I mentioned this in last week’s brief thoughts on the end of the government shutdown, but I was kind of annoyed to see “moderates” widely used as the shorthand for the group of eight Democratic senators who decided to back down from the fight with Republicans. I’m annoyed because of course it’s a bad look for “moderation” to be identified with a decision that highly engaged grassroots Democrats hate.

But I’m also annoyed because I think using that terminology to describe what happened during the shutdown genuinely misstates what the broader argument is about.

I think the moderation argument is primarily about:

• Do you prioritize the issues the public says they care most about?

• Do you take positions on issues the public agrees with?

• Do you prioritize delivering on what the public cares about in your governance?

Elissa Slotkin bucking Chuck Schumer’s whip to vote with Republicans on a vote about letting California ban gasoline-burning cars is moderation. Michael Bennet denouncing the Biden administration’s pause on natural gas exports is moderation. Bennet, Cory Booker, and the late Diane Feinstein fighting the Biden administration on behalf of charter schools is moderation. Ruben Gallego backing an immigration reform plan that limits a path to citizenship to Dreamers and the spouses of U.S. citizens — a far narrower approach than the 2007 and 2013 bills — is moderation. Joe Manchin insisting that the Build Back Better plan be pared down to something that was less inflationary was moderation.

Even moderation that I don’t approve of, like Kyrsten Sinema demanding that the legislation scale back its revenue aspirations, can be a meaningful form of moderation. Jared Golden backing the SAVE Act is moderation. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez denouncing student loan forgiveness and fighting with the Biden administration about the regulation of table saws is moderation.

Even those on the left can manifest acts of moderation. Zohran Mamdani disavowing “defund the police” and committing to retaining Jessica Tisch as police commissioner is moderation. That doesn’t make Mamdani “a moderate” in some absolute sense. But he was trying to move to the center relative to his prior image, to reach out to the middle ground of New York City public opinion (which is way to the left of national opinion), and in doing so he successfully got himself a hair over 50 percent of the vote.

I don’t think Chris Murphy would want me to characterize it this way, but taking the lead on negotiating a border security bill with James Lankford last Congress was moderation. He broke the interest group taboo that said hawkish moves on immigration had to take place in the context of a deal for dovish moves on immigration. And, of course, Joe Biden belatedly moved to the middle on this topic by eventually shutting down the asylum system. Earlier, though, back in 2023 Gallego broke with Biden on the border along with Senators Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, and Sherrod Brown, but Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan declined to join them.

I know Shaheen and Hassan think of themselves as moderates, as does Catherine Cortez Masto, and probably some of the other members of the surrender caucus.

But I can’t think of major examples of them fighting with the Biden administration or progressive interest groups about issues or ideas. And in keeping with that (and not meaning this as a defense of the decision to surrender), I don’t think they ended the shutdown for particularly moderate reasons.

If you ask them what they’re up to, they’ll tell you very plainly that they were trying to safeguard the interests of federal employees and low-income Americans. I think a big part of the subtext of the fight is that they wanted to preserve the filibuster. This bit of Senate procedure is something people have been arguing about for decades, but it’s clearly not something that normal voters care a lot about or that has tons of relevance to electoral strategy or party positioning. The case for moderation is a case about aligning with public views and priorities and just has nothing to do with the inside-baseball Senate stuff.

The real stakes of the decision

Understanding of this is unfortunately distorted by the number of opponents of the deal who were posturing in Congress, insisting on painting a picture where the likely alternative to striking a deal would have been for Democrats to score a win on the policy issue of health-insurance tax credits.

There is certainly a universe in which Donald Trump responded to the licking Republicans took in the off-year elections by opening the door to a deal on this topic. That, in fact, might have been the smartest political move for him.

But it’s not the direction he went. If anything, it was the opposite. While the White House’s original posture had been to refuse to indulge Democrats’ demands under threat of a shutdown, the administration was not expressing that much hostility to the idea of extending the tax credits. But evidently there was some kind of internal debate, and Trump started mouthing off hostility to the idea of the tax credits and indeed hostility to the entire idea of government-subsidized health insurance. Wavering Democrats were clearly eager to see what would happen in the elections. If the party underperformed polling, that might be evidence that the shutdown was backfiring and it should end. If Democrats overperformed and Trump seemed open to negotiating, that would have been the time to work on a deal. But Trump made it clear that no deal would happen.

