government has released little to no information about the strike. On Monday, a group of 25 Senate Democrats signed onto a letter addressed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, demanding transparency about the investigation. The letter calls for the Defense Department to finalize the investigation into the strike, provide an unclassified version of the report to Congress, and submit a plan for corrective action no later than July 20.

“When a U.S. strike kills civilians, the Department owes Congress, the American people, and the victims’ families a clear accounting of what happened and a credible plan to prevent future failures,” the letter states. The Senate Armed Services Committee has also threatened to freeze Hegseth’s travel budget if the Pentagon does not release more details about the school bombing.

As Reason has noted, the Pentagon and President Donald Trump have provided few, and even contradictory, answers about the strike. In March, Trump claimed that the strike could have been carried out by Iran or “somebody else.”

On March 9, New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh asked Trump why he was the only person suggesting that Iran obtained a Tomahawk and bombed its own school.

“Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that,” McCreesh said. “Why are you the only person saying this?”

The president then said that he didn’t know “enough about it.” 

“I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know,” he added. “Numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us.”

So far, the more substantive updates about the investigation have all come from the press. On March 11, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials familiar with the preliminary inquiry found that the U.S. was responsible for the Tomahawk missile strike.

On March 18, Semafor reported that humans, not AI systems, were likely to blame, noting that “US officials failed to recognize subtle changes in satellite imagery.” According to more recent reporting from CNN, satellite imagery from 2013 showed the school and an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base as being one compound, but updated images indicated that a fence separated the school from the base, and dozens of people were shown playing in the school courtyard in December 2025. The outlet reported that senior U.S. military commanders ignored warnings about outdated intelligence for the sake of expediency.

When asked about the lawmakers’ letter on Monday, a Pentagon official told Reuters that the investigation is “ongoing” and that the Pentagon does “not have any updates to announce at this time.”

Although Trump once remarked that bombing Iran would be a “little excursion,” the war has lasted 137 days and does not appear to be ending soon. As this unpopular war continues, it would be politically convenient for the Pentagon to suppress information about the strike and to hope the incident fades from national memory. However, lawmakers and the public must learn the truth and the full extent of the Pentagon’s involvement in the attack—not only for moral accountability, but also to prevent such an atrocity from happening again, especially as bombing Iran becomes a routine part of U.S. foreign policy.

The post As U.S. Starts 'New' Iran War, Lawmakers Want Answers About Deadly Elementary School Strike appeared first on Reason.com.

Between 2013 and 2023, Munson P. Hunter III “used fraudulently obtained Social Security numbers to open 14 bank accounts, acquire at least 18 credit cards, and apply for loans from the Small Business Administration,” the Justice Department says. “Those fraudulent acts ultimately cost others nearly half a million dollars.”

After he was arrested in 2023, Hunter faced 10 counts of bank and wire fraud with combined maximum penalties of 300 years in prison. He also faced a choice. He could go to trial, risking convictions that might send him to prison for the rest of his life. Or he could plead guilty to a single count of aiding and abetting wire fraud, in which case prosecutors would drop the other nine charges. If he chose the second option, it looked like his prison term would be somewhere between 15 and 21 months, the range recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.

You can probably guess what Hunter decided to do. Given the huge difference in potential penalties, he did not really have a choice. Criminal defendants make similar calculations every day, which explains why about 95 percent of felony convictions in the United States are based on guilty pleas. In federal courts, the percentage is even higher: about 98 percent in fiscal year 2025, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

It is not hard to understand why criminal defendants almost never opt for trials. “At the federal level,” the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers reports, “trial sentences are roughly three times higher than plea sentences for the same crime on average and sometimes as much as eight or ten times higher.” The threat of a “trial penalty,” which may include additional charges as well as longer sentences, has transformed a constitutional right into a legal fiction. While TV shows and movies still depict trials as the standard way criminal cases are handled, such showdowns have become vanishingly rare in the real world.

As the Supreme Court acknowledged in 2012, “criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” You might think the Court would have something to say about that situation. But for more than half a century, it was unfazed by the replacement of trials with plea bargains, which it described as “highly desirable” and “an essential component of the administration of justice.” That attitude gave prosecutors free rein to coerce guilty pleas by threatening defendants with severe consequences if they insisted on making the government prove its case.

Despite that history, it looks like the Supreme Court is beginning to have qualms about the consequences of allowing coercive plea bargaining, and we can thank Hunter for that. When he pleaded guilty, Hunter not only gave up his right to a trial; he also gave up his right to challenge any aspect of his sentence, even though he did not know at that point what punishment or release conditions the judge would later impose. Federal plea agreements usually include such appeal waivers. But last month in Hunter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that “an agreement not to appeal a sentence is unenforceable when it would result in a miscarriage of justice.”

A “miscarriage of justice,” Justice Elena Kagan explained in the majority opinion, is “the kind of egregious error that would bring the judicial system into disrepute.” She gave some examples, including release conditions that violate basic rights—the issue that Hunter had raised. A sentence that exceeds the statutory maximum also would qualify, she said, and so would a sentence “infected with a blatant constitutional error” such as racial bias. Her most colorful example was a prison term imposed by a judge who “let an orangutan pick a sentence out of a hat.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch had mentioned that last hypothetical during oral argument in the case three months earlier, riffing on a 1985 opinion written by Richard Posner, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. If both sides in a criminal case “stipulated to trial by 12 orangutans,” Posner said, “the defendant’s conviction would be invalid notwithstanding his consent.” Concurring in Hunter, Gorsuch brought up orangutans again. He also added to Kagan’s list of circumstances that might justify overriding an appeal waiver. But he emphasized that the issue is just one aspect of a broader problem.

“In our times, the jury trial has given way to a conveyor belt of plea bargains,” Gorsuch wrote. “At least some responsibility for that development lies with this Court. When confronted with coercive prosecutorial tactics designed to induce defendants to take plea deals, the Court has often condoned those practices or let them pass in silence.” 

