You Suez, You Lose
On Fourth Amendment exceptions, the insurrection, the shipping industry, and more.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in Caniglia v. Strom, an interesting Fourth Amendment case. Edward Caniglia, a 68-year-old man from Rhode Island, is suing a group of police officers who entered his home without a warrant in 2015. His wife had told the officers that she thought he might be suicidal after he brandished a handgun in front of her during an argument about a coffee mug. The officers interviewed Caniglia, took him to a mental-health hospital for evaluation, and confiscated his guns. He filed a Section 1983 lawsuit against the cops for violating his Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The cops persuaded the lower courts that their actions fell within the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, which generally allows warrantless searches and seizures if they’re performed during an officer’s first-responder duties. On Wednesday, the justices mostly focused on whether this doctrine should be applied to home searches when it was originally designed for vehicle searches. But some of them also touched upon a broader policy debate as well. From my article this week on the case:
At one point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that some cities no longer send police to respond to certain issues. “Some communities are doing that because sometimes mental health checks don’t go well, and people end up getting hurt, or the police, after someone who’s mentally ill pulled a gun on the police or a knife, things go very poorly and sometimes the person who is the subject of the welfare check will end up being hurt or killed,” she explained. “So some communities are creating a situation where social workers go in. Would that be reasonable?” [Caniglia’s lawyer] eventually replied that he thought such a system could survive a Fourth Amendment challenge.
Should armed law-enforcement agents really be serving as de facto mental health counselors and social workers? As Barrett suggested, we’ve seen over the last few years how the mixture of cops and people in mental-health crises can lead to tragic results. And it’s well established how American prisons and jails effectively double as mental hospitals of last resort. If the court sides with the officers, they may also unintentionally bolster calls by activists to redirect police funding towards community services and mental health-care providers.
Federal prosecutors are still bringing charges and releasing evidence against alleged participants in the Capitol Hill riot. This week, that evidence included transcripts of private Facebook conversations between Kelly Meggs, a top member of the far-right Oath Keepers organization, and other group leaders about an alliance with the Proud Boys, the far-right gang that Trump infamously told to “stand back and stand by.”
Most people who reported on the conversations focused on the apparent coordination between the two extremist groups. What caught my eye in those transcripts, however, was something else:
Unknown author: I’m coming just need to know how to prepare
Unknown author: I will need list of gear and attire
Unknown author: Fuck these communist cock suckers
Kelly Meggs: We are all staying in DC near the Capitol we are at the Hilton garden inn but I think it’s full .
Dc is no guns . So mace and gas masks , some batons . If you have armor that’s good . During the day it’s kind of boring but when it starts getting dark Game on
“DC is no guns” appears to be a reference to D.C.’s famously strict gun laws. At one point, the district even forbade private handgun ownership in homes for most of the city’s residents. The Supreme Court overturned that ban in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, where the court recognized an individual right to bear arms within the Second Amendment for the first time.1 Other strict gun restrictions remain on the books in the district to this day: There’s a general ban on openly carrying lawful firearms around D.C. and it’s illegal to possess, sell, or transfer an “assault weapon” in the nation’s capital.
The conversation between the Oath Keepers leaders explains a striking aspect of the January 6 protests: the lack of visible firearms on the demonstrators throughout the day, even among the ones who eventually stormed the Capitol. Contrast that with the heavily armed anti-mask protesters who gathered at the Michigan state capitol last year, or the anti-Biden protesters who gathered outside other state capitols since then. The district also seemed eager to enforce its gun laws as well: D.C. police arrested Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio a few days before January 6 for, among other things, illegal possession of a firearm.
For every tragedy that unfolded on January 6, everything we’ve learned since then suggests the nation narrowly escaped a dozen more tragedies that day. One of the protesters who died that day was Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by police outside the House chamber while her fellow rioters tried to make their way inside. Imagine the horrors that would’ve unfolded if those rioters had been able to return fire.
I was not enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s presidential bid when he launched it in 2019. He spent a good portion of that year walking back his past stances on multiple issues, particularly on criminal justice, without really reckoning with why he got those issues wrong in the first place. He also appeared far too confident that he could work productively with the same Republicans who had resisted Barack Obama at every turn for eight years. Biden’s belief that Republicans like Mitch McConnell would have an “epiphany” if he won, I wrote back then, appeared to stem from his unspoken belief that he could outmaneuver the GOP because he happens to be an older white man.
