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Why Dylann Roof’s Death Sentence May Never Be Carried Out

by CassieO74ss Posted on January 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof entered a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot and killed nine worshippers after reading Bible verses with them. As it was later revealed, the 22-year-old Roof was a white supremacist. After an eight-day trial in the Charleston federal district court, on December 15 the jury found Roof guilty of all 33 federal counts—including hate crimes and obstruction of exercise of religion—18 of which carry the federal death penalty. This week, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury sentenced Roof to death, making him the 63rd person who will be held on federal death row.

Federal law classifies the jury’s decision as a binding “recommendation,” which means, according to Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, “there’s likely a decade worth of appeals.” Roof could be well into his 30s before he is executed.

He likely will not be executed at all, because a federal death sentence often does not result in a lethal injection. To be eligible for federal death row, the defendant’s crime has to have a national angle, such as bombing a federal building. Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in 2015 for his role in the 2013 attack, but his appeals process is likely to extend for years. Today, 23 people on death row have exhausted their appeals and are eligible to be executed. Three co-defendants who have been on federal death row for the longest period of time were convicted in a series of drug-related murders: Richard Tipton, Corey Johnson, and James H. Roane Jr. have been awaiting execution since 1993.

Contrast this with executions on the state level. Between 1988, when the federal death penalty was reinstated, and 2016, the government only put three inmates to death. States have carried out 1,439 executions since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that capital punishment does not violate the Constitution. Gulf War veteran Louis Jones Jr. was the last person to be executed by the government, in 2003, for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Tracie McBride. His was a federal case because the 1995 crime took place on the federal property of a US Air Force base.

There have been no federal executions during President Barack Obama’s two terms. Obama’s efforts to reduce the federal prison population during his presidency and his discomfort with the death penalty, which he described as “deeply troubling,” coincided with the long appeals process and recent questions about the efficacy of lethal injection drugs. The effect was a halt to federal executions. Nationwide support for capital punishment has been dropping steadily over the last two decades. Today, only 49 percent of Americans support the death penalty for murderers, down from 80 percent in 1994. Among Republican voters, however, 72 percent support the death penalty for violent murderers.

President-elect Donald Trump is one of those death penalty supporters. On the campaign trail in December 2015, Trump announced that as president, he would sign an executive order mandating the death penalty for convicted cop killers. As attorney general, Jeff Sessions—who has supported the death penalty—could move this pledge forward by addressing a number of institutional and practical problems that have been obstacles to federal executions.

“It takes a long time and it takes a lot of money to execute folks,” says Monica Foster, a lawyer whose clients include defendants on federal death row. The average cost of defending a federal death penalty case is $620,932. Inmates typically spend more than a decade in the appeals process before entering death row and awaiting execution.

Opponents of capital punishment believe that it’s immoral, racially biased, and not a deterrent for crime. Sixty-two percent of those awaiting death in federal prisons are nonwhite. “The federal death penalty reflects the state penalty system’s problems of racial bias, poor lawyering, and unreliable evidence,” says Miriam Gohora, a law professor at Yale Law School. But Trump’s pick for attorney general disagrees. At a 2001 congressional hearing on racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty, Sessions stated he was against a moratorium on the federal death penalty for several reasons, one of them being that “the death penalty deters murder, as studies as recent as this year have found.” A 2008 Death Penalty Information Center survey published in 2009 found that 88 percent of criminologists do not consider the death penalty a deterrent to violent crime.

“I would expect that the incoming administration would be more aggressive in seeking the federal death penalty,” says William Otis a professor of law at Georgetown law school.

If the Trump administration wanted to aggressively pursue the death penalty and carry out more executions, it would have to address the issue of lethal injection drugs. In 2011, the only American manufacturer of lethal injection drugs, Hospira, announced it would no longer produce sodium thiopental, a key ingredient in the serum used to carry out executions. The company originally intended to resume production at its Italian plant, but Italian officials refused to export the drug if it were to be used for executions. Other companies followed suit, leading to a massive shortage. Many states and the federal government were left with no method of execution, forcing a lull in carrying out capital punishments.

