Update: About 14 hours after Rittenhouse shared his video explaining his support for Ron Paul, declaring that "you must stand by your principles," he announced that he spoke "with members of the Trump's [sic] team" and that he is now "100% behind Donald Trump."

"A lot of people are upset that I said I'm going to be writing in Ron Paul for president of the United States, and that is true. I will be writing in Ron Paul." So said Kyle Rittenhouse in a recent video posted to X. A lot of people, it appears, are indeed upset. Should they be?

Rittenhouse catapulted to national attention in 2020 when, at age 17, he armed himself, traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a night of riots and civil unrest, and shot three men, killing two. It was always Rittenhouse's contention that he'd acted in self-defense, and his arrest galvanized many in the conservative movement who said the prosecution was motivated not by justice but by the political moment. Supporters helped raise $2 million for Rittenhouse's bail, and he ultimately attracted the attention of former President Donald Trump, who defended him while in office and who hosted Rittenhouse at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House.

So one of the primary reactions to Rittenhouse's choice for president is that he's guilty of betrayal. Trump and the MAGA movement had his back when his life took its most dire turn, the thinking goes, so Rittenhouse owes them his loyalty at the ballot box. That general sentiment is summed up aptly by the one-and-only Catturd: "I can stomach a lot of things—but backstabbing millions who supported you at your lowest point. Then turning on Trump right after he got shot," he said in a viral post. "Can't stomach it—won't put up with it—forgotten forever."

In other words, Rittenhouse is allegedly in debt to Trump and his followers for supporting his claims of innocence. He was acquitted in 2021 of all charges, including first-degree reckless homicide, two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, first-degree intentional homicide, and attempted first-degree intentional homicide. That was the right decision. And it was the one the jury came to because that is what the evidence clearly supported. The right to self-defense is not selectively available to people with certain views. Rittenhouse owes no one a thing for not getting convicted of charges that prosecutors should not have brought to begin with.

So why did Trump fail to gain Rittenhouse's support? "Unfortunately, Donald Trump had bad advisers making him bad on the Second Amendment, and that is my issue," he said in his video. "If you cannot be completely uncompromisable on the Second Amendment, I will not vote for you." Trump's record includes a bump stock ban, which Reason's Jacob Sullum noted turned "peaceful gun owners into felons by fiat," and his support for red flag laws. Those moves may not be deal-breakers for many people, including other staunch supporters of the Second Amendment. They apparently are for Rittenhouse. It's his one vote, and he can do with it what he wants.

Yet his announcement also elicited what has become the predictable response, on both the left and the right, to similar defections from the mainstream: You're helping elect the other guy. For one, that vastly overstates the power of a vote—an unpopular thing to say, sure, but true nonetheless. And it's particularly true for Rittenhouse, who lives in the Dallas–Fort Worth area; if he's casting his vote there, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it will not derail Trump's electoral victory in Texas, which is almost assured.

But even if it were true that Rittenhouse's vote would have some sort of Earth-shattering effect on the outcome of the 2024 election, a vote is earned. It's an expression of support. If neither mainstream option can produce a platform that is sufficiently palatable to someone, they certainly have the prerogative to make that known—by supporting someone else or, gasp, not voting altogether.

After all, no one is entitled to your vote. They're not entitled to it simply because they're a member of a particular political party, and they're not entitled to it for supposedly being less bad than the other side. And they're certainly not entitled to it just because they said supportive things about you in a time of need.

The post Nobody Owes Trump Their Vote. Not Even Kyle Rittenhouse. appeared first on Reason.com.

Jeremy Haney, a former police officer in Appleton, Wisconsin, has pleaded no contest to felony misconduct in public office for falsifying information in a report. Haney forged the signatures of a prosecutor and a judge on paperwork to authorize placing a tracking device on a suspect's vehicle as part of a drug investigation. An assistant district attorney spotted the discrepancy when he was reviewing the documents and realized they were not the ones he signed. Haney claimed that he lost the original paperwork, so he reprinted it and forged the signatures. He will receive no jail time but will have to pay fines and fees totaling more than $1,000.

The post Brickbat: Sign on the Dotted Line appeared first on Reason.com.

Voters in California went to the polls this week for a primary election that's the first step towards picking a permanent replacement for the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died nearly six months ago.

In Washington, meanwhile, Feinstein is still wielding influence from beyond the grave. Her name is attached to 256 different earmarks included in the budget bill working its way through Congress this week. Those pork projects will cost taxpayers about $1.1 billion if the bill passes in its current form, the Washington Examiner reported Tuesday.

And that only scratches the surface. The partial budget deal—which contains six of the 12 appropriations bills that make up the discretionary portion of the annual federal budget—is overflowing with earmarks to fund lawmakers' pet projects. All told, there are more than 6,000 earmarks in the bill, costing taxpayers more than $12.7 billion, according to Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), who has urged Republicans to vote against the package.

Many of the earmarks in the package seem like things that would be better funded by local or state taxpayers, who at least might stand to benefit from projects like new sewer systems, new runways and other upgrades for tiny rural airports, and a plethora of highway projects. Some are truly head-scratching, like Sen. Tammy Baldwin's (D–Wis.) $1.4 million earmark for a solar energy project in Wisconsin, one of the places in America least well suited for a solar farm.

Plenty of others make no sense for the public to be funding at all. Like a $3.5 million earmark secured by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D–Mich.) for The Parade Company, which runs Detroit's annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Or the $2.5 million earmark that will help build a new kayaking facility in Franklin, New Hampshire, curtsey of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D–N.H.), as well as $2.7 million line item to help build a bike park in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, a town with a population of less than 2,300 people.

For that amount of money, "you could buy EVERY resident a $1,200+ bike" Sen. Rick Scott (R–Fla.), who has become a vocal critic of the earmarks in the bill, posted on X (formerly Twitter). "There's no way they need this much of YOUR money for this."

The same could be said for several Republican-based earmarks too. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has inserted at least eight earmarks into the bill, forcing federal taxpayers to put up more than $33 million for things most will never use, like a new trail at Coastal Carolina University and an ROTC facility at the University of South Carolina. Among the dozens of earmarks inserted by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska), perhaps the strangest is the $4 million grant for the "Alaska King Crab Enhancement Project."

Wait, you might be thinking, didn't Congress ban the use of earmarks when tea party-era Republicans controlled the government? Yep, they did. But like fiscal responsibility and concern about America's ballooning entitlement costs, those efforts to limit pork barrel spending are now distant memories. Democrats voted to reinstate earmarks in 2021, and Republicans soon followed suit.

To Congress' credit, earmarks are now handled more transparently than they used to be—which is why you can view the full list of earmarks included in the budget bills here.

Still, some things never change. Earmarks remain expensive, wasteful exercises in cronyism—and with the country $34 trillion in debt, Congress should not be putting taxpayers on the hook for frivolous handouts to politically connected friends.

The post The Budget Deal Is Overflowing With $12 Billion of Earmarks appeared first on Reason.com.