This gave Democrats a choice between reopening the government in exchange for nothing (what the Shaheen Team did) and simply pushing the country into a cascading series of air-traffic-control problems, loss of income for SNAP families, and financial hardship for federal workers.

I think the “push the country into hardship” option made political sense because, as far as we can tell, voters were blaming Trump for the shutdown, so hardship would reduce his popularity and reduce his political power. I’m not sure how Trump would have handled the scenario of escalating national economic pain and unpopularity. Perhaps he would have persuaded Republicans to nuke the filibuster. Perhaps he would have rescinded the Carter-era interpretation of the Antideficiency Act that led to government shutdowns and tried to unilaterally reopen the government. Either way, the shutdown would have eventually ended after some amount of pain for the American people, likely with no concessions on health care.

I was happy to bite that bullet. Just as I’m always urging progressives to abandon some of their policy rigidity for the sake of defeating MAGA, I think it would make sense for progressives to be a bit cold-hearted about this tradeoff for the sake of defeating MAGA. I’d have loved to see Democratic Party politicians and progressive donors mobilizing resources to support SNAP families to further make the political point. And I think the fact that it would’ve ended without concessions on health care anyway would mean that Democrats would still have the issue to run on.

But those of us who criticize the decision to fold should be clear about what we’re asking for.

The shutdown was a winning political hand vis-a-vis Trump — but the mechanism of action is that people suffer. Shaheen was acting in solidarity with federal workers and their labor unions, and in solidarity with SNAP recipients and anti-poverty advocates.

The Shaheen Team also made the point that the bipartisan appropriations bills — which the deal has now cleared the deck for — will set spending levels higher than the continuing resolution, and considerably higher than the levels that would be set if Republicans nuked the filibuster. This wasn’t the Washington Generals blundering away a game for no reason. It was earnest progressive Democrats trying to deliver the least-bad substantive policy outcome. This is the exact same impulse that has Senate Democrats filibustering federal voter ID or the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act — they’re declining to accept short-term policy losses for the sort of political gain that might let them do more good in the long run.

Procedural hardball trades off with policy

The luxury of being a progressive senator with a safe seat is you can live in a world with zero tradeoffs, where you tell everyone that if it were up to you, 100 percent of their dreams would come true.

The problem with this is that even the most ideologically extreme members tend to get bored playing pure fantasy politics and not actually doing anything. Elizabeth Warren, for example, made real concessions of substance — including some very in-the-weeds stuff about consumer protection regulation of mortgage lenders that was probably a bitter pill for her to swallow — to Tim Scott for the sake of getting the ROAD to Housing Act written, passed through committee, and out of the Senate. It’s now pending in the House, where a different set of stakeholders has its own hang-ups, and it may collapse.

But if it passes, it won’t pass because it represents Warren’s pure ideological vision. It represents some ideas she believes in, paired with some other ideas that sealed the deal. And good for her! But imagine that it does pass, and Donald Trump gets to say he’s signing historic bipartisan legislation to address housing affordability. That’s pretty great politics for Trump. Someone, somewhere, who is not as much of a housing supply head as Warren and I both are is going to be asking, “Why did Democrats give Trump this win?”

And in the real world, this is a common tradeoff.

A lot of progressive fighters have a kind of envy of the extreme procedural hardball that Republicans played in the mid-Obama years. It’s worth recalling, though, that this hardball involved Republicans rejecting offers from Obama for meaningful cuts to both Medicare and Social Security.

In formal terms, the reason they didn’t do the deal is that it would have raised taxes. But in truth, taxes were scheduled to rise anyway (and, in fact, did) due to the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. They just didn’t want to do anything that would let Obama run for re-election as having achieved a major bipartisan deficit-reduction deal. They wanted to beat Obama and then run the table in 2013. But instead Obama won, and they lost the opportunity to lock in policy gains.

One reason Obama was optimistic that the fever would break if he won the election is that he thought Republicans would see it was a mistake to prioritize hardball over policy wins.

