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'Cheer' star Jerry Harris sentenced to 12 years in prison for child pornography

Jerry Harris, who starred in the Netflix docuseries “Cheer,” was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison on Wednesday for child pornography, several outlets reported.

Joseph Fitzpatrick, assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, told NBC News that Harris was also sentenced to eight years of court-supervised release, to be completed after his prison term. 

The sentencing comes almost two years after the 22-year-old was arrested in September 2020 for one count of producing child pornography after allegedly repeatedly “enticing an underage boy to produce sexually explicit photos and video of himself.”

The boy, 13 at the time, claimed Harris contacted him on social media and attempted to solicit him for oral sex.

Harris was slapped with new charges in December of that year, including for child pornography and sex crimes, which allegedly involved four victims in Illinois, Florida and Texas. In February, he pleaded guilty to two charges: receiving child pornography and engaging in sexual acts with a minor, CNN reports.

Prior to his arrest, Harris had become a popular figure due to “Cheer,” a show documenting the Navarro College cheerleading team as it navigated the elite ranks of the competitive sport.

“Harris used his celebrity and wealth to continue his exploitation of children, expanding the tools available to him to manipulate them into gratifying his seemingly insatiable sexual desires,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Guzman told USA Today.

The Hill has reached out to Netflix and Navarro Cheer for comment.

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Comey, McCabe faced rare, intensive tax audits by IRS under Trump appointee: report

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) conducted purportedly random, intensive audits of two former top FBI officials who drew the ire of former President Trump, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The Times published letters received by former FBI Director James Comey and Andrew McCabe, his deputy who became acting director after Trump fired Comey, indicating the IRS was conducting National Research Program audits of their 2017 and 2019 tax returns, respectively.

“We must examine randomly-selected tax returns to better understand tax compliance and improve the fairness of the tax system,” both letters state.

Trump has repeatedly criticized both men for their roles in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, both during and after their time at the bureau.

The Times reported that the odds of being selected for the specific audit were tiny, with the IRS having targeted about one in every 30,600 tax returns for the intensive scrutiny in 2017.

“Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the IRS to get at a political enemy,” Comey told the Times. “Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question.”

Comey received a $347 refund after the audit, while McCabe, who echoed similar concerns about his audit, owed a small amount of money, according to the Times.

“The revenue agent I dealt with was professional and responsive,” McCabe told the Times. “Nevertheless, I have significant questions about how or why I was selected for this.”

Trump appointee Charles Rettig ran the IRS during both of the men’s audits. 

The IRS in a statement to The Hill denied the audits were politically motivated but said allegations of wrongdoing are “routinely” referred to the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration for further review.

“Federal privacy laws preclude us from discussing specific taxpayer situations,” the IRS said.

“Audits are handled by career civil servants, and the IRS has strong safeguards in place to protect the exam process — and against politically motivated audits,” the statement continued. “It’s ludicrous and untrue to suggest that senior IRS officials somehow targeted specific individuals for National Research Program audits.”

A Trump spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

Both Comey and McCabe repeatedly came under fire from Trump during his presidency.

Comey’s decision to reopen an investigation into then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server two weeks before the 2016 election was seen by many Democrats as a contributor to her eventual loss.

But Trump fired Comey nearly four months into his term as president. At the time, Trump cited recommendations to dismiss Comey from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

But in the years since, Trump has offered varying explanations for why he removed the former FBI director and has at times acknowledged the Russia investigation played a role.

Comey’s firing in May 2017 led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to probe potential links between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as possible obstruction of justice.

Sessions fired McCabe just a day before he was scheduled to retire amid allegations he lied about leaking information about Clinton’s private email server. McCabe filed a lawsuit in 2019 claiming his firing was politically motivated.

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The Senate’s plan on insulin drugs is the wrong way to solve the affordability problem

It is good news that the Senate is working on a bipartisan plan to make insulin more affordable for the millions of Americans with diabetes who desperately need it.  The bill, circulated by primary co-sponsors Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), would tackle insulin affordability in two main ways: first, by capping insured patients’ out-of-pocket costs for insulin to just $35 per month, and second, by nudging drug manufacturers to lower list prices of their insulin products to improve affordability among the uninsured.  

