Because there is a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there is also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.

That hasn’t always been the case in recent years.

It wasn’t the case when, a day before Kimmel’s suspension, Amy Klobuchar called on Congress to prevent violence like Charlie Kirk’s murder by cracking down on speech online. “I’m not for censorship, but I do think that more has to be done online,” said the Democratic senator from Minnesota. Sentences that begin “I’m not for censorship, but …” are usually calls for censorship.

It wasn’t the case this spring when Democrats in the Colorado legislature sought to criminalize some speech that “misgendered” or “deadnamed” transgender children, including custody threats to parents who refused to use their child’s preferred pronouns.

It wasn’t the case in 2023 when a RealClear Opinion Research poll found that three-fourths of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” or inaccurate social media posts, as compared with roughly half of Republicans.

It wasn’t the case when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked, with clear relish, whether social media companies shouldn’t be “open to lawsuits” for publishing what she and the government deemed to be “misinformation” on the COVID vaccines.

It wasn’t the case when Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director then being interviewed by Brzezinski, answered, “We’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.”

It wasn’t the case when, in February 2021, Facebook announced that it would treat claims that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” — that is, the lab-leak hypothesis — as a form of misinformation, leading to the removal of all mention of it. Mark Zuckerberg later complained that the Biden administration pressured the company to take down posts about COVID-19, including humor, according to a report in Politico.

It wasn’t the case among the stars of the liberal literary establishment, including Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, who demanded boycotts of Israeli publications, publishers and institutions on account of their presumptive complicity in oppressing Palestinians.

It wasn’t the case, either, when another batch of liberal writers, including cartoonist Garry Trudeau and novelist Peter Carey, rebuked the PEN American Center for its decision to give an award to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper that lost 12 of its staff members in a 2015 terrorist attack.

It wasn’t the case when the New York publishing industry began capitulating to social-media demands to cancel or torpedo books whose authors had run afoul of one left-wing orthodoxy or another: Jeanine Cummins and “American Dirt,” Richard North Patterson and “Trial,” Dr. Seuss and “If I Ran the Zoo” and several other titles.

It wasn’t the case when the editors of Slate indefinitely suspended podcast host Mike Pesca for arguing that it could be appropriate to mention a racial slur if not using it as an epithet. Or when The Atlantic fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson after a few days of employment because of a handful of remarks made years earlier. Or when NBC parted ways with Megyn Kelly because she said (and then apologized for saying) that, in her childhood, using blackface was “OK as long as you were dressing up like a character.”

It wasn’t the case in 2021 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled a prestigious science lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot because it didn’t like his views about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Or when Harvard University pushed out evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven because of her insistence on the fundamental realities of sex differences. Or when Jason Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago (a public university), was suspended merely for referring to two slurs without specifically mentioning the actual slurs.

Some readers might argue that the effort to cancel Kimmel is unique — and uniquely dangerous — because it was pushed by Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission. That is true, but then why the comparative liberal silence about the Biden administration’s efforts to police speech on social media? Others might argue that COVID misinformation or hate speech should be subject to different rules from mundane political speech. More than a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, from liberal and conservative justices alike, says otherwise.

And then there are those who point to the hypocrisy of conservatives, Carr not least, who rail against censorship and cancellation when it comes from the left and then enforce their own cancel (or consequence) culture the moment they are in power. A very fair point — and all the more reason for liberals to stick by liberal principles when it comes to their own side’s self-appointed censors.

It’s a cliché, but can’t be said enough, that speech is genuinely free only when it is speech we like the least from those we dislike the most. Rosa Luxemburg put it well: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

Shana tova.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

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Once again, Congress seems to be barreling toward a government shutdown. Once again, the process is likely to be costly, counterproductive and completely unnecessary.

As so often in recent years, Congress has yet to pass all 12 appropriations bills needed to fund the government on time. Unless a deal materializes, the lights will go out on Oct. 1. Republicans were able to pass a mostly party-line bill in the House on Friday but will need bipartisan support to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

With this bit of leverage, Democrats are thinking of forcing a shutdown to induce certain policy concessions. Although their goals are legitimate, closing the government won’t further any of them.

Last week, party leaders aired two main objectives. The first concerns health-care policy. Enhanced Covid-era tax credits for insurance bought on Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to expire at the end of the year, potentially raising out-of-pocket costs by as much as 75% and jeopardizing coverage for 4 million people. This would indeed be a bad outcome and extending the subsidies is a reasonable priority.