‘Deeper Problems’ With Appeal Waivers

The need for a course correction is clear from what happened after Hunter pleaded guilty. Although the crime he admitted involved the theft of $38,649 in a single transaction, his sentence was based on additional allegations—an example of a disturbing practice that imposes punishment for conduct that was never admitted by the defendant or proven beyond a reasonable doubt. At sentencing in the Southern District of Texas, Judge Sim Lake assumed that Hunter had stolen $488,352 in 26 transactions.

“This made a significant difference for Mr. Hunter,” Gorsuch noted. “Had the district court sentenced him based on the amount he had pleaded guilty to stealing, he would have faced an advisory sentencing guidelines range of 15 to 21 months in prison. Now, though, he faced a recommended prison term of 41 to 51 months. And based on that calculation, the district court chose a prison sentence of 51 months.” In other words, “a guilty plea to a single charge enabled prosecutors to secure a punishment based on other charges they had agreed to drop or had not even brought.”

That was not Hunter’s only unpleasant surprise. As a condition of his supervised release after his prison term, Lake ordered him to “participate in a mental-health treatment program” and “take all mental health medications that are prescribed by your treating physician.” Hunter objected to the latter condition. “I want to take mental health programs, but I don’t want to take any medication,” he told Lake. “I don’t drink. I don’t use drugs. I don’t even curse. I don’t want to have to be forced to medicate.”

On appeal, Hunter argued that Lake’s order violated his “constitutionally protected liberty interest in avoiding the unwanted administration of antipsychotic drugs.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said Hunter could not raise that issue because he had waived his right to challenge his sentence. The Supreme Court disagreed, saying Hunter should have an opportunity to argue that forced medication qualifies as a “miscarriage of justice” because it is unconstitutional.

Gorsuch perceived another potential miscarriage of justice, saying the category includes “sentences imposing penalties the law reserves for offenses different [from] those of which the defendant stands convicted.” Hunter’s 51-month sentence fits that description, and there are many other examples of punishment based on charges that were never validated by a guilty plea or a jury verdict.

Penalties “reflecting a marked departure from mandatory sentencing procedures” also might justify overriding appeal waivers, Gorsuch said. Even “aspects of sentencing that can require a degree of judicial discretion,” such as the weighing of sentencing factors, “the application of the advisory sentencing guidelines,” and “the imposition of supervised release conditions within statutory and constitutional bounds,” could trigger the exception recognized by the Court, he suggested. “A miscarriage of justice would seem to arise, as well, when a district court metes out punishment that is so substantively unreasonable that it would fail under the ‘deferential abuse-of-discretion standard’ that appellate courts already apply in sentencing challenges.”

Gorsuch saw “deeper problems” with appeal waivers. “The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, this Court has held, tolerates only ‘voluntary and knowing’ guilty pleas,” he noted. A guilty plea “must be made both ‘voluntarily’ and ‘with full understanding of the consequences.'” But “how can a defendant ‘know’ and ‘fully understand’ at the time he signs a plea agreement that a court might later order punishment that defies the Constitution, a federal statute, or this Court’s precedents?”

Gorsuch also noted that the Supreme Court “has found prospective waivers of
many other statutory rights invalid and unenforceable.” He said the Trump administration, which urged the justices to uphold the 5th Circuit’s decision in Hunter’s case, “has offered no colorable explanation why a defendant’s prospective waiver of his statutory right to appeal his sentence should be treated differently.”

If a defendant “may prospectively waive the right to appeal his sentence,” Gorsuch wrote, “one might wonder what’s to stop prosecutors from pushing their luck further yet. Might we eventually face plea agreements that include prospective waivers of the defendant’s right to complain about future unreasonable searches and seizures of his home? Or prospective waivers of a defendant’s right to seek a jury (rather than bench) trial in future proceedings if he ever is charged with another crime?”

The Shift From Trials to Plea Deals

The ramifications of the Supreme Court’s new restrictions on appeal waivers probably will not extend as far as Gorsuch would like, especially since he questions whether such agreements are valid at all. But the fact that the Court thought its intervention was necessary reflects the problems created by a criminal justice system that resolves nearly all cases through plea deals.

That system would have dismayed the Founders, who saw trial by jury—a right of Englishmen recognized since the Magna Carta—as a crucial safeguard against tyranny. The power of that safeguard was famously illustrated by the 1735 acquittal of John Peter Zenger, publisher of The New-York Weekly Journal, who was charged with seditious libel based on articles that criticized New York’s royal governor. In the run-up to the Revolution, British laws restricting the right to trial by jury and threats to replace local trials with prosecution in England figured prominently in American grievances against George III’s government.

Among other abuses, the Declaration of Independence faulted the king for “transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences” and “depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury.” The Constitution included two provisions—the third clause of Article III, Section 2, plus the Sixth Amendment—aimed at preserving those benefits for criminal defendants. 

Representative government and “trials by juries” are “the heart and lungs” of a system that aims to prevent “arbitrary” rule, John Adams declared in 1776. “In these two powers consist wholly the liberty and security of the people.” In 1788, Alexander Hamilton noted that both sides in the debate over ratification of the Constitution saw the right to trial by jury as important, differing only on whether it was “a valuable safeguard to liberty” or “the very palladium of free government.” Thomas Jefferson inclined toward the latter view. In a 1789 letter to Thomas Paine, he described trial by jury as “the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

Today, thanks to plea bargaining, that anchor is hanging by a thread. How did that happen? 

In a 1979 Law and Society article, legal historian John Langbein described an ironic tradeoff, arguing that plea bargaining, which puts defendants at a distinct disadvantage, emerged in response to the complications created by safeguards aimed at protecting defendants. “As late as the 18th century,” he noted, the jury trial was a “summary proceeding” that was almost always completed within a single day. But “the rise of adversary procedure and the law of evidence injected vast complexity into jury trial,” making it “unworkable as a routine dispositive procedure.”

That same year in the Columbia Law Review, legal historian Albert Alschuler offered another explanation for the rise of plea bargaining: “striking political corruption” in “many urban courts” at the turn of the 20th century. Through intermediaries, courts literally sold lenience. A New York defense attorney who had made “financial arrangements with a magistrate,” for example, reportedly would “stand out on the street in front of the Night Court and dicker away sentences in this form: $300 for ten days, $200 for twenty days, $150 for thirty days.”