What happened instead, of course, was the rise of Trump, who is certainly a huge fan of hardball politics. Progressives often look at that and characterize Trump as an ultra-conservative. But part of Trump’s whole deal was just completely giving up on G.O.P. policy goals with regard to Social Security and Medicare. He didn’t make the tradeoff go away; he just chose definitively to prioritize crushing the left over cutting federal transfer payments.

Fighters versus policy-demanders

I also want to clarify here that I’m not just talking out of my ass. The faction urging the Democrats to be more moderate isn’t saying they should be like Jeanne Shaheen.

Third Way President Jonathan Cowan denounced the deal in a press release. Note that the shutdown fight itself — which was about health-care tax credits rather than authoritarianism or ICE raids — was from the get-go moderate in its conception. Moderates want Democrats to fight on their best issues rather than tilt over stuff the public doesn’t care about, and incremental expansions of the health-care safety net are one of Democrats’ very best issues.

My favorite group of elected officials is the Majority Democrats. If you look at their Senate members (Gallego, Slotkin, and Bennet) and their members who are running for Senate (Angie Craig and James Talarico), none of them were for the deal.

I also think the exceptions here prove the rule. The party’s two successful gubernatorial candidates this year, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, are both Majority Democrats. They’re also similar politicians — elected in the same House class, roommates in D.C., good friends by all accounts — and have broadly similar approaches. Sherrill, like the rest of the Majority Dems, was against the deal but Spanberger came out for it.

Is that because Spanberger is more moderate than Sherrill? I don’t think it is. It’s pretty obviously because the cost-benefit of sacrificing federal workers’ paychecks for the sake of getting over on Trump looks different from Richmond than from Trenton.

Precisely for that reason, I kind of wish Spanberger had come out swinging against a deal days before it was announced to show that even though a deal is narrowly good for Virginia, she still wanted to fight.

But I bring up the difference because I think it illustrates what the actual tradeoff is here. Tim Kaine was on the bubble, but joined the dealmakers at the last minute because he got Republicans to make concessions protecting federal workers from Trump’s efforts at mass layoffs. Again, I think it’s totally comprehensible that a Virginia politician would consider this concrete policy win very important. I wish he saw it otherwise, but it illustrates the actual dynamic here, which is that dealmakers were prioritizing policy outcomes while rejectionists wanted to accept a worse policy outcome for the sake of political combat.

I will also say that I am not fanatical about this. There is a universe in which Trump said “yes” to Chuck Schumer’s proposal to extend the tax credits by one year, and I think a bunch of Democrats would have voted for that deal. I bet hardcore partisan brawlers would have been pretty disappointed with that outcome, too, because they are true fanatics about the ethic of fight fight fight. But that would just turn it into a losing fight.

Either way, though, there’s no getting around the basic tradeoff of fighting versus policy wins.

National party leadership matters most

One bit of nuance here is that moderates do genuinely value politicians who can win in Trump districts. I think Henry Cuellar and Tom Suozzi, both of whom fit this bill, are valuable to the Democratic Party because ultimately the road to a majority requires winning those seats.

These guys tend not to be big partisan brawlers on process questions; Cuellar and Suozzi weren’t involved in the dealmaking or the strategic decision to throw in the towel. But, once the deal was sealed, they voted for it because people in mismatched districts like to have bipartisan voting records.

This is why, even though I personally admire our brave Blue Dogs holding down red districts, I do not think that “recruit more moderate candidates” is the only solution to Democrats’ problems. I’ve been trying to be more conscious in recent months about the need to be clear on this. I think these are good politicians, and Democrats should recruit more like them. But recruitment doesn’t magically solve problems. That’s because:

1. It’s incredibly hard for politicians to credibly differentiate themselves from national party brands.

2. It’s incredibly hard for politicians representing red districts to engage in the kind of partisan hardball that would genuinely cripple MAGA.

The solution is that instead of just recruiting candidates who can win in red districts, national Democrats need to try to be a national political party that can win in red districts, such that those districts are no longer red.

