A friend of mine is referring to Tuesday’s election results as the Judex election. I can get on board with that. Many of the core Judex issues fared well, particularly crime and free speech. Here are some of the highlights.
Crime
Election day this year sent good signals on the crime front. Across the nation, voters rejected soft on crime criminal justice reform policies and the people that promote them.
Californians overwhelmingly approved the Proposition 36 ballot initiative, which reversed Proposition 47, a 2014 law that decreased penalties for many crimes. The State’s Prop 47 in 2014 kicked off a criminal reform movement that swept the nation, including a vigorous effort in Indiana. But voters in California have soured on the reform effort and its negative consequences, which include increased overdose deaths, homelessness, and rampant shoplifting. Prop 36 approval means California will now increase penalties for retail theft, property crimes and drug offenses. The measure was supported by law enforcement, of course, but also interestingly by San Francisco’s liberal mayor. You can read more about it here.
A ballot measure in Massachusetts that would have legalized recreational use of psychedelics, including psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, also failed. Fifty-six percent of the state’s voters opposed the initiative. You can read more about it here.
On the other side of the nation, Florida voters rejected a ballot measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana in the state. Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, campaigned heavily against legalization. The media campaign against the ballot measure emphasized quality of life issues, highlighting that legal marijuana would mean that the whole state would stink, impacting the important Florida tourist industry. You can read more about it here.
Finally, Los Angeles County, California voters also tossed out progressive Soros Prosecutor, George Gascon. Gascon was perhaps the nation’s most enthusiastic supporter of progressive prosecution policies. Upon taking office, Gascon eliminated the use of sentence enhancements, refused to prosecute any juveniles as adults no matter how serious the offense, would not prosecute shoplifting or many drug offenses, and eliminated cash bail. San Francisco voters soundly rejected Gascon’s ideology electing Nathan Hochman, a former prosecutor who campaigned on a tough on crime agenda. Hochman won with over sixty percent of the vote. You can read more about it here.
These are all positive developments. Progressive areas that embraced radical criminal justice policies are starting to dislike the consequences of those policies. Hopefully, this means the tide is turning on the disastrous criminal reform movement. There is still work to do, however, even here in Indiana.
Free speech
The election also held good news for freedom of speech. Over the last few years, the censorship-industrial complex, a collusion between government and the tech industry, has suppressed conservative speech. I have written previously about this here. As recently as three days before the election, YouTube made it nearly impossible to find Donald Trump’s interview on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Like Trump or not, Rogan’s podcast is the most successful podcast in the world, garnering millions upon millions of more views than all the mainstream U.S. media combined. It is dumb to suppress it, and illegal to do so if performed at the behest of the government, as much of the suppression has been. Trump has strong motivation to dismantle the censorship operation. I hope his administration will resist the urge to reverse the censorship, and instead adopt the principle that the antidote to bad speech is not less but freer speech.
Originalism
Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeal Judge, Amul Thapar, recently spoke to the Heritage Foundation, and encouraged donors to withhold money from laws schools unless they commit to hiring ideologically diverse faculty and to teaching originalist theory. Thapar said, “much is amiss at our nation’s law schools,” adding that law schools “teach widely accepted originalist methods through a distorted, uncharitable and often inaccurate lens.” It is good to see conservative judges standing up like this. You can read more about it here.
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