So, earlier this week, I asked myself a simple question: Was I wrong about Biden? The American Rescue Plan, his $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package, passed Congress without a single Republican vote, and the GOP remains firmly in Donald Trump’s circle. So much for that epiphany. It was also a far more monumental piece of legislation than anyone would have expected from him in 2019. The pandemic obviously changed Biden’s thinking on economic stimulus and anti-poverty measures. He appears more eager now to be a big-thinking president instead of a mere caretaker of the White House, and the GOP is struggling to counter him on it so far. The president still has a long four years ahead. He may yet fail to live up to his own hype. So for now, I’m willing to say he was half-right.
Speaking of Congress, I also wrote this week about the clash between House Democrats and Republicans over Iowa’s second congressional district. Last November’s contest between GOP candidate Mariannette Miller-Meeks and her Democratic opponent Rita Hart came down to a mere six votes in Miller-Meeks’ favor. Miller-Meeks took her seat in January, but Hart is now challenging that result based on a handful of ballots that she says were wrongly excluded, which would tip the race in her favor.
How should the House resolve this? On one hand, Hart’s claims appear to have some merit, even though she declined to make them in court. On the other hand, the outcome was already certified by state officials acting in apparent good faith after a recount and a statewide canvass of ballots. Republicans are openly salivating at the prospect of Democrats overturning a House election, hoping to use it to defend Trump’s own efforts to overturn the presidential election and further delegitimize American democracy. Whatever the outcome, I don’t envy the Democrats on the House Administration Committee who’ll have to decide it.
One hundred and fifty years ago, more than a million workers carved a 120-mile long waterway across a narrow strip of Egyptian soil that joined Africa to Eurasia. Ten years of labor linked the Mediterranean and Red Seas for navigation and commerce and, later, the glory of the British Empire. Now there’s a ship the size of the Empire State Building lodged sideways in it, and roughly ten percent of the world’s seaborne commerce has ground to a halt.
It’s not very funny that the Ever Given is stuck in the Suez Canal if you’re a sailor aboard one of the 200 ships waiting aimlessly for passage or an oil executive wondering if your shipment from the Persian Gulf will reach consumers in Europe any time soon. But it is slightly funny to me, an American writer with no personal stake in a mildly comedic situation where nobody’s health or freedom is at risk.
Moving things from one place to another over long distances is not easy, especially if you want to move a lot of things, and especially if you want to move them quickly. One shipping executive told The Wall Street Journal that it would take 2,400 Boeing 747 planes to carry the 20,000 freight containers currently trapped on the Ever Given. Boeing has only built 1,500 of its 747 planes since their introduction in 1970. People travel most efficiently by plane or by train. Everything else travels best on giant ships.
It’s been a rough 12 months for the shipping industry. More than 300,000 workers in the world’s shipping fleets were effectively trapped on their vessels last year as governments closed their borders to slow the coronavirus’s spread. The pandemic also sparked massive, sudden shifts in consumer behavior, especially when millions of home-bound Americans began ordering a flood of goods from China last year to adjust to quarantined living. Shipping containers, the humble workhorse of international commerce, piled up in some countries while vanishing from others, throwing worldwide trade patterns into chaos.2
The pandemic and the Suez crisis (no, not that one) have also exposed the fragility of modern supply chains. From The New York Times:
In recent decades, management experts and consulting firms have championed so-called just-in-time manufacturing to limit costs and boost profits. Rather than waste money stockpiling extra goods in warehouses, companies can depend on the magic of the internet and the global shipping industry to summon what they need as they need it.
The embrace of this idea has delivered no less than a revolution to major industries — automotive and medical device manufacturing, retailing, pharmaceuticals and more. It has also yielded a bonanza for corporate executives and other shareholders: Money not spent filling warehouses with unneeded auto parts is, at least in part, money that can be given to shareholders in the form of dividends.
[…]
Some experts have warned for years that short-term shareholder interests have eclipsed prudent management in prompting companies to skimp on stockpiling goods.
I think I’ve read some variation of that “short-term shareholder interests eclipsed prudent management” line at least a dozen times over the years. If nothing else, it’s humbling to know that for all its sophistication and complexity, our modern globalized economy is no match for high winds and one wayward ship.
Lightning round! The B mesons aren’t decaying right at CERN. Politics entangled the Facebook of knitting. Should Spotify be nationalized? A French monastery really needs to sell cheese. Don’t forget to airlift your rhinoceros upside down. We accept cash, check, money order, or 91,500 oily pennies.
This is only the second issue of my newsletter, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. What did you enjoy? What could you do without? Please feel free to send me your feedback at matt@tnr.com. See you again next week!
For more on the legal tussles in D.C. that followed that ruling, check out this WAMU story on the tenth anniversary of Heller from 2018.
I would love to read a good history of the modern shipping container. If you can recommend one, please email me at matt@tnr.com.