Some states sought to use different drug combinations that haven’t been widely tested. In Oklahoma, a new drug combination led to the botched execution in 2014 of Clayton Lockett, who writhed and moaned during the procedure. In the wake of this incident, Obama announced that the government, through the Department of Justice, would be reviewing its death penalty protocols leading to an effective moratorium. The move was considered a victory for opponents of the death penalty.

The state of Texas recently sued the Food and Drug Administration over the withholding of a shipment of lethal injection drugs that the FDA maintains are illegal to import because they haven’t been tested for safety. “Drugs used in executions are not supposed to be safe—they’re supposed to be lethal,” Otis says, adding that the safety requirements would likely be one of the first areas the Trump administration might seek to change.

In death penalty cases like Dylann Roof’s, where there is no question about guilt or innocence, opponents of capital punishment believe that a life sentence without the chance of parole would provide justice. Roof wanted to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but federal officials rejected the offer. Many family members of the victims opposed the death penalty for Roof. The morning after the jury decided on its verdict, Judge Richard Gergel formally sentenced Roof to death, saying, “This trial has produced no winners, only losers.”

Original source: 

Why Dylann Roof’s Death Sentence May Never Be Carried Out

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For the last time, warming is not slowing down!

by KaseyStallworth Posted on January 4, 2017

That’s according to a new study in Science Advances, the latest installment in a debate that has refused to die.

The controversy started in 2013 with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggesting that global warming had stalled. Researchers scrambled to explain what looked like a “warming hiatus,” while skeptics seized on those weird numbers to attack climate science.

The confusion should have been cleared up in 2015, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that a shift from ship-based measurements to ocean buoys could explain the low values. There was no “hiatus” at all. Republican Rep. Lamar Smith from Texas had a conniption and subpoenaed the agency (remember that?).

This latest study “shows that NOAA got it right,” says Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist at UC Berkeley. His team reviewed ocean temperature data from buoys, diving robots, and satellites, and confirmed NOAA’s warming estimates.

Researchers had long measured ocean temperatures from the warm bellies of ships, Hausfather says. Then, in the 1990s, scientists switched to using floating buoys. Buoys are relatively colder, so temperature measurements also took a dip. Correcting the buoy bias doubled estimates of ocean warming, accounting for most of the “hiatus.”

This latest study should put an end to the debate, Hausfather says. But considering the last three years were the hottest on record, shouldn’t it have been dead already?

Taken from – 

For the last time, warming is not slowing down!

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This Bible Belt Abortion Provider Is Looking Beyond Trump

by TraceeZerangue Posted on December 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Abortion providers have had a rollercoaster year. On the one hand, a landmark abortion rights case in Texas saw an affirmative ruling from the Supreme Court, overturning restrictions that aimed to put clinics out of business across the United States. At the same time, conservative statehouses pushed through legislation that aimed to decrease abortion access and defund Planned Parenthood, the largest women’s health provider in the country. Months after the Supreme Court ruled in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt that the restrictions in Texas qualified as undue burdens and were therefore unconstitutional, Donald Trump was elected president, assuring voters of his staunch support for anti-choice legislation and deflecting allegations of sexual assault.

The week after the election, we called Dr. Willie Parker—a Harvard-educated OB-GYN from Alabama in his 50s who has been providing abortions full time since 2009. He practices in clinics in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, has confronted demonstrators blocking his access, and sued the state of Mississippi to keep the sole clinic in that state open. We wanted to hear how abortion providers are preparing for the next chapter of the battle against reproductive rights. As board chair for Physicians for Reproductive Health, Parker has been at the forefront of the national fight to preserve a woman’s right to choose. Here’s what he had to say about the likely new realities in women’s health during the future Trump administration.

