In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden's executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.

01:32—Biden's new asylum restrictions

21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon

33:25—Weekly Listener Question

39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post

48:09—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border" by Fiona Harrigan

"Biden's New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal" by Ilya Somin

"Travel Ban, Redux" by Josh Blackman

"Immigration Fueled America's Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan" by Eric Boehm

"Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back 'Ellis Island Style' Immigration Processing" by Fiona Harrigan

"Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury" by Jacob Sullum

"The Conviction Effect" by Liz Wolfe

"Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017" by Jacob Sullum

"A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump 'Fair Notice' of the New York Charges Against Him" by Jacob Sullum

"Does Donald Trump's Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?" by J.D. Tuccille

"The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1" by Sasha Volokh

"Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak" by Damon Root

"Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It" by Ira Stoll

"Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would 'Cut' Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels" by Christian Britschgi

"This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies" by Natalie Dowzicky

"Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound" by Christian Britschgi

"With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity" by Peter Suderman

"D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot" by Christian Britschgi

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The post Partisan Border Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

In late April, the Miami-based rail company Brightline Trains broke ground on a project that the company promises will give the United States its first dedicated, high-speed passenger rail service. The 350-kilometer (218-mile) corridor, which the company calls Brightline West, will connect Las Vegas to the suburbs of Los Angeles. Brightline says it hopes to complete the project in time for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, which will take place in Los Angeles.

Brightline has chosen Siemens American Pioneer 220 engines that will run at speeds averaging 165 kilometers per hour, with an advertised top speed of 320 km/h. That average speed still falls short of the Eurostar network connecting London, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam (300 km/h), Germany’s Intercity-Express 3 service (330 km/h), and the world’s fastest train service, China’s Beijing-to-Shanghai regional G trains (350 km/h).

There are currently only two rail lines in the U.S. that ever reach the 200 km/h mark, which is the unofficial minimum speed at which a train can be considered to be high-speed rail. Brightline, the company that is about to construct the L.A.-to-Las-Vegas Brightline West line, also operates a Miami-Orlando rail line that averages 111 km/h. The other is Amtrak’s Acela line between Boston and Washington, D.C.—and that line only qualifies as high-speed rail for just 80 km of its 735-km route. That’s a consequence of the rail status quo in the United States, in which slower freight trains typically have right of way on shared rail infrastructure.

As Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, noted in IEEE Spectrum in 2018, there has long been hope that the United States would catch up with Europe, China, and Japan, where high-speed regional rail travel has long been a regular fixture. “In a rational world, one that valued convenience, time, low energy intensity and low carbon conversions, the high-speed electric train would always be the first choice for [intercity travel],” Smil wrote at the time. And yet, in the United States, funding and regulatory approval for such projects have been in short supply.

Now, Brightline West, as well as a few preexisting rail projects that are at some stage of development, such as the California High-Speed Rail Network and the Texas Central Line, could be a bellwether for an attitude shift that could—belatedly—put trains closer to equal footing with cars and planes for travelers in the continental United States.

The U.S. government, like many national governments, has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Because that generally requires decarbonizing transportation and improving energy efficiency, trains, which can run on electricity generated from fossil-fuel as well as non-fossil-fuel sources, are getting a big push. As Smil noted in 2018, trains use a fraction of a megajoule of energy per passenger-kilometer, while a lone driver in even one of the most efficient gasoline-powered cars will use orders of magnitude more energy per passenger-kilometer.

Brightline and Siemens did not respond to inquiries by Spectrum seeking to find out what innovations they plan to introduce that would make the L.A.-to-Las Vegas passenger line run faster or perhaps use less energy than its Asian and European counterparts. But Karen E. Philbrick, executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, in California, says that’s beside the point. She notes that the United States, having focused on cars for the better part of the past century, already missed the period when major innovations were being made in high-speed rail. “What’s important about Brightline West and, say, the California High-speed Rail project, is not how innovative they are, but the fact that they’re happening at all. I am thrilled to see the U.S. catching up.”

Maybe Brightline or other groups seeking to get Americans off the roadways and onto railways will be able to seize the moment and create high-speed rail lines connecting other intraregional population centers in the United States. With enough of those pieces in place, it might someday be possible to ride the rails from California to New York in a single day, in the same way train passengers in China can get from Beijing to Shanghai between breakfast and lunch.