A second concern is that the White House keeps refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. In July, it requested a “rescission” of about $9 billion in foreign-aid funding and media subsidies (which Congress partly accepted) and in August asserted the right to cut another $4.9 billion effectively without legislative consent. Again, Democrats have a point: This maneuver is anti-democratic, probably illegal and worth fighting over.

The problem is that a shutdown won’t address either concern. Across five decades of these fights, the party demanding concessions has almost always taken the blame in the court of public opinion and has almost never accomplished its goals. In this case, a minority in the Senate would be defying majorities in both chambers as well as the president in pursuit of unrelated policy changes. It’s hardly a winning hand.

Moreover, closing the government is costly in itself. A 16-day shutdown in 2013 led to perhaps $6 billion in lost output and $2 billion in added costs. That’s to say nothing of the harm to services: Air travel may be disrupted, Food and Drug Administration inspections halted, benefits delayed, data releases postponed, national parks shuttered and much else. Hundreds of thousands of workers would likely be furloughed without pay.

Rather than picking this unwinnable fight, Democrats should agree to a stopgap funding bill, then do the hard work of negotiating compromises and winning elections.

A bipartisan deal on the Obamacare subsidies — ideally one that includes a long-term extension in return for gradually moderating tax credits for the highest earners — should be achievable: Neither party wants to see big premium hikes in an election year. As for “pocket rescissions,” a court challenge is underway; the Government Accountability Office has deemed the practice illegal; and half a dozen prominent Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, have publicly broken with the president on the topic. Should the White House attempt further such gambits, a bipartisan rejection seems likely.

More important for Democrats is that they have a good chance of winning the House and making gains in the Senate next November, so long as they don’t blow it by engaging in stunts like this. Midterms historically favor the opposition party, and the president remains quite unpopular. If they wish to advance their policy goals and reassert authority over a wayward executive, the ballot box is the place to do it.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

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Property owners in Washington County can now learn if their property ever had a racial covenant — a clause in a property deed that barred people who were not white from owning homes or land for the first half of the 20th century.

The properties are marked on a new online map from Mapping Prejudice, an ongoing University of Minnesota Libraries research project working to expose structural racism.

So far, researchers have mapped 438 properties with racial covenants in the county, and the work is continuing, said Dave Brandt, the county’s geospatial systems architect, who has been working with the U of M researchers.

While the U.S. Supreme Court made racial covenants legally unenforceable in 1948, many sellers continued to add them to properties after that date, said Michael Corey, technical lead for Mapping Prejudice. They were made fully illegal nationwide by the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

Acknowledging the racial covenants and the wrongs they inflicted is the first step toward reversing wealth gaps around the country, Corey said.

Covenants were put on properties “to attract white buyers,” he said. “They were seen as a selling point. It was an amenity, a new technology that they said would make your neighborhood better.”

Mapping Prejudice, which was started in 2016, has uncovered more than 35,000 racial covenants to date in Minnesota, he said. The earliest one found so far is from 1910.

Racial covenants and other tools “shut people out from generations of wealth-building,” Corey said.

“Now that discrimination is theoretically illegal, we’re not all starting from the same place,” he said. “We’re starting from a place where some people have had 100 years of investment in their neighborhoods. They’ve gone to college, they’ve been able to retire. Other people are on the opposite end of that, where maybe they were only able to live in a neighborhood that had a freeway next to it or was redlined, and they weren’t able to get a loan and maybe didn’t have access to college. Some people are starting in a hole while other people were given a huge leg up.”

Mapped homes

The properties that have been mapped to date in Washington County appear with detailed descriptions of the racially restrictive covenants, the addresses and the dates they were added.

Among them are homes on North Shore Circle in Forest Lake, homes along the shore of Bone Lake in Scandia and homes scattered throughout Oakdale, St. Paul Park, Lake St. Croix Beach and St. Mary’s Point. There also are a few in Lakeland and one in Newport.

About 45 homes built between Lake Demontreville and Lake Olson in the Tri-Lake neighborhood of Lake Elmo contain racial covenants. Most of the racial covenants were placed in 1925; another dozen or so were added in 1951.

Many of the covenants in that area of Lake Elmo state that “the said property shall not … be conveyed or leased to, or occupied or used by, any other person or persons than those of the white Caucasian race, but this provision shall not be construed to prevent the occupation of said property by persons of other races, where they are employed as servants.”

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Washington County commissioners in June 2021 approved an agreement with the University of Minnesota Libraries giving researchers bulk access to property-record images free of charge for deeds filed from 1910 to 1968.

After they received images of the microfilmed property records from Washington County, volunteers fed the images through optical-character-recognition software to screen for racist language, Corey said. Anything the software flagged was then reviewed, he said.