My go-to example of this is that if Democrats won’t accept that the Democratic senators from Pennsylvania and Colorado and New Mexico won’t vote for a fracking ban because those states have oil and gas industries, then obviously Democrats aren’t going to win in redder Ohio and Texas and Alaska while banning fracking either.

The solution is for Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and — yes — Jeanne Shaheen to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking. That makes life much easier for Sherrod Brown. It makes it easier to recruit Mary Peltola. It means that Talarico and Colin Allred can wage a vigorous primary without either of them committing to anything politically suicidal.

I don’t want to re-do my whole schtick about this. But the point is that a more moderate Democratic Party, to me, means a national party with leaders and safe seat members who are genuinely trying to become more popular — who are more willing to align with majority opinion on major issues and less in hock to progressive policy-demanders. It’s not a party that relies on candidates who distance themselves from the party to win tough seats, but a party that positions itself such that candidates don’t need to distance themselves so much in order to win. And it’s definitely not a party that reflexively abandons the public-opinion high ground in order to secure obscure policy wins about appropriations levels.

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A small Missouri town will pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man whose 13-pound blind and deaf shih tzu dog was shot and killed by a police officer. It is one of the largest settlements of its kind, an animal rights group says.

Nicholas Hunter filed a lawsuit last year against the City of Sturgeon, Missouri, and former Sturgeon police officer Myron Woodson, alleging his Fourth Amendment rights were violated when Woodson killed his dog Teddy shortly after finding it wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19, 2024.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), an animal rights advocacy group, provided a grant to help cover costs for the lawsuit and announced the settlement last Friday in a press release.

"Mr. Hunter is relieved this matter is concluded but nothing can ever bring his Teddy back," Hunter's attorneys, Daniel J. Kolde and Eric C. Crinnian, said in the release. "Teddy was a good dog who did not deserve this. We hope that other departments will learn from this and train their officers better in the future so events like this don't happen again. We also are grateful to the ALDF for their support and efforts to bring light to tragedies like Teddy and encourage better training and more responsible police behavior towards beloved family pets."

Teddy's shooting was a particularly egregious example of a common phenomena: police needlessly shooting family dogs. (There have been so many cases over the years that we have a "puppycide" tag for stories on the Reason website.) No one knows exactly how many dogs police shoot around the country, but every year, there are more cases of wanton killings that, besides terrorizing owners, generate huge lawsuits, viral outrage, and sometimes result in officers being fired or facing trial, such as in the case of a New Orleans officer who shot and killed a puppy.

The trouble in Sturgeon started on May 19, 2024, when Teddy escaped from Hunter's backyard while Hunter was out at dinner. Hunter's neighbor called a county dispatch center to report that the dog had wandered into their yard. According to Hunter's lawsuit, the caller responded, "No, not at all," when asked if the dog was aggressive.

The town of Sturgeon's official Facebook page posted an alert on May 19 about the missing dog, along with photos of Teddy: "Do you know this doggie? Joint communications has been notified. The doggie seems in need of medical attention."

Hunter had been called about the Facebook post and was on his way to pick up Teddy. Instead, Woodson beat him to the scene, and a few minutes later, the officer shot the dog twice, killing it.

The city of Sturgeon posted on Facebook about the incident the next day, defending Woodson's decision: "Based on the behavior exhibited by the dog, believing the dog to be severely injured or infected with rabies, and as the officer feared being bitten and being infected with rabies, the SPD [Sturgeon Police Department] officer felt that his only option was to put the animal down," the city wrote. "It was later learned that the animal's behavior was because the animal was blind. Unfortunately, the animal's lack of a collar or tags influenced the SPD Officer's decision to put the animal down due to his belief that the animal was injured, sick and abandoned."

But when the local news outlet ABC 17 obtained Woodson's body camera footage, it showed that Teddy was never aggressive and didn't bark or growl. Woodson tried to lasso Teddy with a catch pole—a common tool used in animal control—but the dog simply shook its head free of the rope and trotted away. After fumbling the catch pole several times, Woodson drew his gun and killed Teddy. ABC 17 reported that Woodson's entire encounter with Teddy, from exiting his car to putting two bullets in the animal, lasted three minutes and six seconds.