Law professor Lucian Dervan added to Alschuler’s account in a 2019 Federal Sentencing Reporter article. For most of its history, “the common law has rejected plea bargaining as impermissibly coercive and an affront to the truth-seeking mission of the criminal justice system,” he noted. “Plea bargaining as it is known today is actually a relatively recent American invention that appeared first around the time of the American civil war.”

Initially, Dervan wrote, “courts faced with considering the validity of these deals struck them down with regularity,” recognizing that the promise of mitigated punishment made such bargains suspect. In 1871, for instance, a Wisconsin court observed that plea bargaining was “hardly, if at all, distinguishable in principle from a direct sale of justice.”

Despite such judicial objections, plea bargains proliferated in the early 20th century. In addition to the “striking political corruption” that Alschuler had noted, Dervan cited “unprecedented overcriminalization,” which accelerated during Prohibition and expanded “both the number of criminal offenses and the volume of individual prosecutions.” Because that added load “overwhelmed” the courts, Dervan wrote, “prosecutors began turning to plea bargaining to increase efficiency and clear dockets.”

The relationship between overcriminalization and plea bargaining goes both ways. “It is no exaggeration to say that, without plea bargaining, mass incarceration could not occur,” New York University law professor Rachel Elise Barkow writes in her 2025 book Justice Abandoned. “The mass numbers of cases require mass processing, and you cannot have that without plea bargaining. It is the rotten core of mass incarceration, and it exists only because the Supreme Court has allowed the government to coerce people into giving up one of the most sacred of constitutional rights.” 

Plea Bargaining Is ‘Highly Desirable’

The Supreme Court was not always inclined to do that. In fact, it was initially skeptical of plea bargains, largely because it viewed the threat of extra punishment as coercive.

In the 1941 case Walker v. Johnston, the Court held that a defendant is “deprived of a constitutional right” when he is “induced to plead guilty” by “deception or coercion of the prosecuting attorney.” The defendant in that case, who was charged with robbing a Texas bank, alleged that the district attorney discouraged him from hiring a lawyer, “asked him to plead guilty,” showed him pictures of the crime scene in an effort to persuade him that he would be convicted by a jury, and warned him that his sentence would be twice as long if he insisted on going to trial.

The Supreme Court took a similar stance in the 1962 case Machibroda v. United States, which involved a robbery suspect who said a federal prosecutor had promised him a sentence of no more than 20 years if he pleaded guilty, threatened additional charges if he refused to do so, and discouraged him from talking to his attorney about the proposed deal. The Court had “no doubt” that “if the allegations contained in the petitioner’s motion and affidavit are true, he is entitled to have his sentence vacated.” Why? Because “a guilty plea, if induced by promises or threats which deprive it of the character of a voluntary act, is void.”

Langbein made the same point in a 1978 University of Chicago Law Review article,  likening plea bargains to confessions obtained under threat of torture in medieval Europe. “There is, of course, a difference between having your limbs crushed if you refuse to confess [and] suffering some extra years of imprisonment if you refuse to confess,” he conceded, “but the difference is of degree, not kind. Plea bargaining, like torture, is coercive.”

By that point, the Supreme Court had already shed its concern that guilty pleas are not truly voluntary when they are obtained by “promises or threats.” In the 1970 case Brady v. United States, the Court rejected an alleged kidnapper’s argument that his conviction should be overturned because he had pleaded guilty only to avoid the possibility of a death sentence. “Waivers of constitutional rights not only must be voluntary but must be knowing, intelligent acts done with sufficient awareness of the relevant circumstances and likely consequences,” Justice Byron White noted in the majority opinion. But he concluded that the defendant’s guilty plea met that test.

When the Court decided that case, plea bargains accounted for “well over three-fourths of criminal convictions,” and a “great many of them” were “no doubt motivated at least in part by the hope or assurance of a lesser penalty than might be imposed if there were a guilty verdict after a trial,” White noted. “But we cannot hold that it is unconstitutional for the State to extend a benefit to a defendant who in turn extends a substantial benefit to the State.” 

The following year in Santobello v. New York, the Court made it clear that it viewed plea deals as not just acceptable but “highly desirable.” Plea bargaining “is an essential component of the administration of justice,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in the majority opinion. “Properly administered, it is to be encouraged.” Why? “If every criminal charge were subjected to a full-scale trial,” Burger worried, “the States and the Federal Government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court facilities.”

The Supreme Court reiterated that view in the 1977 case Blackledge v. Allison. “Whatever might be the situation in an ideal world,” Justice Potter Stewart wrote for the unanimous Court, “the fact is that the guilty plea and the often concomitant plea bargain are important components of this country’s criminal justice system. Properly administered, they can benefit all concerned.”

What does a “properly administered” plea bargaining system look like? The Court provided a clue in the 1978 case Bordenkircher v. Hayes, which involved a Kentucky man who was charged with using a forged check to buy $88.30 in groceries.

Based on that charge, Paul Hayes faced a sentence of two to 10 years in prison. If Hayes pleaded guilty, the prosecutor said, he would recommend a five-year sentence. But if Hayes insisted on going to trial, the prosecutor warned, he would be charged under Kentucky’s “three strikes” law, which authorized a life sentence. Uncowed, Hayes said he wanted a trial. The prosecutor delivered on his threat, and Hayes was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted. The Supreme Court saw no problem with the prosecutor’s tactics.

“By tolerating and encouraging the negotiation of pleas, this Court has necessarily accepted as constitutionally legitimate the simple reality that the prosecutor’s interest at the bargaining table is to persuade the defendant to forgo his right to plead not guilty,” Stewart wrote in the majority opinion. “The course of conduct engaged in by the prosecutor in this case, which no more than openly presented the defendant with the unpleasant alternatives of forgoing trial or facing charges on which he was plainly subject to prosecution, did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The Supreme Court’s gloss on plea agreements, which portrayed them as mutually beneficial arrangements reached “at the bargaining table,” was more than a little misleading. That process, Alschuler noted in a 2013 Duquesne Law Review article, “benefits both parties only in the sense that a gunman’s demand for your money or your life benefits you as well as the gunman.”