As laudable as the drafters’ motives are, however, the bill is flawed as it needlessly raises costs above what is necessary, through higher insurance premiums for insured households and employers, and higher government payments for Medicare. It would do so by muting future price competition in the insulin market and by unnecessarily raising spending through the opportunities it creates for strategic conduct and with its formulas for setting some transaction prices.

To understand why, consider how the U.S. pharmaceutical market operates today. To sell more of their drugs, pharmaceutical manufacturers regularly compete to get on insurance company “formularies,” (lists of covered drugs) by agreeing to pay “rebates,” or discounts. These rebates typically go to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) who pass them back to insurers, after taking a cut. The rebates reduce the net costs of covering drugs to insurers and with that premiums. However, the rebate system has also given manufacturers incentive to inflate the list prices of their drugs. The high list prices do not affect patients who pay flat co-pays on their insulin, but they hurt patients with deductibles, co-insurance, or no insurance at all.

For the insured, the Senate bill proposes to use a $35 co-pay cap for “certified insulin products” as a fix for the affordability problem. The Senate bill sets up a voluntary certification program for manufacturers who agree to lower their list prices for their insulin products to the benefit of uninsured patients who could not benefit from co-pay caps. The “certified” price for a specific insulin product should not exceed weighted average of prices net of rebates paid by Medicare’s Part D plans in 2021, with weights reflecting plan enrollment.  (New insulin products also have a pricing formula to establish certified prices).  The certified list prices would now become new transaction prices for insurers because the bill would ban any additional rebates and other discounts offered to PBMs and insurers for covering specific insulin products. These new transaction prices would become permanent, locked in at 2021 levels (adjusted for general inflation). All “certified” products would automatically get preferred placement on insurer formularies.  

What’s wrong with this approach?  With automatic formulary placement and transaction prices pegged to 2021 levels, the bill eliminates price competition for insulin in the insured market. This would lock in manufacturer profits at a time when competition is increasing, manufacturer margins are dropping, and more competitors are on the horizon.  The voluntary nature of certification creates incentives for strategic selection of products to certify—manufacturers would choose to certify if they believe they could make more money doing so.  With multiple products within the insulin class, manufacturers would have incentives to use physician marketing, patient advertising and other tools to shift use from the currently highly discounted insulins to those that have higher margins but would be newly certified. The pricing formula for new insulins would create an automatic incentive for manufacturers to create costlier but not necessarily better versions of their existing insulins.

There are ways to address some but not all of these problems. The new product formula should weigh insulins by their volume of use. Certification could allow a manufacturer to certify only one price per insulin class, at a level that is least costly for insurers. The policy could allow for Medicaid rebates to continue (a cost we have not listed above). Pricing need not be fixed to 2021 levels in perpetuity but rebased every few years.

Together these concerns suggest that it may be time to pause and consider whether access to affordable insulins for uninsured patients could be addressed in some other way than by undermining price competition in the insured insulin market beyond what is necessary to achieve $35 co-pay caps.  A mandatory program would limit the strategic selection of products (gaming). In absence of such a plan, a narrower certification program where the product with lowest transaction cost in each insulin class, not for each manufacturer, and with guaranteed sales volume, could be a path forward.  With programs like these, the promise of $30 insulin could become a reality. 

Richard G. Frank, PhD., is the Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and Director of the USC-Schaeffer Initiative on Health Policy. He is a former Assistant Secretary for Planning Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. Marta E. Wosińska, PhD., is Visiting Fellow in Economics Studies at the Brookings Institution. She is former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission and former Chief Healthcare Officer at the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services. From that role, she was detailed in 2019 to the Senate Finance Committee to work on the insulin drug pricing investigation. Both Frank and Wosińska acknowledge grant funding from Arnold Ventures.

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Defense & National Security — Pentagon lifts block on abortion-related websites

The Pentagon will lift a long-standing ban and allow military and civilian personnel to access abortion-related websites on the agency’s computers. 

We’ll share what the new rule entails, plus the latest demands to the Biden administration to help free WNBA star Brittney Griner from Russian detainment. 

