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Tough fight ahead on opioids. On Thursday, President Trump directed the Department of Health and Human Services to declare the opioid crisis a national health emergency. Details of a comprehensive plan for fighting opioid addiction and abuse, which have killed more Americans than the Vietnam War just since 2016, is said to be forthcoming. In her recent article, "Taking on the Scourge of Opioids," Sally Satel shows us that states have been engaged in the fight against opioid abuse for some time, they have adopted a variety of strategies, and some have worked better than others but all methods have their limits. The roots of the problem, she writes, are deep: [F]actors beyond physical pain are most responsible for making individuals vulnerable to problems with opioids. Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton paint a dreary portrait of the social determinants of addiction in their work on premature demise across the nation. Beginning in the late 1990s, deaths due to alcoholism-related liver disease, suicide, and opioid overdoses began to climb nationwide. These "deaths of despair," as Case and Deaton call them, strike less-educated whites, both men and women, between the ages of 45 and 54. While the life expectancy of men and women with a college degree continues to grow, it is actually decreasing for their less-educated counterparts. The problems start with poor job opportunities for those without college degrees. Absent employment, people come unmoored. Families unravel, domestic violence escalates, marriages dissolve, parents are alienated from their children, and their children from them. Opioids are a salve for these communal wounds. Work by Alex Hollingsworth and colleagues found that residents of locales most severely pummeled by the economic downturn were more susceptible to opioids. As county unemployment rates increased by one percentage point, the opioid death rate (per 100,000) rose by almost 4%, and the emergency-room visit rate for opioid overdoses (per 100,000) increased by 7%. It's no coincidence that many of the states won by Donald Trump — West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, for example — had the highest rates of fatal drug overdoses in 2015. What's needed, she writes, is to let states try new strategies and learn from those that work: The federal government can provide much-needed additional funding for treatment. This will be imperative if the Medicaid expansion is rolled back, as it has brought coverage to about 1.3 million substance abusers who were too poor for private insurance but not poor enough for Medicaid. But it is at the state and county levels that the real progress will be made. Locales are developing inventive modes of engagement; treatment programs are beginning to test novel kinds of incentives; and justice programs are starting to combine enforced structure with medication. As we have seen, the worst of the crisis is in small communities where everyone knows someone who has been affected by an opioid addiction. It makes sense that the effort to find inspired solutions would be most concentrated there; we should invest in those solutions and learn from them. There won't be a master blueprint that works everywhere — this is not a problem that will ever lend itself to such a scalable solution, especially in small towns. At least at this point, if not for the duration of this crisis, we need to allow medical professionals, law-enforcement officials, community organizations, and the loved ones of those affected to attempt different, even radical, solutions and evaluate their effectiveness. Policymakers should support such experimentation, and fund it, but must resist the urge to pretend that better funding alone will end the scourge of opioids. [National Affairs] Gender neutral pronouns: Is the movement about promoting good manners or empowering thought police? Seth Barron: It seems fair and just to refer to people as they present themselves and wish to be addressed. It would be rude to call a transman "Miss" just to make a point, and within reason, going along with whatever benign fiction people might have cooked up about themselves is simply good manners. "Preferred-pronoun" usage, however, is a bridge too far, and not just because it's impossible to expect everyone to memorize lists of declensions of made-up words. The pronoun debate is also an effort to force us to change the way we talk about people who are not actually present: when we speak of "he" or "she," we are almost always talking about someone who is not there. When speaking face-to-face, the only pronoun we commonly use is "you." It's considered improper to use third-person pronouns in the presence of their subjects; hence the old saying, "'She' is the cat's mother," meant to admonish against using the pronominal form instead of the individual's proper name, if he or she is present. Insisting that we refer to absent people according to made-up vocabulary words upon threat of punishment is to interpose political ideology into conversation under force of law. It deputizes all listeners or interlocutors as surveillance agents in the name of gender equality. [City Journal] Tea Party groups win legal battle against the Internal Revenue Service. On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced settlements with two groups of Tea Party organizations over the treatment of their tax exempt status applications by the Internal Revenue Service. The settlements cover groups of plaintiffs in two different cases: Linchpins of Liberty v. United States and NorCal Tea Party Patriots v. Internal Revenue Service. From Attorney General Jeff Sessions's statement: But it is now clear that during the last Administration, the IRS began using inappropriate criteria to screen applications for 501(c) status. These criteria included names such as "Tea Party," "Patriots," or "9/12" or policy positions concerning government spending or taxes, education of the public to "make America a better place to live," or statements criticizing how the country was being run. It is also clear these criteria disproportionately impacted conservative groups.