Although defenders of plea bargaining sometimes liken it to “the working-out of a business contract,” the Cato Institute’s brief in Hunter noted, the result is more like “terms of surrender,” since one side wields overwhelming power: “Prosecutors alone decide the ‘price’ a defendant will pay for his acts. They have no competitors to which defendants can turn for better terms. Defendants in criminal cases are trapped in a system that insists they make a ‘deal’ when they have no bargaining power.”

Staggering Trial Penalties

Thanks largely to the Supreme Court’s endorsement of plea bargaining, criminal defendants today face staggeringly high trial penalties. Although we should not feel too bad for Hunter Biden, whose paternal pardon shielded him from punishment for his gun and tax crimes, his case vividly illustrates the price that defendants can pay for exercising their Sixth Amendment rights.

President Joe Biden complained that prosecutors threw the book at his son after a proposed plea deal fell apart under judicial scrutiny in 2023. But that is par for the course when defendants insist on going to trial.

The gun case involved a Delaware firearm purchase that was illegal because Hunter Biden was a crack user at the time. After renewed plea negotiations proved unsuccessful, a single felony charge that Special Counsel David Weiss was initially prepared to drop after Biden completed a pretrial diversion program became three felony charges, all based on the same transaction. As a result, Biden faced up to 25 years in prison after he was convicted in June 2024. Although his actual sentence would have been considerably shorter, it still would have been quite a jump from zero time behind bars, which is what he was promised under the nixed diversion agreement.

In the tax case, two misdemeanors became three felonies and six misdemeanors, all of which were covered by a guilty plea that Biden entered in September 2024. That increased the maximum penalty to 17 years in a case where Weiss had been willing to recommend probation.

Weldon Angelos, a rap producer and part-time marijuana dealer in Utah, faced an even stiffer trial penalty. And unlike Biden, he did not have a well-placed father to spare him.

Angelos was not exactly a cannabis kingpin. His 2003 arrest, which stemmed from an investigation by a joint state and federal task force, was based on three eight-ounce marijuana sales to a childhood acquaintance who had become a police informant. The proceeds totaled about $1,000. But because Angelos owned guns, he was charged with possessing a firearm “during and in relation to” or “in furtherance of” drug trafficking.

The first such offense carried a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, which rose to 25 years for each subsequent offense, with all sentences to be served consecutively. Federal prosecutors counted each pot sale as a separate gun offense.

“I really didn’t believe that this was even a possibility,” says Angelos, who initially was not familiar with federal mandatory minimums. “I thought I was just being threatened because they were hoping that arresting me and putting pressure on me would lead to the arrest of famous rap artists. And when that didn’t happen, they threw the book at me.”

Angelos turned down a proposed plea deal that involved a 15-year sentence for one count of selling marijuana and the associated gun charge. He thought “15 years for $300 worth of marijuana as a first-time offender” was grossly disproportionate. He had “just signed a major record deal, had two young boys,” and thought “this would ruin my life.”

Prosecutors seemed determined to do that one way or another. After Angelos rejected their offer, they obtained an indictment that included a litany of 20 charges with combined potential mandatory minimums of 105 years.

“I was facing a hundred years,” Angelos recalls, “but in my mind, you know, this is America. There’s a judge that can intervene. I just felt that something would change. I was in denial.” He “didn’t start realizing” the full gravity of the situation until the trial. “My attorney tried explaining it to me, but I was really ignorant because I’d never been in the system,” he says. “And once I was convicted, then it sunk in, like, OK, this is real; this does happen in America. My attorney looked at me and said ‘that’s 55 years’ when I got convicted on those three [gun] charges. That’s the point when I realized, OK, this is serious: I’m going to prison for 55 years.”

That was in fact the sentence that Angelos received after a jury convicted him of the gun charges and 13 other crimes. It was nearly four times as long as the sentence that prosecutors had offered, and it would have been even longer if the judge, Paul Cassell, had not bent over backward to spare Angelos additional punishment for the 13 other counts, which did not carry statutory minimums. 

In 2016, after years of lobbying by prominent legal, political, and cultural figures, Angelos was quietly freed from prison. He had served nearly 13 years and expected to serve 35 more, taking into account “good time” credit. His release was not the result of judicial intervention or the presidential clemency that Cassell had repeatedly recommended. It happened because Robert Lund, the lead prosecutor on the case, had second thoughts about the fairness of the sentence and agreed to support a reduction.

Another notorious case of prosecutorial overkill involved Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and internet “hacktivist.” In late 2010 and early 2011, apparently frustrated by limits on information he thought should be freely available, Swartz downloaded a large trove of articles from JSTOR, an online academic library. “The volume of activity, hundreds of downloads per minute, was having a negative impact on our servers,” JSTOR later explained, “and therefore was prohibited by JSTOR’s terms of service.” When Swartz was caught, he returned the articles, and JSTOR considered the matter resolved, telling the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts it “preferred that no charges be brought.”

Federal prosecutors nevertheless charged Swartz with wire fraud and three counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. When Swartz declined to plead guilty in exchange for a six-month sentence, prosecutors added another nine counts, threatening him with decades in prison and millions of dollars in fines. Swartz committed suicide in January 2013, a few months before his trial was scheduled to begin.

‘Sentences Chosen by an Orangutan’

Gorsuch highlights Swartz’s case in his 2024 book Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, which decries overcriminalization and the abandonment of the right to trial. “This newly aggressive reliance on plea bargaining to adjudicate guilt,” Gorsuch and co-author Janie Nitze write, “represents a radical shift for a nation that professes to value trial by jury as the gold standard for testing culpability.”

Gorsuch hopes the Supreme Court’s concern about appeal waivers signals a new awareness of the damage that “radical shift” has done. “Two hundred years ago,” he wrote in Hunter, “it was likely unimaginable that almost every federal criminal case would be resolved by plea bargain. Forty years ago, it may have been no easier to foresee that plea bargaining defendants would be pressed to waive their statutory right to appeal sentences yet to be imposed. Let alone that the federal government would argue these waivers prevent defendants from appealing even blatantly unlawful or unconstitutional sentences chosen by an orangutan.”