This is Defense & National Security, your nightly guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond. For The Hill, I’m Ellen Mitchell. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Pentagon allows access to abortion-related websites

The Department of Defense (DOD) said Wednesday that it will stop blocking abortion-related websites from its networks, allowing military and civilian personnel to access the sites on the agency’s computers. 

“We continually evaluate the categorized content that is blocked on DOD networks,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Gorman told The Hill in an emailed statement. 

“We determined that we should allow content categorized as abortion-related on healthcare requirements,” he added. 

Why they were previously blocked: Gorman told The Hill that access to these sites was previously restricted due to bandwidth concerns. 

Across the board: “We are working our way through all DOD networks now to ensure that restriction is lifted uniformly,” he added. “Further, we are updating our broader policy to ensure consistency and access to appropriate information for the DoD workforce.” 

The timing: The change, which was first reported by The Military Times, comes as the agency faces tough questions on how it will protect service members seeking abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. 

Federal law prohibits the military from providing the service unless a pregnancy was a result of rape or incest, or if it endangers the life of the parent. 

Last Tuesday, Gil Cisneros, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, issued a memo saying that the high court’s action wouldn’t affect the agency’s ability to provide abortions. 

Under pressure: On Friday, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) led a group of her Democratic colleagues in a letter pressing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to protect abortion rights for service members, particularly in states that are poised to restrict the service. 

“Entrusted to your care are hundreds of thousands of troops, dependents, and Department of Defense (DOD) civilians who have lost access to safe abortions and now face threats of criminal prosecution for seeking out those services,” the Democrats wrote. 

Read more here

Demand to bring Brittney Griner home grows

More than 1,000 Black women have signed a letter to President Biden demanding the administration step up its efforts to free WNBA star Brittney Griner from Russian detainment.  

The letter, signed by 1,200 women of all ages and professions, was the work of Win With Black Women, a collective of intergenerational and intersectional Black women across the nation.   

“It’s been more than 134 days and in our opinion that’s just 134 days too many for anyone to be subjected to the conditions [Griner] has been,” said Jotaka Eaddy, founder of Win With Black Women. 

A quick refresher: Griner, a center for the Phoenix Mercury and an Olympic gold medalist, was detained by the Russian Federal Customs Service in February on charges of possession of vape cartridges containing hashish oil, a contraband substance in Russia. Her trial began July 1. 

Who signed the letter: Signers of the letter included Bernice King, CEO of the King Center and daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.; Terri Jackson, executive director of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association; and Dawn Staley, basketball Hall of Famer, three-time Olympic gold medalist and head coach of South Carolina Gamecocks. 

A new urgency: In a statement to The Hill, Jackson said the letter helps the organization “raise the alarm and convey a clear message of urgency to the President about our sister.” 

“This letter in support of Brittney is an embrace from a powerful group of women that strengthens our resolve and allows us to keep fighting for BG,” Jackson said. “We are not The 144 without her. We need BG back home now with her family.” 

The collective’s letter follows Griner’s handwritten note to the president on July 4 begging for a prisoner exchange. In her letter, Griner said she is “terrified” she will be in Russia forever. 

While Biden officials have said they will do all they can to bring Griner home, the collective’s letter said its members are “concerned that the rhetoric does not appear to align with the actions taken to date.” 

Read more here 

Read more from The Hill: 

• Biden, Harris speak with wife of Brittney Griner about her detention 
• The Memo: Why Brittney Griner is a political problem for Biden

ON TAP TOMORROW

• The Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress will host a virtual event on “Defense and the Future of War,” at 11 a.m.   
• The Wilson Center will hold a talk on “The Role of Belarus in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict: From Guarantor of Security to a Source of Instability,” at 12 p.m. 
• Brookings Institution will hold a virtual discussion on “Why Foreign Talent is Critical to National Security,” with former Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox, and former U.S. Central Command Commander retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, at 1 p.m.  
• Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger will speak at the Hudson Institute at 1:30 p.m.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Cipollone to testify before Jan. 6 panel on Friday: reports 
• Capitol Police arrest man with two Molotov cocktails 
• Treasury announces sanctions targeting cheap Iranian oil heading for China 
• Federal agencies warn health sector against North Korean ransomware 
• The Hill: Opinion: It’s not time yet to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war 
• The Hill: Opinion: Guarding against Russia’s October surprise

That’s it for today. Check out The Hill’s Defense and National Security pages for the latest coverage. See you tomorrow!