As a result of these criteria, the IRS transferred hundreds of applications to a specifically designated group of IRS agents for additional levels of review, questioning and delay. In many instances, the IRS then requested highly sensitive information from applicants, such as donor information, that was not needed to make a determination of tax-exempt status.
The IRS's use of these criteria as a basis for heightened scrutiny was wrong and should never have occurred. It is improper for the IRS to single out groups for different treatment based on their names or ideological positions. Any entitlement to tax exemption should be based on the activities of the organization and whether they fulfill requirements of the law, not the policy positions adopted by members or the name chosen to reflect those views. [U.S. Department of Justice] The proposed order in the Linchpins of Liberty case includes the following statement from the Internal Revenue Service: The IRS admits that its treatment of Plaintiffs during the tax-exempt determinations process, including screening their applications based on their names or policy positions, subjecting those applications to heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays, and demanding of some Plaintiffs' information that TIGTA determined was unnecessary to the agency's determination of their tax-exempt status, was wrong. For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology. [American Center for Law and Justice] Funding politics with the public's money. The IRS scandal may have reached its legal conclusion, but another Obama-era scandal concerning favoritism to liberal groups is just now surfacing. Kevin Mooney reports: President Barack Obama's Justice Department created a "slush fund" of nearly $1 billion using legal settlements with banks and steered those funds to political allies on the left while excluding conservative groups, internal documents show. Tony West, an associate attorney general during the Obama administration who is now a top official at PepsiCo Inc., figures prominently in a chain of email messages involving his staff members, the records show. The financial institutions, which made legal settlements with the Obama administration regarding mortgage securities that imploded during the 2008 financial crisis, include Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and JPMorgan Chase. Public records of the settlement agreements with the Justice Department show that when cash donations to liberal groups are combined with other donations in the form of loans and a separate settlement with Volkswagen of America Inc., the slush fund may have topped $3 billion. As Mooney goes on to note, the House of Representatives has just this week passed a bill that, if passed by the Senate and signed into law, will "bar the Justice Department and all other federal agencies from 'requiring defendants to donate money to outside groups as part of settlement agreements.'" [The Daily Signal] No more "sue and settle" at EPA. Rob Gordon and Hans von Spakovsky report on a big win for the rule of law: There's a new day dawning at the Environmental Protection Agency. On October 16, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced that he is pulling the plug on the "sue and settle" strategy his predecessors used to impose new regulations and funnel large amounts of cash to their allies in the environmental movement.
Under President Obama, the sue-and-settle gambit was raised to an art form. The administration would invite special-interest groups to sue the EPA over a regulation that it wanted to change but couldn't, at least not expeditiously. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the EPA would then almost immediately surrender, agreeing to settle. Inevitably, the settlement entailed consenting to whatever outrageous demands were being made by the agency's handpicked "adversary."
As Pruitt noted, this tactic allowed the Obama administration to "circumvent the regulatory process set by Congress," avoiding the requirements of public notice that are supposed to give citizens and industry a chance to comment on changes in existing regulations or proposed new ones. Under the settlements that resulted, the EPA would often commit to imposing changes that went far beyond what the law required, short-circuiting statutory deadlines and timetables along the way. And even though the EPA settled the friendly suits in record time, it still paid tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to cover the plaintiffs' legal bills. Between 2009 and 2012, the EPA chose not to defend itself in 60 such lawsuits. In each case, the agency agreed to settle on terms favorable to the advocacy groups, according to a 2013 report of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These "sue and settle" lawsuits resulted in more than 100 new federal rules estimated to impose $100 million in annual regulatory-compliance costs. [National Review]
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