Although “this Court is not responsible for all these developments,” Gorsuch added, “it has encouraged some of them and stood silent while others took hold. Today, the Court finally begins to correct course, taking an important step toward reining in appeal waivers. It is not a solution to all of plea bargaining’s excesses, and perhaps not even those associated with appeal waivers. But it is a start.”

The post How the Right to Trial Became a Legal Fiction appeared first on Reason.com.

Lindsey Graham died doing what he loved: egging on faraway violence. After returning from a trip to a drone factory in Ukraine, the Republican senator from South Carolina suddenly came down with chest pains. One of his last acts was phoning President Donald Trump—a man who Graham had once called “unfit for office”—to push for more aggressive policies in Europe and the Middle East.

“I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out, and do Israeli-Saudi normalization,” Graham reportedly joked to the people around him, feeling ill after his call with Trump. But about half an hour after being called to Graham’s house on Saturday night, medics reported that the 71-year-old senator was undergoing cardiac arrest. The medical examiner declared Graham dead of an aortic dissection caused by high blood pressure.

Graham was the last surviving member of the “Three Amigos,” a gaggle of hawkish senators that included John McCain, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat turned independent. Although he shared their foreign policy goals, Graham may have been the most morally flexible of the three. Unlike McCain, who stuck with his opposition to Trump until his last dying days, Graham twice flattered his way back into Trump’s graces after abandoning him. And he whispered in the ear of Trump’s rival, President Joe Biden, as well.

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it,” Graham had declared during the 2016 election, calling Trump a “race-baiting” lunatic. Two years later, Graham was showering Trump with praise and claiming that McCain would have done the same. During the 2020 election, Graham argued that Trump should never concede. When Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol in pursuit of exactly that goal, Graham distanced himself from the president: “Enough is enough.”

When Biden took office, Graham started flattering the new leader, claiming that only Biden could secure the kind of U.S.–Israeli–Saudi deal that Trump had been pursuing. “Ask anyone in the Biden administration—they know how deeply engaged [Graham] was,” wrote David Makovsky, director of the program on Arab-Israel Relations at the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Even this supposed peace deal was really about opening the door for more war. Graham bluntly told Biden that the negotiations were about building American willingness “to go to war for Saudi Arabia,” according to Bob Woodward’s book War. And Graham considered Iran the “spoiler” for Arab-Israeli peace—so naturally, the solution would be war with Iran.

Graham wormed himself back into Trump’s orbit in an almost single-minded pursuit of that goal. (The best way to convince Trump of something, Graham gloated, was to tell him former President Barack Obama would have done the opposite.) He pushed Trump to follow Israel in bombing Iran in June 2025, complained that the end of that war was a “step backwards,” and then pushed Trump to bomb Iran again in February 2026, in what was supposed to be a final regime change war. “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God,” Graham told Trump earlier this year.

The same two-faced flattery extended overseas. Graham made numerous public gestures in support of Kurdish rights, earning himself a glowing eulogy from Syrian Kurdish Gen. Mazloum Abdi and a proposal by Erbil Governor Omid Xoshnaw to build a statue for Graham in Iraqi Kurdistan. But at the same time, Graham helped sell a proposal to let Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan take over Kurdish areas of Syria, according to the memoirs of former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Sometimes, Graham complained that Americans were too bigoted against Muslims to support spreading democracy in the Middle East. Other times, he claimed that the doctrine of Shiite Islam “compels them to kill all the Jews” and implied that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza would be acceptable. In between his statements of support for the “brave Iranian people,” he declared that “Iranians cheat and they lie” and made wisecracks about their bad genes.

So it went in Europe. For all the eulogies calling Graham a friend of Ukraine, the senator himself was frank about trading Ukrainian lives for other goals. “I like the structural path we’re on. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and economic support, they will fight [Russia] to the last person,” he said at a 2022 press conference. Two years later, Graham declared that “this war is about money” and bragged about the potential economic benefits.

Despite all of these twists, turns and contortions, Graham clearly had a consistent principle: expanding the U.S. government’s involvement in the world, by force. He started his Senate career supporting the Second Gulf War, pushed for bombing Iran while the Iraq conflict was still ongoing, and argued for staying in Afghanistan permanently. Graham discovered that the U.S. military was in the African nation of Niger only after several troops died there in 2017—and then immediately called for “more actions in Africa, not less.”

In pursuit of that goal, Graham had no problem treating Americans as enemies. In 2011, speaking on the Senate floor about Americans accused of terrorism inside the U.S., he said: “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. You are an enemy combatant.'” Two years later, when the National Security Agency was caught spying on Verizon phone customers, Graham declared himself “glad” that he and his fellow citizens were being surveilled. And after an American protester was shot by Israeli commandos in 2010, Graham stated: “I’m not asking the Israeli government to apologize to me for killing an American citizen. I’m urging American citizens to act responsibly.”

What drove such intense aggression? One formative experience was Graham’s military career, serving as a U.S. Air Force lawyer in Germany during the end of the Cold War. “I thought I would never live to see the Berlin Wall come down, right? Two years later it’s down,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2011. Graham kept chasing that high, calling Iranian regime change “Berlin Wall stuff” and comparing himself to former President Ronald Reagan.

“I would like to shape world events rather than watch the world fall apart,” Graham continued in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “That unity that we had from administration to administration, regardless of party and winning the Cold War, has clearly been lost in the war on terror, or a man-made catastrophe, whatever you want to call it.” 

Graham couldn’t see how his own strategy was destroying that unity. The war in Iraq that he supported was a major factor in destroying trust in the U.S. government and polarizing U.S. politics. Graham used his influence to push both Trump and Biden into supporting policies that their own constituents increasingly hated. The attack on Iran this year, the fulfillment of Graham’s life work, is the first U.S. war to be fought with negative public support from its start. The more Graham brought the parties together in support of forever wars, the further he drove them from the American people.

The post Last of the Neocon 'Three Amigos': Lindsey Graham Dies Unexpectedly appeared first on Reason.com.

Over a decade ago, Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) looked like the future of Bernie Sanders–style populism, championing higher minimum wages, criminal justice reform, and social welfare spending. After 13 years as mayor of deeply impoverished Braddock, Pennsylvania, and then a term as the state’s lieutenant governor, he won his Senate seat in 2022.