What’s the conversation like among providers right now?
Most people can’t even talk. We’re still figuring it out. But I think people are trying to think beyond and say, “OK, given the inability to overturn the election, and given our ability to prognosticate based on how he’s operated politically, most of us have to think worst-case scenario.” But there’s also really no way of knowing what he’s going to do—he’s been sufficiently vague in his policy positions. We can take some prognostic indication from some of the things that he’s said, like in his 60 Minutes interview where he talked about his intention to appoint a pro-life justice to align the court to overturn Roe. I think of it as a low-hanging fruit. He has every intention to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as much because it’s known as Obamacare as because he wants to try and deconstruct the legacy of President Obama. But that has implications that mean women who were accessing family planning and contraception as a preventative service with no co-pay will lose access to that coverage. We will only see an exacerbation of the things we were engaged in trying to prevent—like unplanned pregnancy and the need for abortion, which creates a societal dilemma. If you’re making abortion illegal and undermining the various things that will allow the prevention of that need, it can only be a situation that goes from bad to worse.

There are a lot of misconceptions around contraception and abortion care, not only in the general public, but also among our lawmakers. Do you think there will be an uptick in anti-science attitudes?
There’s a saying that you can’t awaken somebody who’s pretending to be asleep. I’m full of clichés—I was raised by a Southern black woman, and they had a saying for everything.

I get you, I’m from Tennessee and Mississippi, I grew up on those sayings too.
Oh, so you’re my homegirl! laughs

There’s a willful ignorance. We indulge people who are willfully misrepresenting the facts. I don’t think those anti-choice congress people are as much benignly misguided as they are intentionally and willfully ignorant of the facts of reproduction. That lends itself very well to them being ideologically driven and carrying out agendas that, if they were to be really be honest about the facts, would be a tougher sell. But I think anti-intellectualism can be rewarded by the outcome of the election that’s going to result in people being appointed who can reinforce that agenda. We’re going to see more of that willful ignorance if we don’t push back and fight. The worst thing we can do is to assume that the electoral college votes resulting in the election of Donald Trump represents a mandate. It does not. He did not get the majority of the popular vote; that went to Hillary Clinton. That means those votes represent the consciousness of the nation, which is that abortion should be legal, that contraception and family planning are health issues and prevention, that a woman’s right to reproductive privacy is the law of the land and should remain such.

Have any of your patients expressed any fear since the election?
I’ve seen patients once since the election, and then, it was only abortion patients. But certainly, my friends and the common narrative is people are trying to shore up their own lives with regards to family planning and reproduction. I know people who were previously considering IUDs are considering them again. I know the requests for those kind of visits are up. People are concerned about how much control over their reproductive lives they’re going to lose as a result of this election outcome.

Do you think this puts states that are down to one clinic, such as Mississippi, in even more danger?
The fight in Mississippi will be more protracted. I’m the physician plaintiff in the lawsuit that keeps the Mississippi clinic open, and we prevailed twice in the Fifth Circuit—once with just the three-judge panel and once with the full Fifth Circuit panel. Despite that, the state tried to push it up to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court did not take that in lieu of the Texas case. So the definitive nature of the Texas case should have made things OK in Mississippi, but the state of Mississippi has decided to go forward. Now, I think their hope will be rekindled and renewed around the fact that potentially there will be an overturning of Roe, and there will be the appointment of a conservative justice who alters the balance of the court. There now will be a political hope based on the change in the presidential administration—hope that maybe wasn’t there before the election. But I don’t think anything will change immediately. President Obama, in his first remarks since the election, in order to reassure people and help them understand how government works, said the US government is like an ocean liner, not like a speed boat. It’s harder to turn around than people might think. Hopefully, many of the decisions have been structured in a way to make them resilient, so they’re not as vulnerable to the capricious whim of political administrations.

So what would you say to women who are worried about what a Trump administration could do to their reproductive health?