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Illinois governor tells NRA to 'leave us the hell alone'

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker told the National Rifle Association (NRA) in a tweet to “leave us the hell alone” in the wake of a mass shooting that killed seven people in Chicago’s Highland Park suburb Monday.

In a tweet on Tuesday, the NRA cited recent research from the nonprofit Crime Prevention Research Center, which found that “Since 1950, 94% of mass public shootings occurred in gun-free zones.”

Pritzker replied: “And 100% of mass public shootings happen with guns. As Governor, on behalf of the people of Highland Park — leave us the hell alone.”

The Illinois governor, in a press conference hours after the incident, called the Fourth of July shooting exemplary of “our uniquely American plague.”

“There are no words for the kind of evil that shows up at a public celebration of freedom, hides on a roof and shoots innocent people with an assault rifle,” Pritzker said.

Pritzker faces pro-gun Republican candidate state Sen. Darren Bailey in his bid for reelection in November’s election.

Shortly after the shooting, Bailey tweeted, “We need more police on our streets to keep our families safe.” 

Police report that the shooter, Robert “Bobby” Crimo, fired over 70 rounds of ammunition with a semi-automatic rifle, wounding at least 24 others. 

The CPRC, whose research the NRA cited, was founded by John R. Lott, Jr., a gun advocate hired by the Department of Justice during the Trump administration.

In October 2020, Lott wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed critiquing Biden’s gun control platform and arguing that “Mr. Trump is right: Democrats want to ban guns.” 

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Kemp raises nearly $4 million in 2 months in Georgia governor race

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has raised nearly $4 million within a two-month span in his rematch with Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Kemp’s campaign told The Hill on Wednesday that the governor raised $3.8 million between May 1 to June 30.

According to Axios, a Kemp-aligned PAC, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, brought in an additional $3 million during the same period.

Kemp and Abrams won their respective primaries on May 24.

Kemp raised some $7 million during his primary race against Trump-backed primary challenger David Perdue, who he beat by a wide margin. He had some $10.7 million cash on hand as of April.

Abrams, who lost to Kemp in 2018, raised $11.7 million within a three-month period ending on April 30, according to The Associated Press. She has not released her latest campaign finance report.

Kemp and Abrams are in a virtual dead heat, according to a Quinnipiac University poll from last week, with both candidates polling at 48 percent of voters, showing little change from a theoretical head-to-head poll in January.

Kemp recently hired former Vice President Mike Pence’s top aide Marc Short to help with his national fundraising campaign.

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On The Money — Strong job market barely cooled off in May

Despite rising recession fears, jobseekers did well for themselves in May. We’ll also look at a potential decline in gas prices and new questions over the future of a cap on insulin costs. 

But first, find out why the White House is ditching Norman Rockwell paintings.  

Welcome to On The Money, your nightly guide to everything affecting your bills, bank account and bottom line. For The Hill, we’re Sylvan Lane, Aris Folley and Karl Evers-Hillstrom. Someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Job openings, quits rate fell slightly in May

Job openings fell slightly in May as demand for workers remained near record highs, according to data released Wednesday by the Labor Department, even amid growing concerns of a potential recession. 

• The number of open jobs listed in the U.S. on the final business day of May totaled 11.3 million, dropping from 11.7 million in April after seasonal adjustments.  
• Though job openings fell in May, hires, layoffs and quits stayed roughly even with their April numbers, according to the May Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report. 

The background: The JOLTS report showed a labor market still stacked strongly for workers in May, a month when the U.S. added 390,000 jobs and saw the jobless rate hold strong at 3.6 percent.  

• Despite the decline in job openings, there were still almost two open gigs for each unemployed American. 
• That mismatch can give workers many opportunities to find new jobs with better compensation and career opportunities than their current ones. 

“This is not what a recession looks like. The May 2022 JOLTS data obviously lags what’s happening in the labor market presently, but all signs are that it remains strong,” wrote Nick Bunker, research director at Indeed.com, in a Wednesday analysis. 

Sylvan has more here

RELIEF AT THE PUMP?