If volunteers found a racist covenant, they then transcribed the text of the covenant and recorded the date, the name of the buyer, the name of the seller and the physical description of the property.

Shocked to learn

The covenants are never removed from the history of the deed, but they can be discharged, Corey said.

“We don’t actually want to redact the historical record,” he said. “But when you discharge your covenant, it actually puts another note in the stack of files associated with the property that says, ‘There was a covenant. Here’s where it was, and we disavow that.’”

“We think it’s really important that we don’t erase the evidence of racial covenants,” he said. “The only reason that we can find these now and map them and have these conversations is because they were preserved as part of the historical record. Sometimes I think people would just prefer that this history was gone, but in the past, that has meant that people have avoided talking about this history and pretending it didn’t happen.”

A woman who owns one of the houses in Lake Elmo said she was shocked to learn her deed includes a clause that once prohibited any non-white person from buying or renting it. She and her husband, who bought the house in 2010, plan to contact the Washington County’s property records department and begin the process of having the covenant discharged, she said.

There is no charge to do so, thanks to a law passed by the Minnesota Legislature earlier this year, Corey said.

“A lot of people have found discharging their covenants really meaningful and important, and we support that,” he said. “We also say that that needs to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of a conversation. Now that we know that this was here, what are we going to do about it? Discharging your covenant does not undo the damage that was done by that covenant being there for 50 years.”

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Racial covenants info, talk

Anyone who wants to have a racial covenant discharged in Washington County should contact the County Recorder’s Office at 651-430-6175 or recorder@washingtoncountymn.gov or stop by the front desk at the Washington County Government Center in Stillwater. There is no fee.

Dave Brandt will present a Tea Talk on the Mapping Prejudice project from 5-6 p.m. Friday at the Washington County Historic Courthouse in Stillwater. Registration is $15 at WashingtonCountyMN.gov/ParksPrograms (search for “Tea Talk”).

Vince Cornell knows that he could do a lot worse than the basement apartment of his Ashland Avenue home, even after coming home some days to find water seeping in under his front door. Cornell, 34, a journeyman commercial roofer who lived on the streets as a teen, has rented his two-bedroom unit for $875 a month since 2018.

Still, he was taken aback to receive notice that his rent would climb to $1,124, which likely would force him to find a new place. Last week, by the slimmest of margins, the St. Paul City Council voted to side with Cornell and a series of his Ashland Avenue neighbors appealing their rent increases, thereby holding his rent hike to no more than $934.

“I would say it’s definitely a relief,” said Cornell, who hosts his three children every other week. “It’s going to make some things easier for me budget-wise, and I don’t have to move.”

When tenants of the three small apartment buildings along the 900 block of Ashland Avenue learned that city staff approved rent increases of 28.5% despite the city’s rent control ordinance, their reactions ran the gamut.

Some tenants made plans to move out. Another negotiated a 15% increase directly with the landlord.

Appealing rent hike

Others banded together and convinced the Housing Justice Center to represent them in appeals this summer before the city’s legislative hearing officer, and later before the city council.

In their appeals, the Ashland Avenue tenants pointed to deferred maintenance on their seven century-old units, ranging from deteriorating foundations, water leaks and wobbly exterior staircases to open electrical covers, broken window locks, insects, mice and in some areas, mold. The property owner’s family said the rent hikes reflected the cost of repairs.

On Sept. 17, a divided council voted 4-3 to grant the tenants’ appeals, holding rent increases to no more than 3% — the city’s limit under rent control — but only for the seven units in question.

The split votes continued throughout consecutive rounds of voting, with council members repeatedly raising concerns about troubling living conditions they acknowledged did not rise to the level of having each property condemned as they took up each appeal, one by one.

“The greatest that could be imposed on the tenants is 3%,” said Abbie Hanson, an attorney for the Housing Justice Center. “I think that the tenants are really pleased with the outcome. They took a lot of time out of their schedules, and put in a lot of courage to stick up for their rights in this forum.”

Months-long process

The outcome, the culmination of a months-long process of appeals, underscores the complexity for city leaders of balancing the goals of St. Paul’s voter-approved rent control ordinance with the reality of maintaining NOAHs, or “naturally occurring affordable housing” that has remained affordable simply because of its age or lack of upkeep.

When bringing NOAHs up to fire and building codes proves costly, maintenance costs climb much more than 3%. City officials have said that under the ordinance, the city’s appeals process requires tenants of each unit to make their own individual case for why their rents should remain within that cap.