I just want to remind people that the task of those who support reproductive rights and reproductive justice didn’t change based on who is in the White House. We have leadership that is not supportive of what we’re trying to do, but the demand for justice shouldn’t be modulated. We can take that as a notion that we don’t know exactly what President-elect Trump is going to do, but we can’t afford to take a position of waiting around to see. We have to work under the assumption that the things that we fought hard for to protect women will be under assault, and we have to bring all our creativity and our energy to bear to preserve those things. No matter who is in the White House.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Excerpt from:

This Bible Belt Abortion Provider Is Looking Beyond Trump

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Trump Looking for Hispanic to Take Agriculture Post

by OtisPerkins5 Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Politico reports on Donald Trump’s search for a Secretary of Agriculture:

Trump met Wednesday with two Hispanic politicians at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach to discuss the possibility of taking on the agriculture post: Dr. Elsa Murano, a former U.S. agriculture undersecretary for food safety, who is Cuban-American, and Abel Maldonado, a Mexican-American who is a former California lieutenant governor and co-owner of Runway Vineyards.

I imagine Trump’s interior monologue for his cabinet choices has gone something like this:

Lessee. Solid, silver-haired white guy for State. Check. Retired general for Defense. Check. Personal financial crony for Treasury. Check. What else? Teachers are all women, so Betsy is good for Education. Urban is code for black, so Ben will fit in at HUD. Lotta oil wells in Texas, so maybe a Texan for Energy. Perry can do it. Somebody exotic-looking for UN ambassador. Nikki really looks the part. Asians are bad drivers, maybe Elaine can get through to them at Transportation. Fill out the rest with a bunch of dull white guys. I’ll let Pence take care of it. And Agriculture. Hmmm. Gotta be Hispanic, right? They’re the ones who pick all the crops. But who?

If only I were just joking with this.

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Trump Looking for Hispanic to Take Agriculture Post

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Trump’s Pick for Labor Secretary Doesn’t Think Workers Should Get Breaks

by LynIrvin725 Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Department of Labor exists to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners and job seekers,” and to “improve working conditions” and “assure work-related benefits and rights.” Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s choice to lead the department, has not exactly embodied those values in his career as CEO of CKE Restaurants, parent company of fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. He’s a staunch and vocal opponent of minimum-wage hikes, and his company has had to pay out millions of dollars to settle overtime claims (more here).

And now, thanks to OC Weekly‘s Gabriel San Roman, we know what Puzder thinks of worker breaks. Spoiler: not much.

San Roman got to digging into the archives of Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History, where he found a 2009 interview (not available online) with Puzder. According to San Roman, Puzder “complained about regulations and overtime laws, claiming workers are overprotected.” San Roman adds, quoting from the interview:

“Have you ever been to a fast food restaurant and the employees are sitting and you’re wondering, ‘Why are they sitting?'” Puzder asked. “They are on what is called a mandatory break emphasis his.” He shared a laugh with the interviewer, saying the so-called nanny state is why Carl’s Jr. doesn’t open up any new restaurants in California anymore.

Now, anointing a burger tycoon who openly disdains worker rights as labor secretary might seem like a quintessentially Trumpian move. But it’s worth remembering that Puzder is very much an establishment Republican. A major donor to GOP political campaigns, he served as an economic adviser and spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and as a delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention and as chairman of the Platform Committee’s Sub-Committee on the Economy, Job Creation, and the Debt.

In late 2014, as the 2016 presidential race was about to heat up, Puzder listed his top three choices for the Republican nomination: Romney, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (now Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Energy), and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. That same year, Puzder and then-Gov.Perry even appeared together at a Carl’s Jr. event in Austin, to roll out the burger chain’s “Texas BBQ Thickburger” and raise funds for a veterans’ charity, along with Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Ferguson. Puzder declared Perry “America’s best governor.”

And now they’ll both be in the Cabinet. Trump ran hard against the GOP establishment, only to hand it the keys to power.

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Trump’s Pick for Labor Secretary Doesn’t Think Workers Should Get Breaks

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A Trump Tariff Wall Would Help a Little, But Hurt a Lot

by MarguerU84 Posted on December 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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So let’s suppose that Donald Trump really does impose a 10 or 15 percent tariff on all goods entering the United States. Or maybe only Chinese and Mexican goods.1 What would happen? Who would be the winners and losers?