US on ‘cusp’ of falling gas prices 

Gasoline futures fell more than 10 percent Tuesday and since June are down more than 22 percent, raising hopes that the high price of gas across the country might soon fall. 

The price of U.S. crude oil fell more than 8 percent and international benchmark Brent crude fell nearly 10 percent on Tuesday.  

“We’re on the cusp of seeing more savings,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at gas price tracking site GasBuddy. “I’m trying to be a little bit optimistic here that this relief could make its entire way to the pump in the weeks ahead.” 

• The price of U.S. crude oil was hovering around $98 per barrel on Wednesday afternoon, down from about $108 late last week, while Brent crude fell by $10. 
• Experts say the current benchmarks should translate to a 12 percent reduction in the price customers pay at the pump.  
• Experts say the decline isn’t due to any real changes on the supply side but rather to consumers scaling back their expenses and pulling down the expectation of demand.  

Tobias Burns and Rachel Frazin have more here.

NO CAP

Democratic drug pricing bill removes insulin cost cap amid bipartisan push 

Senate Democrats’ latest bill to lower prescription drug prices removes a provision to cap patients’ insulin costs at $35 per month, legislation that comes amid a push for a separate bipartisan bill on insulin.   

Capping out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month has been a high-profile selling point for Democrats’ economic package and has been touted by President Biden, so removing it carries some risk.     

• The provision is part of a separate bipartisan bill from Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), which is moving forward and could get a vote in the Senate this month. 
• But the Shaheen-Collins bill will require support from at least 10 Republican senators in order to clear a filibuster and pass. By contrast, the Democratic-only drug pricing measure is part of Biden’s economic package, which uses a process known as reconciliation to bypass a GOP filibuster, meaning it can pass with only 50 Democratic votes.   

Read more here from The Hill’s Peter Sullivan.

OUT WITH THE OLD

Biden administration unveils sweeping changes to federal student loan system 

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced several new proposed changes to the federal student loan system, including measures that help discharge loans for physically and mentally disabled borrowers, limit interest capitalization rates, and help borrowers working as public service employees to earn forgiveness on their loans. 

In a statement unveiling the proposed expansion of student loan discharge programs, the Department of Education said it expected to finalize a full plan by Nov. 1, with the aim to have the changes take effect no later than July 1. 

• Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the statement that proposed changes “will protect borrowers and save them time, money, and frustration, and will hold their colleges responsible for wrongdoing.” 
• The Biden administration has so far canceled nearly $26 billion for more than 1.3 million borrowers since taking office, much of which included loans obtained by borrowers who were defrauded by their college or had their school close down before they could complete their education. 

The Hill’s Brad Dress has more on this here.

Good to Know

President Biden spent Wednesday afternoon in the key swing state of Ohio courting union workers, seeking to convince voters his policies are helping buttress the middle class as polls continue to show Americans souring on his handling of the economy. 

Biden spoke to a packed crowd at Max S. Hayes High School in Cleveland to announce the final rule for implementing a program created by his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief law to support struggling multiemployer pension plans so that union workers have more retirement security. 

Here’s what else we have our eye on: 

• Mortgage applications sank for the second consecutive week even as rates dipped slightly amid fears of a looming recession. 
• Democratic senators are putting pressure on the Biden administration to use its authority to deschedule cannabis, as a Senate proposal to legalize marijuana faces an uphill battle. 
• Bans and restrictions on food exports are “counterproductive” against the global food crisis and drive rising domestic prices “even higher,” World Bank directors said Wednesday. 
• The Biden administration is working on a plan that will allow foreign manufacturers of infant formula to keep their products on the market in the U.S. long term, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Wednesday.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading and check out The Hill’s Finance page for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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What laws could have stopped the Highland Park shooting?

The Independence Day shooting in Highland Park, Ill., has put the spotlight on loopholes in federal and state gun laws as well as a lack of robust implementation that limits their effectiveness in preventing gun violence.

The 21-year-old man accused of shooting and killing seven people and wounding dozens more on Monday slipped past Illinois’ red flag laws and legally obtained a high-powered rifle similar to an AR-15, raising questions about both the law and those sworn to uphold it.