Since coming to Washington, Fetterman has charted a unique path. He routinely criticizes his own party for “catering to the fringe and agitated parts of our base,” accuses fellow Democrats of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and praises capitalism as the one system that has consistently improved living standards.

In May, Fetterman joined The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie to argue that the socialist politics of such Democrats as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani are alienating moderates and spell long-term doom for the party. He denounced former President Joe Biden’s failure to control the southern border and President Donald Trump’s antipathy toward legal immigration, called the national debt a “ticking bomb,” and advocated legalizing marijuana and psychedelics.

Reason: You recently wrote in The Washington Post that you’re not going to be changing parties. Yet you also have critical words for your own party. You told Fox News that the Democratic Party is turning into “an orgy of socialism.” And in your Post piece, you said that Democrats are “catering to the fringe and agitated parts of our base.” What do you think is driving that?

Fetterman: Extremism is driving it, without a doubt. Look at the primaries all across in the Senate and in the House, and look at the kinds of people that have already been elected.

For example, the mayor in Seattle, she’s an absolute socialist, if not more. And now people [say], “Hey, I’m leaving,” and she’s like, “Bye.” And then, of course, New York, that’s its own situation too. I thought [Florida Republican Gov. Ron] DeSantis had a great line saying, “Mamdani is my favorite real estate agent now.” It’s driving people away. People can move, and they can vote with their feet. That explains why Florida continues to flourish. But a lot of these states like New York and other blue states, we’ve read that $2 trillion have migrated out of these states too.

The Democratic Party is the problem, except they love the billionaires that fund those kinds of causes and those kinds of organizations that are actually driving a part, a lot, of the protesting. That’s where that energy is as well. Look at some of the views now that people are espousing. It’s moving more and more in socialism and communism.

In Maine, for example, [Democratic Senate candidate] Graham Platner: avowed communist. He described himself as a communist. “Antifa”—that’s not a slur from me. That’s his own words, how he described that.

What about your own personal evolution? In 2016, you endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) in the presidential primaries for the Democratic Party. He’s an avowed democratic socialist. What is it that rubbed you the wrong way about socialists or communists since then?

In 2016, it was much more about the minimum wage and some other very basic kinds of things. Now that’s just turned into much more standing with Cuba, standing with Venezuela, standing with the Iranian regime, and turn that into becoming more increasingly anti-American.

My views really haven’t changed that much, things that I supported. I was very supportive about gay rights. Back in 2013, I was officializing a gay marriage when that was illegal. I was happy to get arrested on that. My views really haven’t changed; what’s really changed is the party. In 2024, I was campaigning for Kamala Harris as a Democrat. It was very clear we were going to lose, and a lot of the excesses that we’ve had in 2020 came back to revisit, and that really, I think, cost us that election in 2024. The excess of the party back then summoned the second term of the Trump administration.

.@SenFettermanPA endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2016. Now he's blasting fellow Democrats for embracing socialism.

What changed?

"My views really haven't changed. What's really changed is the party," Fetterman tells @nickgillespie on The Reason Interview podcast. pic.twitter.com/M2OjvyidQE

— reason (@reason) May 16, 2026

You’ve said that the Democratic Party has become anti-men. What forms does that take? What’s driving the lurch to the far left, both in terms of economic policy and identity politics?

If you make someone feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, they will leave. They’ve done that. Back in 2016, I witnessed that. I lived directly across the street from a steel mill and the union hall. I was doing an event for Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton at that time. I was asking the union president, “Where’s your people on that?” And he’s like, “At least half, half if not more, are [for] Trump.” And just coincidentally, a guy in a big truck drove by and he honked, “Ha ha ha, go Trump, go Trump.” He had truck nuts on the trailer and had a Trump sticker. Clearly that’s what’s already well underway. I think we effectively can count that a lot of those traditional union members have already left the Democratic Party. That’s where we are. It’s been a serious realignment of parts of our base. And that’s driving some of the more extreme things of our party now too.

You have said Trump is plainspoken. That’s a charitable way of saying it. When he announced he was running for president, he launched into a diatribe against Mexicans being rapists and drug dealers.

He uses and engages in things that I would never engage on that. Just a couple of hours before this conversation, he put an image of Democrats in sewage in the reflecting pool here in Washington, D.C. I don’t do those kinds of things. I don’t support those things. But I also think it’s ridiculous to heckle him over $13 million to rehab that. That’s just kind of small ball, for me.

But let’s talk about immigration. We absolutely, the Democratic Party, became an open-border party. That used to be a GOP slur. But then you realize those numbers. It really was—you had 300,000 people showing up at our border every month. That’s the size of Pittsburgh, [near] where I live. I try to describe that to my party. This is a serious problem. People are angry. All of our blue cities have become overwhelmed. New York, Chicago, Denver, Boston: All those were overwhelmed with migrants. I was a Democrat being very, very pro-immigration, as I remain that. But we have to secure our border and deport all the criminals.

This draws a distinction not just between Trump and the Democrats but between you and many Democrats. Biden, in his last year, basically secured the southern border. Trump has cut legal immigration. He is exceptionally anti-immigrant. What is a better policy, once we presume that the border is secure?

Not a single Democrat could identify what’s the solution. What do you do with 300,000 people showing up at the border every month? People were living at the airport in Boston. New York City spent $8 [billion], $9 billion to house and take care of those people and secure the border. The Biden administration finally made some changes. They should have already had them in place. Why not secure the border? Because I think they were afraid of the party, and that would be anti-immigration or racist for those other kinds of things. We think what’s appropriate: secure the border, deport all the criminals. I was the Democratic lead for the Laken Riley bill. I grieve for Renée Good or Alex Pretti, but I also grieve for Laken Riley or Miles Young and other people that were victimized by people that should have never been here or already should have been deported after they broke the law.

It’s easy to say that someone here illegally who commits a violent crime should be deported or imprisoned. But communities like western Pennsylvania need new people moving in. What would a good, viable legal immigration system look like, one that will help American communities, businesses, and the economy thrive?