The simplest way to think about this is to remember what happens when tariffs are reduced. Textbook economics says that overall GDP will grow, prices will go down, but certain groups of people will be disproportionately harmed. So if tariffs are increased, the opposite should happen. Economic growth would suffer, prices would go up for most people, but certain groups would benefit. It’s not always clear what those groups are, but generally speaking workers in the sectors most vulnerable to foreign competition would probably benefit: textiles, clothes, shoes, rubber products, computer assembly, and so forth.

That’s the theory, anyway. The reality is sometimes different. Free traders, for example, often point to the example of automobile tires. In 2009, President Obama slapped a huge tariff on Chinese tires in order to protect the US tire industry. The chart on the right shows what happened: other countries rushed to fill the void and tire imports skyrocketed. The usual estimate is that about 1,200 jobs were saved at a cost to US consumers of $1.1 billion. That’s $900,000 per job, which is obviously a bad deal, but it’s also a diffuse deal. Unions and tire workers were happy regardless of how things turned out, while consumers probably barely noticed that they were paying an extra dollar per tire.

If Trump enacted a tariff only on China, this is roughly what would happen: some of China’s business would move to other countries, and net US imports would stay about the same. China would lose, other countries would gain, and in America it would be a wash.

But what if Trump enacted a 10-15 percent tariff across the board on every country? Economically, that would act like a sales tax on foreign goods. Prices would go up, which would allow American companies to increase production in sectors where a 10-15 percent advantage was enough to make them competitive.2 The exact way this would shake out depends on the elasticity of demand for various goods, but in the end American workers in certain sectors would almost certainly make gains, while all American consumers would pay higher prices. Is this tradeoff worth it? I’d say no, but plenty of people would disagree.

That’s the 100-thousand-foot view, anyway. In real life, other countries would almost certainly retaliate—maybe via tariffs of their own, maybe in other ways. Boeing, for example, usually suffers when the Chinese get annoyed with us, because Chinese airlines develop a sudden fondness for Airbus planes. Or the authorities in Beijing could make life harder for American companies doing business in China. Or they could get nasty in any of a dozen other ways. Ditto for the rest of the world, which would appeal to the WTO at best and retaliate with their own trade barriers at worst.

And no matter what the rest of the world did, American companies would face headaches for years as they tried to rework their supply chains, which are global for nearly every product you can think of. American products use lots of parts made overseas, and lots of overseas products use parts (and services) from America. For example, a San Francisco Fed paper estimates that 55 percent of the value of Chinese goods is actually US content. To make this concrete, think about iPhones: If China ends up making fewer iPhones, that also means fewer jobs for the Apple sales force and lower sales for the plant in Texas that makes iPhone processors. The whole thing is a mess—and it’s especially a mess if companies have no assurance about how long the tariffs will stay around or what’s around the corner from the rest of the world as they figure out ways to get back at us.

The bottom line is this:

The impact on workers in certain sectors would be anything from negative (in the case of a big trade war) to fairly positive (if the tariffs worked and the rest of the world decided to ride it out).
Prices would go up for everyone. And since low-income workers buy more goods as a share of their income, higher prices would hit them the hardest.
Economic growth would almost certainly slow down.

Most likely, Trump’s tariffs would be a bad deal for nearly everyone, and maybe—maybe—a good deal for a few workers and CEOs in the sectors that have been hardest hit by foreign competition.

More generally, you can’t really talk about “trade” in the abstract. Basically, there’s China and there’s everyone else. China is our big problem, but the trouble with retaliating against China is that it’s too late. We have lost a lot of jobs to them, but the damage was mostly done years ago. By the time Obama took office there was little he could do, and there’s even less that Trump can do now. It’s also true that China was a bad actor on the world economic stage for a long time. But again, their worst practices are mostly in the past. Their export subsidies are fairly low these days, and their currency manipulation is mostly to push the yuan up, not down. This benefits America, not China.

There is one best-case scenario, though: Trump threatens the Chinese and ends up getting some concessions from them without ever enacting any tariffs. Is that likely? I guess that depends on how good a negotiator you think Trump is. Unfortunately, his record in the business world doesn’t give much cause for optimism on that front.