“Illinois has this law on the books and it’s on the books for exactly the scenario that we saw in Highland Park,” said Shannon Frattaroli, a professor in the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

Red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, allow a judge to take away a firearm from someone based on the suspicion that the owner could use it to harm themselves or others. Family members, police, or doctors, have to petition the court to take away the firearm and that can result in police removing it for up to a year.

The Illinois law has been on the books since 2018, while the new gun safety measure was approved by Congress last month. It was the most sweeping gun control legislation passed by Congress in nearly three decades, and was focused on red-flag laws, allocating millions to help states administer the laws.

But it’s unclear it would have made a difference if it had been in place before the Highland Park shooting, and the Illinois law did not prevent the shootings.

The man arrested in Illinois, Robert Crimo III, was able to legally buy a gun despite two encounters with the police in 2019. In one encounter, he had attempted to commit suicide.

Outside experts point to the problem of how the laws are actually enforced or implemented by local officials.

“I think the issue for red flag laws — extreme risk protection orders – the devil’s in the details of how they get implemented. Right now, they exist and they exist in a lot of different forms across different states,” said Charles Branas, professor of epidemiology in the Columbia University Scientific Union for the Reduction of Gun Violence.

“The big takeaway for me from the Illinois experience, as is the case for so many of these mass shootings and quite frankly so many of the shootings and deaths that don’t capture national attention, is implementation,” Frattaroli said.

Nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have red flag laws, including GOP-led states like Florida and Indiana. The new federal law includes $750 million to incentivize other states to pass them.

Branas argued that national action towards red flag laws would be better than leaving them to the states. He also called for a similar model across the country.

Yet even with a stronger national model and better implementation, Eugene Volokh, the University of California-Los Angeles’s expert in firearms regulation policy, argued that the black market for firearm purchases provides a loophole that is not easy to crack down on.

“People ask could this have been stopped with a red flag law? And the answer is nobody could be sure if it could be stopped. At most, what a red flag does it is causes the seizure of a weapon and prevents somebody from lawfully buying a weapon in the future,” he said, adding that someone could then just go buy a gun illegally.

“You can’t really stop someone simply by this kind of proceeding,” he added.

Proponents of the red-flag laws argue that if properly implemented, they could have stopped Monday’s shooting in Highland Park.

“The fact is red flag laws do work, we have a mountain of evidence that shows that, but it’s an imperfect tool,” said Noah Lumbantobing, spokesperson for March for Our Lives. “You’ve got to train local officials on its use, you’ve got to make the public aware that it’s a tool available to them if they’re worried about the safety of a loved one.”

Red-flag laws can be critical tools in lowering the number of suicides, experts say.

At the same time, many advocates say the best way to really reduce mass shootings would be for the government to reimpose an assault weapons ban or impose controls on large capacity magazines and ammunition.

“In our view, it’s clear a nationwide assault weapons ban would have prevented this,” Lumbantobing said.

Biden has called on Congress to ban assault weapons since he first entered office, but a ban is very unlikely to pass the Senate anytime soon given GOP opposition. Democrats now holding a majority would need 10 Republicans to vote with them to overcome the 60-vote threshold to advance most legislation. Without Republican support, all 50 Democratic senators would need to support changing the Senate filibuster rule, which Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are opposed to.

Large capacity magazines can be put into handguns to allow the shooter to fire more rounds. The suspect on Monday allegedly fired more than 70 bullets from a roof of a local business through a fire escape ladder.

Branas argued an executive action could get high-capacity magazines off the streets, but it could take the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) being given more regulatory control.

“They could be made to have the actual regulatory teeth that they were originally intended to have and that might be the opportunity to executive action on things like high-capacity magazines and ammunition,” Branas said. “A more robust ATF could really go far here.”

The bottom line, say gun control groups, is that the nation’s laws are simply too weak to really stop gun violence, even with the new gun safety measure and more red-flag laws. 

“I think what’s really important to remember is our federal gun laws are extremely weak. The bipartisan bill is absolutely a concrete important, critical step forward on that but there’s a lot of work to be done on that,” said Robin Lloyd, Giffords’ managing director.

“Our federal gun laws are so riddled with loopholes,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be this way but in order for this not to be this way, we have to do a lot.”