Yet after body camera footage was released, Sturgeon doubled down: "The City believes that the officer acted within his authority based on the information available to him at the time to protect against possible injury to citizens from what appeared to be an injured, sick, and abandoned dog," Sturgeon posted in a follow-up Facebook post.

Hunter filed a federal lawsuit within a week of the shooting.

In a deposition, Woodson testified that he destroyed the animal because "I believed the dog was seriously injured and suffering."

Sturgeon city officials suspended Woodson and promised to conduct an investigation, but according to Hunter's lawsuit, that investigation never occurred. The city allegedly instead paid Woodson a $16,000 settlement regarding his suspension.

Woodson no longer works for the SPD and is apparently a process server. ABC 17 reported last week that Woodson was charged with trespassing for allegedly refusing police officers' orders to leave a retirement home where he was attempting to serve papers.

Chris Green, executive director of the ALDF, said in a statement that the settlement is "one of the largest of its kind for the police shooting of a beloved family dog."

The typical size of these settlements has grown substantially since a court ruling in the early 2000s established that the Fourth Amendment protects pets from unreasonable "seizures"—that is, killings. In 2018, a Maryland jury awarded $1.26 million to a family whose dog was shot and killed by police. As Reason reported that year, these settlements and the intense public backlash has caught police departments' attention; they've started to incorporate training for officers to recognize dog behaviors and respond with non-lethal methods first. It's a step that animal rights groups say is long overdue.

"These horrendous tragedies are completely unnecessary and preventable with simple, adequate training," Green continued. "I hope this half-million-dollar amount sends a message to other police departments that if your officers needlessly harm an animal, you will pay."

The City of Sturgeon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Missouri Town Will Pay $500K To Settle Lawsuit Over Deputy Shooting Blind and Deaf Dog appeared first on Reason.com.

"In August, United and Delta Air Lines were sued by passengers in two separate but similar suits. Both airlines were accused of unfairly charging extra for some window seats without warning that there wasn't actually a window there.

United filed a motion to dismiss the case on Monday.

"The use of the word 'window' in reference to a particular seat cannot reasonably be interpreted as a promise that the seat will have an exterior window view," the airline's lawyers wrote.

"Rather, the word 'window' identifies the position of the seat—i.e., next to the wall of the main body of the aircraft," they added.

If Donald Trump loses his Supreme Court fight over tariffs, the US may be forced to return “tens of billions of dollars to companies that have paid import fees this year, plus interest,” The Atlantic reported. And the longer the verdict is delayed, the higher the refunds could go, possibly even hitting $1 trillion.

For tech companies both large and small, the stakes are particularly high. A Trump defeat would not just mean clawing back any duties paid on imports to the US that companies otherwise can use to invest in their competitiveness. But, more critically in the long term, it would also end tariff shocks that, as economics lecturer Matthew Allen emphasized in a report for The Conversation, risked harming “innovation itself” by destabilizing global partnerships and diverse supply chains in “tech-intensive, IP-led sectors like semiconductors and software.”

Currently, the Supreme Court is weighing two cases that argue that the US president does not have unilateral authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Defending his regime of so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump argued these taxes were necessary to correct the “emergency” of enduring trade imbalances that he alleged have unfairly enriched other countries while bringing the US “to the brink of catastrophic decline.”

Not everyone thinks Trump will lose. But after oral arguments last week, prediction markets dropped Trump’s odds of winning from 50 to 25 percent, Forbes reported, due to Supreme Court justices appearing skeptical.

Dozens of economists agreed: Trump’s tariffs are “odd”

Justices may have been swayed by dozens of leading economists who weighed in. In one friend of the court brief, more than 40 economists, public policy researchers, and former government officials argued that Trump’s got it all wrong when he claims that “sustained trade deficits” have “fostered dependency on foreign rivals and gutted American manufacturing.”

Far from being “unusual and extraordinary,” they argued that trade deficits are “rather ordinary and commonplace.” And rather than being a sign of US weakness, the deficits instead indicate that the US has a “foreign investment surplus,” as other countries clearly consider the US “a superior investment.”