1Yes, he could do it. Details here.

2For example, if China makes clocks for $2 and America makes clocks for $3, a 15 percent tariff wouldn’t do anything for American clockmakers. Even at a Chinese price of $2.30, Americans still couldn’t compete. However, consumers would end up paying $2.30 for clocks instead of $2.

On the other hand, if China makes cars for $9,000 and America makes cars for $10,000, a tariff could have a big effect. Chinese cars would now cost $10,350, and that means consumers would buy a lot more American cars. Unless, of course, they really prefer the Chinese cars even at a higher price. It all depends, you see.

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A Trump Tariff Wall Would Help a Little, But Hurt a Lot

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Sam Johnson Wants to Cut Your Social Security Benefits By a Third

by TonySoper22 Posted on December 11, 2016

Mother Jones

For reasons that are a little unclear, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) has decided to introduce a shiny new plan to reform Social Security when Congress meets next year. Johnson’s idea of “reform” is to slash everyone’s benefits, so this idea seems slightly suicidal—not to mention pointless, since Donald Trump campaigned very loudly on a promise not to touch anyone’s Social Security.

But Johnson is a very conservative guy, and maybe he just wants to lay down a marker. So what would his plan do? It has 15 components, all of them crammed full of Social Security’s usual alphabet soup of acronyms—AWI, PIA, AIME, MAGI, bend points, etc.—but it turns out that only six of them are big enough to be meaningful. Here is the Social Security actuary’s estimate of how much money they’d save:

Basically, there are four big proposals that would cut benefits by 5.76 percent of payroll, and two proposals that would increase benefits by 1.37 percent of payroll. I assure you that this chart is far simpler to understand than the actual analysis, but it probably still leaves you a little baffled. Whose benefits would be cut? And by how much? I’m here to help:

Roughly speaking, people with extremely low average earnings over their working lives would see their benefits rise. That’s good! Unfortunately, everyone with an average lifetime income over $22,000 would see their benefits slashed—in some cases by a lot. An income of $60,000 is not exactly a king’s ransom, but nonetheless Johnson would cut benefits for these folks by a third.

As usual with these plans, a lot of its provisions are phased in gradually over time. But unlike most of these plans, some of them start to kick in right away. This means that even people who are already retired would suffer benefit cuts. For example, Johnson’s plan reduces the annual cost-of-living increase—and eliminates it entirely for anyone earning over $85,000—beginning in 2018.

Anyway, since I tortured myself by reading this plan, I figured I should torture all the rest of you by blogging about it. Happy Holidays!

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Sam Johnson Wants to Cut Your Social Security Benefits By a Third

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Despite victory for Standing Rock Sioux, Energy Transfer Partners vows Dakota Access Pipeline will go on.

by KimberlBlanton Posted on December 5, 2016

Grist sent former fellow Melissa Cronin aboard a four-seat prop plane to the tiny village of Tyonek, Alaska, this summer. Her on-the-ground investigation helped expose a Texas energy company’s plans to develop a coal mine across wetlands and forest that are extremely valuable to the local indigenous people.

Through her dogged reporting, Melissa published Coal’s Last Gamble — the type of fearless journalism we are proud to produce. If you missed the story, check it out here.

As part of our annual winter fund drive, we’re highlighting the stories of 2016 that defined our year. Why? Now more than ever, the world desperately needs independent nonprofit journalism. With the media landscape rife with antagonism, spectacle, and fake news, Grist dives deep and brings important stories you just can’t find elsewhere.

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Grist’s journalism is powered by readers like you. So, if you learned something valuable from Coal’s Last Gamble or any of the great work the team brought you this year, please consider making a gift!

As an added bonus, all new monthly donors will receive a limited-edition Grist steel pint glass to drink your political sorrows away toast to the progress we make toward a more sustainable, just future. Supplies are limited — get yours now.

Original article – 

Despite victory for Standing Rock Sioux, Energy Transfer Partners vows Dakota Access Pipeline will go on.