We have the most generous and the largest immigration program of any country in the world already. People and immigrants are coming to Pennsylvania. In parts of Pennsylvania, like in Reading and the Lehigh Valley, across our state, the immigrant community is actually driving a lot of those economies. Agriculture is our top industry in Pennsylvania. Targeting and going after these workers is absolutely wrong. I’ve spoken out against that. Don’t harass and target otherwise lawful people that are just working hard. I agree with that. We should protect our Dreamers too. My wife was a Dreamer. You reference what’s easy. No, that’s common sense; it’s not easy. We betrayed those basic kinds of standards as a party. And now the Republicans, Trump has betrayed those same commonsense standards, and you have the kind of calamity in Minneapolis.

I became the only Democrat that voted for Markwayne Mullin for the next secretary [of the Department of Homeland Security]. [Kristi] Noem was a disaster. I called for her to go. I’m working with Markwayne. Markwayne promised, “I’m not going to be the guy in the headlines.” There aren’t any headlines.

What do you say to Republicans, including senators like Eric Schmitt from Missouri, who talk about how the real Americans are the people who can trace their heritage here back to sometime before the Civil War? Is that any way to build a viable nation?

We all have our own different views for that. For me, my family is a product of immigration, illegal immigration. My views on that haven’t changed ever. That’s why we have to find a way forward. Twenty-seven years ago, I had Alan Simpson as a professor at [Harvard Kennedy School]. He said you are never going to have any meaningful immigration legalization, because both sides use it and they weaponize it. That was absolutely true. So finding a way forward, it’s too valuable for the extremists to blame the immigrants or to say that we could just open up our border. It’s necessary to find a commonsense approach and reject the extreme things.

Do you support a path to citizenship for people who enter the country illegally but have been living here and have not been arrested for any kind of serious crime?

Yeah. I think that was part of a deal years ago, and that was derailed too. Right now, the base in our respective parties punish people that want to have a serious conversation about that. That’s where we constantly are now. I absolutely knew we were going to get rolled for the bipartisan border deal back in ’23 and ’24, because there’s no way you’re going to provide that—it was too valuable on both sides. That’s what happened about immigration. And here we are. That’s where we are right now. Thankfully, they are coming back and they’re taking more reasonable advice.

In your recent Washington Post piece you said you remain strongly pro-choice and pro-weed. Are you going to introduce legislation, or is there any federal movement to legalize marijuana or change drug laws so states can experiment more freely?

I am very, very libertarian in a lot of ways and for those circumstances. If you check my record, I’ve been for legal weed for forever. Politically, that was toxic or certainly not popular. And also psychedelics too. Back then too, when I was [lieutenant governor]. Pennsylvania, that’s the mushroom king in the world. That is the fact. I said, “My goodness, why? Couldn’t this be a really a great opportunity for agriculture and helping people feeling better about that?” Thankfully, I think we could all agree [with] everything that President Trump has done about liberalizing marijuana and psychedelics. As a libertarian, I don’t judge or knock anyone for whatever they [use to] knock their edge off to just make it through in this world.

I absolutely support Zyn and those things as long as it’s safe. I think that’s important. That’s a choice that every American of legal age deserves to have and to participate in a way that doesn’t turn them into a criminal, or for those things make it as safe as possible. I think that’s sacred too. Whatever that is, a glass of wine or scotch or a little weed, sitting in front of the firepit in your backyard, whatever that is. Your path for wellness, psychedelics, whatever, I think it all should be legal without judgment and without punishment or a criminal record. I’ve been very consistent about that and sharing those things. I do hope it continues to liberalize overall.

Tell me what you dislike about Trump. What is it about Trump that most gets you mad? What are the Republicans doing most wrong, as far as you’re concerned?

He invited me to have dinner and sat down with him in January of 2025. He just came back from the most remarkable political comeback in American history, as far as I’m aware of. He was sitting, his power was peak, and he could have done a lot of big, big important things. He got a second chance in every kind of way. My God, he was shot in the head. Half an inch over, that could have turned that into a Zapruder tape. Thank God.

I don’t know why he chose some of these choices when he could have done so much more. Technically, he did make [it] about revenge and those things. The strongest of these small petty kinds of cases, the strongest one I can cite is the guy that threw the sandwich at the [Customs and Border Protection agent]. I don’t know why you engage in that. There’s no upside for those things. Those cases never go anywhere. But I absolutely support, I was proud. I stand with Israel, and that’s why I follow him now too.

Last year, federal spending was the equivalent of 23 percent of gross domestic product, while tax revenue, overall revenue was 17 percent. We had a $1.78 trillion deficit last year. The national debt is bigger than the annual economy. You are a proponent of spending lots of money or having the government be very robust and muscular and helping people. Is the national debt or federal annual deficits a problem? How do we close that gap?

Without a doubt, the national debt is a ticking bomb. Without a doubt, we are going to have to address that. We are going to have to deal with entitlements. We have to do all these kinds of honest conversations. That’s going to require bipartisanship. That’s going to demand that we remember we’re all Americans. We have to find solutions here. Unfortunately, here in this town right now, we are doing just dumb, pointless things. Shutting down our government. I was the only Democrat that said that’s dumb and terrible. Why would you shut down our entire government because we aren’t able to win enough elections to make the kind of changes that we all want to?

Do you support ending the Senate filibuster? Trump wants to get rid of it, and I believe you have spoken positively about getting rid of the filibuster.

We Democrats, we were so wrong about eliminating the filibuster. I was wrong too. I’ll be the first person to say we were so wrong. Thank God people prevailed. I think history vindicated someone like [former Sens. Kyrsten] Sinema [I–Ariz.] and [Joe] Manchin [I–W.Va.] to stand for that. If the Senate becomes a smaller version of the House, that would have profound changes that are going to damage our nation.

So we need the filibuster? The filibuster should stay in place?

Absolutely, 100 percent. Same Democrats—we seem to forget we all wanted to get rid of it. But now we love that shit. We love the filibuster. Thank God, the filibuster. I’m not surprised that the president is going to come for the filibuster, because that’s the one thing that stands in the way before they lose the majority. Without a doubt, the House is going to change. The Senate’s possible, perhaps—I don’t know. But the backlash, the chaos, and without a doubt, there is going to be a lot of churn.