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US needs to foster competition in the Cloud now

The single most important development in the digital economy over the last decade has been the architectural transformation from on-premise servers and software to “the cloud,” including computing and software as a service. Nothing has been more significant to reducing the costs of start-up innovation, enabling rapid scaling up and down of computing capacity in sync with demand and making progress on cybersecurity. This cloud-enabled digital infrastructure will be essential to making next generation machine learning applications broadly usable across the economy — which, in turn, is our best bet to generate the productivity we need to escape the risk of stagflation as we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis.

Given these high stakes, getting the terms of cloud competition right is now a critical economic and technology policy objective. 

Competition in the cloud isn’t an easy problem to solve. Cloud providers are fundamentally a scale-advantaged business, where the bigger you are, the better. There are also likely some advantages to a certain amount of vertical integration — packaging raw computing power with integrated software packages, data security, and other related products all run on on-demand, can offer pricing and performance advantages. So, there are natural tendencies toward consolidation and, at a minimum, oligopoly.

But this is precisely why we have to be extra vigilant about the business models and licensing practices of the major cloud service providers.

If these platforms are set up to enhance monopolistic tendencies, it can and will exacerbate limits to competition, which will in turn reduce the positive impact that the cloud revolution can have on the overall economy.

We need to lean decisively in the other direction, and positively incentivize business models and practices that enhance competition from top to bottom of the cloud stack. 

The European Union has been pushing in precisely this direction, and large technology companies have taken notice. In May, Microsoft publicly responded in a blog post titled “Microsoft’s European Cloud Principles.” Microsoft announced plans to relax a set of licensing restrictions that had had the effect of raising prices for customers using Microsoft enterprise software licenses on competing cloud services — but only for smaller cloud providers, and only for those in Europe.

This isn’t nearly enough. 

Although Microsoft’s response was a reasonable half-step in the right direction, it falls short in crucial ways. Fair competition is not a game where you get to choose who you compete against.In this case, to move toward a truly level playing field would require that all cloud services — regardless of size and geography — be freed from discriminatory pricing practices. This impacts not just the direct competitors, but the economy overall.

As long as Google Cloud and Amazon AWS customers are still disadvantaged by Microsoft’s enterprise software pricing scheme, most European customers will continue to have to absorb higher prices for some important enterprise applications if they choose not to ‘switch’ to a bundle that lives in Azure. 

What could possibly be the justification for limiting the change in licensing restrictions to small European-based cloud providers? And why should these principles apply in Europe but not elsewhere?

In fact, Microsoft’s offer is heavier on the public relations angle than the actual business economics angle, and it harkens back in unfortunate ways to the ‘bad old days’ of anti-competitive bundling practices which we simply cannot afford to allow to creep back into the cloud environment. 

From a purely political and public relations standpoint, offering what looks like relief (though remember: it is relief from what was arguably an anti-competitive posture to start) targeted at smaller businesses in Europe could be a savvy move to try to reduce the immediate pressure from regulators and legislators in Brussels. But it doesn’t do enough to advance what ought to be the goal of cloud competition principles and policy.   

The unfortunate fact is that bundling of applications with platforms can be an attractive way for big technology players to protect themselves from competition and raise the costs of switching to the point where it becomes prohibitive for customers to really even consider it. It’s attractive for the would-be monopolist, but it’s bad for customers and it’s bad for innovation.

Regulatory authorities in both the U.S. and Europe moved against this bundling strategy when it came to operating systems and web browsers a long time ago. Currently both are moving against this strategy again when it comes to app stores and apps, search and businesses that show up in search results and even e-commerce platforms and in-house products. These are important developments in competition policy, but they are also aimed at markets that are somewhat mature where the damage has already been done. Do we really want to wait for the same kind of problem to further impede the development of competition and innovation in the cloud?

Principles are one thing; policy, pricing, and licensing decisions that really affect how markets function are another.

Now is the right time to press for a better and fuller solution to the cloud competition challenge, one that supports broad economic growth and innovation more than public relations.

Steve Weber works at the intersection of technology markets, intellectual property regimes, and international politics. He has published numerous books, including “The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas” and “The Success of Open Source,” and serves as professor of the Graduate School, School of Information, UC Berkeley. He has worked with and received research funding from a number of technology firms, including Google and Microsoft.

Source: TEST FEED1