“That’s how the city is interpreting it, yes,” said Hanson on Wednesday.

Council Member Anika Bowie, who represents the neighborhood and voted against the appeals, said she felt empathy for tenants experiencing double-digit rent increases, but “as a council, as a body, I want us to also be fair, and ensure that the very people who are providing the housing … have that wiggle room, financially, and are able to make those improvements. … From the testimony, this landlord is really breaking even.”

Council President Rebecca Noecker, who voted with the majority, noted the property owner could still make building improvements and then come back to seek a larger rent increase after the fact, but any repairs conducted to date seemed rushed and insufficient.

“My vote does not mean that it’s saying that this apartment is uninhabitable,” she said.

Maintaining properties

Approved by voters in 2021, the city’s rent stabilization or “rent control” ordinance caps annual rent increases at 3%, but exceptions can be made — and often are — when a property owner contends property taxes, upkeep and other expenses exceed the limit and would prevent a “reasonable return on investment.”

Scott Day, son of property owner Judith Day, told the council this month that his mother once lived in the properties and even married the maintenance man, but she’s now in her late 80s, suffers from dementia and uses a wheelchair. She’s been unable to keep up with maintenance, he said, but she had long kept monthly rents stable and relatively affordable for the area, ranging from $875 for a two-bedroom basement unit to $1,600 for a three-bedroom apartment.

To add a $23,000 boiler, fix up the properties and expect a fair return on investment, he’d have to hike rents accordingly, he explained to the city’s legislative hearing officer in July, and then to the city council during a Sept. 10 hearing. City staff had examined his rent rolls and other financial documents and informed tenants through letters issued in April and May that the rent increases would be granted.

“It is clear that his family has been empathetic toward its tenants,” Bowie said. “This landlord has not raised rents in years. This is not a property that has requested subsidies. This is not a property that has requested any funding from the city. This is truly purely natural affordable housing.”

Attorneys with the Housing Justice Center argued that exceptions to the rent control ordinance could only be granted if a unit met “minimal maintenance and habitability standards,” and photos and videos showed several of the units in questionable condition. Day noted, in response, that until he alerted tenants of the rent hikes, the city had not previously received any formal complaints of fire code violations, and at the time, there were no open inspections cases involving the properties.

Units No. 1 and 5: Appeal granted, rent increase held to 3%

For units No. 1 and 5, Bowie moved on Sept. 17 to deny the tenants’ appeal of their 28.5% rent increases, noting complaints about light fixtures and paint wear-and-tear did not rise to the level of “habitability” concerns under the city’s rent control ordinance. She also noted the landlord had proven his need for a reasonable return on investment.

“Our ruling has to stand in a court of law, and we’re not that court of law,” Bowie said.

Taking a different tack, Noecker said she felt “disturbed” by the city’s Department of Safety and Inspections failing to abide by a requirement in the ordinance to fully assess deterioration and code violations, even if the unit was still inhabitable.

“It seems that the department did establish a significant rent increase without having established those facts,” said Noecker, who noted that major rent hikes should perhaps trigger a new fire certificate of occupancy inspection. “It should not be on the tenants to complain, or some other jurisdiction to weigh in.”

Bowie’s motion to deny the appeal failed, with Noecker, Vice President HwaJeong Kim, Cheniqua Johnson and Nelsie Yang supporting the tenants’ appeal. Bowie, Molly Coleman and Saura Jost favored denial but were outnumbered. The vote effectively limits the rent increase at the unit to 3%.

“There are so many questions about what our process looks like,” said Coleman, explaining her dissent. She said questions of habitability should be determined through city inspections or in housing court or district court. “This has exposed to my mind a number of flaws in our process. … That said … the question of habitability has some very serious legal implications, if we’re to make that finding as a council.”

Units No. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12: A wobbly staircase

Bowie said a Sept. 7 inspection in the next building showed more troubling maintenance concerns, including a condemned staircase, which justified limiting the rent hike.

Bowie said the maintenance issues merited a more limited rent increase of 20% once improvements had been made, rather than the 28.5% previously approved by city staff, but phased in over time as repairs roll out and a new fire certificate of occupancy is issued.

“We will vote on a 10% increase after the inspection … and after six months they will receive another 10% increase,” Bowie said. “I am definitely aware this is not a question of habitability. My motion is connected to deterioration.”

Her motion was again voted down by Noecker, Johnson, Kim and Yang, who then voted to support the tenants’ appeal and hold rent increases to no more than 3%.

“It’s important for us to be intellectually consistent, and to have consistent benchmarks,” Noecker said. “Right now, we don’t.”

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