Look no further than the tech sector for a prominent example, they suggested, noting that “the United States has the dominant technology sector in the world and, as a result, has been running a persistent surplus in trade in services for decades.” Citing a quip from Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow—“I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me”—economists argued that trade deficits are never inherently problematic.

“It is odd to economists, to say the least, for the United States government to attempt to rebalance trade on a country-by-country basis,” economists wrote, as Trump seems to do with his trade deals imposing reciprocal tariffs as high as 145 percent.

SCOTUS urged to end “perfect storm of uncertainty”

Trump has been on a mission to use tariffs to force more manufacturing back into the US. He has claimed that the court undoing his trade deals would be an “economic disaster” and “would literally destroy the United States of America.” And the longer it takes for the verdict to come out, the more damage the verdict could do, his administration warned, as the US continues to collect tariffs and Trump continues to strike deals that hinge on reciprocal tariffs being in play.

However, in another friend-of-court brief, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and the Chamber of Commerce (CoC) argued that the outcome is worse for US businesses if the court defers to Trump.

“The current administration’s use of IEEPA to impose virtually unbounded tariffs is not only unprecedented but is causing irreparable harm” to each group’s members by “increasing their costs, undermining their ability to plan for the future, and in some cases, threatening their very existence,” their filing said.

“The tariffs are particularly damaging to American manufacturing,” they argued, complaining that “American manufacturers face higher prices for raw materials than their foreign competitors, destroying any comparative advantage the tariffs were allegedly meant to create.”

Further, businesses face decreased exports of their products, as well as retaliatory tariffs from any countries striking back at Trump—which “affect $223 billion of US exports and are expected to eliminate an additional 141,000 jobs,” CTA and CoC estimated.

Innovation “thrives on collaboration, trust and scale,” Allen, the economics lecturer, noted, joining critics warning that Trump risked hobbling not just US tech dominance by holding onto seemingly misguided protectionist beliefs but also the European Union’s and the United Kingdom’s.

Meanwhile, the CTA and CoC argued that Trump has other ways to impose tariffs that have been authorized by Congress and do not carry the same risks of destabilizing key US industries, such as the tech sector. Under Section 122, which many critics argued is the authority Trump should be using to impose the reciprocal tariffs, Trump would be limited to a 15 percent tariff for no more than 150 days, trade scholars noted in yet another brief SCOTUS reviewed.

“But the President’s claimed IEEPA authority contains no such limits” CTA and CoC noted. “At whim, he has increased, decreased, suspended, or reimposed tariffs, generating the perfect storm of uncertainty.”

US may end up owing $1 trillion in refunds

Economists urged SCOTUS to intervene and stop Trump’s attempt to seize authority to impose boundless reciprocal tariffs—arguing the economic impact “is predicted to be far greater than in two programs” SCOTUS previously struck, including the Biden administration’s $50 billion plan for student loan forgiveness.

In September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned justices that “the amount to be refunded could be between $750 billion and $1 trillion if the court waits until next summer before issuing a ruling that says the tariffs have to be repaid,” CNBC reported.

During oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fretted that undoing Trump’s tariffs could be “messy,” CNBC reported.

However, some business owners—who joined the We Pay Tariffs coalition weighing in on the SCOTUS case—told CNBC that they think it could be relatively straightforward, since customs forms contain line items detailing which tariffs were paid. Businesses could be paid in lump sums or even future credits, they suggested.

Rick Muskat, CEO of family-run shoe company DeerStags, told CNBC that his company paid more than $1 million in tariffs so far, but “it should be simple for importers to apply for refunds based on this tariff itemization.” If the IRS can issue repayments for tax overpayments, US Customs should have “no problem” either, he suggested—especially since the agency automatically refunded US importers with no issue during a 2018 conflict, CNBC reported.

If there aren’t automatic refunds, though, things could get sticky. Filing paperwork required to challenge various tariffs may become “time-consuming and difficult” for some businesses, particularly those dealing with large shipments where only some products may have been taxed.

There’s also the issue that some countries’ tariffs—like China’s—changed “multiple times,” Joyce Adetutu, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, told CNBC. “It is going to take quite a bit of time untangling all of that, and it will be an administrative burden,” Adetutu said.

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