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Obama’s Overtime Rule Is Perfectly Sensible and Deserves Judicial Deference

by HilarioConnibere Posted on November 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Prepare to be fascinated. Last week I noted that a Texas judge had blocked the Obama administration’s new overtime rules. The basic issue here is simple: the law states that you’re exempt from overtime rules if you’re a “bona fide” executive, administrative, or professional (EAP) employee. But what does that mean? That’s up to the Department of Labor, which has always had a two-part test. First, you have to have the actual duties of an EAP employee. Second, there’s a salary floor: you have to make more than a certain amount. This is basically designed to keep employers from pretending that someone is an EAP even though they’re paying them peanuts.

The previous floor, set in 2004, was $23,660, or about $29,000 in 2014 dollars. The new rule raised that to about $47,000. The judge ruled that was too high. At $23,660, it made sense that no one under that level could possibly be a bona fide EAP. But at $47,000? Maybe they could.

Was the judge right? Jared Bernstein, who’s been deeply involved in this issue, writes today that he’s not. The basic problem is that the judge accepted the Bush administration’s number as gospel without considering the entire history of the salary floor. Adjusted for inflation, here’s what it looks like since 1940:1

The new level of $47,000 looks perfectly reasonable in historical context. In fact, it’s the 2004 number that looks way out of whack. But what if you use PCE instead of CPI as your inflation measure?

Now it’s the $47,000 number that looks like an outlier. Maybe the judge was right?

I don’t think so. As a matter of bloggy interest, we can certainly argue whether CPI or PCE (or some other measure) is “best” for measuring long-term inflation. However, they’re both widely used and perfectly acceptable in a broad sense. If the Department of Labor uses CPI, that’s a reasonable choice, which the court should give deference to under the Chevron rule. Beyond that, if DOL chooses to look at the historical record for the salary floor, rather than solely at the Bush administration’s number, that’s also reasonable and deserves deference.

Bottom line: the Labor Department set the salary floor in a reasonable way, backed by plenty of empirical evidence. (More empirical evidence than just the historical level of the salary test, I should add.) If anyone was out of line here, it was the Bush administration, not the Obama administration.

1The actual raw numbers are a little tricky to figure out. From 1950 through 1975, DOL used two different salary floors related to a “long test” and a “short test.” (Don’t ask.) As near as I can tell, the best fit to the previous floors is an average of the two, so that’s what I used. Bernstein has more on this here.

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Obama’s Overtime Rule Is Perfectly Sensible and Deserves Judicial Deference

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Trump’s Top Food Guy Just Abruptly Quit

by Lanny96N47 Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

To manage the transition of the US Department of Agriculture, President-elect Donald Trump settled on a lobbyist who represents Big Soda, Big Pizza, and Big Ag. On Wednesday, in a classic Trumpian lurch, the incoming chief executive announced a ban…on lobbyists serving in the transition.

And so the ag lobbyist, Michael Torrey, had to choose between maintaining his business or his position on the transition team. In a Friday press release, Torrey revealed his choice:

When asked recently to terminate lobbying registration for clients whom I serve in order to continue my role with the transition, I respectfully resigned from my role.

The Trump team has not announced a replacement or responded to my request for comment. One place to look for Torrey’s successor might be the motley crew of right-wing pols and agribiz execs who made up the Trump campaign’s Agricultural Advisory Committee.

Its chair, Charles Herbster, is a Trump loyalist who runs a multilevel marketing firm. One of the committee’s most high-profile members, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, is on the short list to be named USDA chief, according to the New York Times. Miller is most famous for trying to bill Texas taxpayers for a trip to Oklahoma to receive a medical procedure known as “the Jesus shot,” administered by a convicted felon known as Dr. Mike, and for calling Hillary Clinton a “cunt” in a tweet he has since deleted. He has also handed plum state jobs to campaign contributors, compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes, and suggested nuclear bombs be dropped on Muslim countries.

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Trump’s Top Food Guy Just Abruptly Quit

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