Social Security and Medicare are the main drivers of the national debt and annual budget deficits. Should these programs be cut back to function more as a safety net, or should taxes be raised to fund them? What is your preferred solution to entitlement reform?

When I was at grad school, they had a comprehensive, two-week node to study Social Security. It was solvent through 2037. Way, way back in 1998, that felt like we’d be living on the moon and other things. Now that’s starting to approach. It just required very small, small actuarial kinds of changes for that. Insolvent does not mean broke; it just means at that point you could pay 75 percent of current benefit levels. Just agreeing as a Democrat, Republican, I’m not going to weaponize this conversation against one another, and we’re not going to scare the elderly Americans. Congress has to be the adult in the room. We refuse to do that. People are running right now—”Fuck Trump, fuck Trump,” that is their campaign. They are producing these kinds of videos to do that thing. It’s both sides. Congress, we have to be the adult in the room and solve these serious problems. I’m here to be in that conversation as a Democrat that’s been isolated in my party for some of these views, and the same guy that doesn’t engage in some of the extreme AI slop in social media things from the other side too. That’s where I’m at: having conversations with the left, the right, and here with you too. I’m all thrilled to just have a real conversation about where we are.

Braddock, Pennsylvania, is a town of about 1,500 or 1,700 people. You were its mayor. You told me in 2011 that you were administering palliative care, that the town probably wasn’t coming back. Can you bring us up to date? What is Braddock like now? What policies would actually help people there live with dignity and give their children and grandchildren thriving lives?

When you and I met all those years ago [on Real Time With Bill Maher], I still lived there. I have three children, and they live there. They were all born in Braddock. And we [were] working—both the Biden administration and the Trump administration—to save the American steel way of life here. We were able to save a lot of the buildings in town too. We created some more affordable housing.

It’s not a renaissance. When I arrived, 90 percent of all that stuff was gone already. During my time as mayor, I was very proud to address gun violence, and we were successful in achieving those things too. Giving a shit about these kinds of abandoned places, that really became my argument. It was never about money, power. No one ever showed up in a place like Braddock trying to help kids get GEDs. I never thought I would be ending up here in the United States Senate, for now, but that’s where I am.

That’s still my home. I could have moved. I could’ve moved at any point, but I live there and things are better than they were when I arrived. Significantly. But it’s never going to be a gentrification. It’s abandonment, and that remains a significant problem.

I think you would consider yourself a “big government liberal.” Do you think government should be heavily involved in people’s lives and provide money and opportunities?

No. I would never describe myself in that way. There are important problems that a government is necessary to address. Government is not the solution for all things. I’m a capitalist. I absolutely revere the market and how it’s able to correct and redirect these kinds of resources. I think things continue to get better and better despite the churn and a lot of the chaos.

Is there a tension between protectionism and the creative destruction that is always happening? The industries that you were born into are not going to exist forever. How do you minimize the disruption without blocking the changes necessary to renew towns, regions, and whole countries?

That’s a complicated answer. But for me, I’m a very pro-capitalist Democrat. I refuse to engage in the extreme rhetoric and support the kinds of extremism and throw around those stupid terms like end-stage capitalism. Without a doubt in human history, capitalism has been the only system that has proven to raise the quality of life across the globe. That’s a fact. And now, thankfully, we were able to prevail here in our nation.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

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Six weeks ago, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of COGE, the Commission on Government Efficiency. While the commission’s name might sound like Elon Musk’s now-dead federal DOGE and conjure up an image of a chainsaw-slashing, afuera-style attack on the city’s $125.8 billion budget, the commission has thus far been a typical governmental task force. 

Before proposing changes to the city’s charter, COGE is holding a series of 11 meetings to gather input from elected officials and the public about improving government efficiency. On Wednesday evening, I went to the penultimate COGE meeting in the auditorium of the historic Riverside Church in Morningside Heights to witness COGE in action. The meeting started about 20 minutes late. When the commissioners finally took their seats, a lone audience member began clapping, and the rest of the attendees tentatively joined him. 

The woman to my right said she was told she may not have time to testify during the meeting because city officials were giving presentations. The first hour of the meeting was, in fact, dedicated to lengthy presentations. Comptroller Mark Levine urged the commission to adopt clear rules for the city’s rainy day fund so emergency funds may be better protected and set aside for times of economic crisis. The public advocate, the city’s elected watchdog, then spoke about wanting easier access to city agency information. New York City Buildings Department Commissioner Ahmed Tigani, fresh off dealing with a building crisis in Midtown, discussed ways to accelerate safe construction projects. Tigani’s colleague then shared recommendations from the SPEED task force, which seeks to “expedite equitable development” (i.e., build affordable housing faster). 

After the officials and experts testified for over an hour, members of the public were called to the front of the auditorium in pairs and were given three minutes to share their grievances and suggestions. The woman sitting next to me left before testifying. 

The theme of this meeting was streamlining permitting, but participants testified about a range of issues, from street safety complaints to teachers’ inability to gather supplies (despite the NYC Education Department’s $45 billion budget). Some participants shared testimony over Zoom, and participants were also able to submit written testimony online. One gentleman complained that the city was not ticketing cars on his street. In line with the COGE mission, nobody at the meeting demanded outright cuts to agencies, but they shared ideas for improving existing processes. 

Like at any public meeting, the attendees at the Riverside Church meeting were a self-selecting group. They were not local cranks like in Parks and Rec; they were mostly leaders of various civic groups and associations, including the Times Square Alliance. Those who attended appeared to be in good spirits, clapping after each testimony (although I did catch two people snoozing). It was heartening to see that these New Yorkers cared enough about efficiency to attend a three-hour-long governmental meeting on a summer evening. 

Perhaps improving government efficiency in New York City requires a long and tedious process like this. But let’s remember that several of those at the helm of COGE have had long careers in city—and, in some cases, federal—government. These commissioners appear to place great faith in the government’s ability to solve problems (if only it were more efficient), and they have little incentive to cut the programs they have spent their careers building. And while COGE may have good intentions, the commission’s approach does not attack inefficiency at its source: the expansive size and scope of government.

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