Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

No Ambiguity

July 25, 2022 – 12:06 pm

In our hearing tonight, you saw an American President faced with a stark and unmistakable choice between right and wrong. There was no ambiguity. No nuance. Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office, to ignore the ongoing violence against law enforcement, to threaten our constitutional order. There is no way to excuse that behavior. It was indefensible.

– Liz Cheney, 7-21-2022

This week’s featured post is “Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story“.

This week everybody was talking about the final summer 1-6 committee hearing

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=589953199165168&set=a.202597147900777

Thursday’s prime-time hearing [video, transcript] focused on the three hours between when Trump told his supporters to march to the Capitol and when he asked them to go home.

In between, he sat in the Oval Office dining room watching the riot unfold on Fox News and doing nothing to stop it. He could have asked the rioters to go home sooner, and he could have mobilized federal resources to support the Capitol Police resisting the attack. Many of his staffers urged him to do one or the other, but he refused.

Instead, he tweeted more incitement to those who wanted to hang Vice President Pence, and called Republicans in Congress urging them to further delay the counting the electoral votes. It seems clear that his primary goal that day was to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory, and the riot was just one of his tools for achieving that purpose. He didn’t stop the riot because he wanted it to succeed.

Some of the most striking evidence presented concerned Vice President Pence’s safety. Audio and video of Pence’s Secret Service detail trying to move him from his office in the Capitol to a more secure location showed just how tense the situation was.

In addition, an anonymous White House security official (whose voice was disguised), told about listening to the Secret Service radio chatter.

Members of the V.P. detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives. There was a lot of yelling—a lot of very personal calls over the radio. It was very disturbing. I don’t like talking about it. There were calls to say goodbye to family members. For whatever reason on the ground, the V.P. detail thought that this was about to get very ugly.

The comic relief in the hearing was video of Josh Hawley pumping his fist to encourage the 1-6 mob, but then later running through the Capitol to get away from them. The clip got one of the few audible laughs we’ve heard in these hearings. His home-state Kansas City Star proclaimed Senator Hawley “a laughingstock” and quoted this tweet:

From now on, if political reporters ask Josh Hawley if he’s planning to run, he’s going to have to ask them to clarify.

Hawley has a book coming out next May: “Manhood: the Masculine Virtues America Needs“. When I first heard that, I thought it was a joke. It’s not, or at least not an intentional one.

https://claytoonz.com/2022/07/22/run-josh-run/

The mystery of the missing Secret Service text messages from January 6 is looking worse and worse. The Service is claiming they innocently deleted the messages as part of a system upgrade, but that’s hard to credit. I upgraded computer this year, and I managed not to delete my files. The Secret Service, meanwhile, is an agency responsible for investigating cybercrimes. Basic data hygiene shouldn’t be beyond them.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015349/the-secret-services-really-good-job

The Service is also connected to another 1-6 mystery: Why was Mike Pence so reluctant to get in the car when agents wanted to take him to a safer place?

Mr Pence then reportedly outright refused to get into the vehicle, saying his security detail would ignore his demand not to leave the building and would instead “take off” against his wishes.

“I’m not getting in the car, Tim,” Mr Pence replied. “I trust you, Tim, but you’re not driving the car. If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off. I’m not getting in the car.”

This is speculative to the point of being a conspiracy theory, but what if the two are connected? Maybe the agents’ text messages say something about their plans for Pence.

Beaux of the Fifth Column doesn’t expect the hearings to turn Trump supporters into liberals, but he does suggest the lesson they should learn from what has been presented: Trump conned them with his whole stolen-election grift, and Trump’s people have been laughing at them this whole time. Now they need to look at their 2022 candidates, and sort out which ones were also fooled by Trump, and which ones were in on the con.

Steve Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress. He called no witnesses, and the jury deliberated for two-and-a-half hours.

I wonder what they talked about. “Should we hang around for lunch? Anybody know what they’re feeding us?” They needed to answer two questions: Did Bannon receive a lawful subpoena? Did he defy it? The answers were clearly yes.

He’ll be sentenced in October, possibly for as long as two years. He’s planning to appeal. His only hope is a purely partisan intervention by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority.

Peter Navarro has also been charged with contempt of Congress; his trial is due to start November 17. Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino have also been cited by Congress for contempt, but the Justice Department has not pressed charges.

The Murdoch Empire seems to have turned on Trump. This week both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post spoke out against him.

and abortion

A leading Republican candidate for governor of Michigan is clear about her position:

Asked … about a hypothetical situation in which a 14-year-old girl became pregnant as a result of sexual abuse by a family member, Dixon said, “Perfect example.” She went on, “Because I know people who are the product. A life is a life for me. That’s how it is. That is for me, that is my feeling.” 

“A life is a life” doesn’t seem to apply to the 14-year-old, whose life might be thrown considerably off-track.

The NYT has been staying on this theme: Life-of-the-mother exceptions to state abortion bans are not all they’re made out to be. Yes, they allow abortions if a pregnant woman is in danger of immediate death. But they don’t cover the situation where death is merely a probable consequence of carrying a fetus to term, or even of waiting to see how things develop.

Case in point: pregnant women with cancer.

[Rachel Brown] had always said she would never have an abortion. But the choices she faced were wrenching. If she had the chemotherapy that she needed to prevent the spread of her cancer, she could harm her baby. If she didn’t have it, the cancer could spread and kill her. She had two children, ages 2 and 11, who could lose their mother.

… Ms. Brown’s first visit was with a surgical oncologist who, she said, “made it clear that my life would be in danger if I kept my pregnancy because I wouldn’t be able to be treated until the second trimester.” He told her that if she waited for those months passed, her cancer could spread to distant organs and would become fatal.

This situation is exceptional, but not freakishly so. The article claims that about one in a thousand pregnant women gets diagnosed with cancer (often breast cancer). Given that millions of babies are born in the US each year, that means thousands of women face this decision. Or at least they did face it, before state governments began deciding for them that they must risk their lives.

Similar considerations apply to pregnant women prone to blood clots or at risk of stroke or heart attack. They may not be facing death at this particular moment, but waiting for a crisis might mean intervening too late to save them.

Some women, no doubt, want a child so badly that they would choose to accept such a risk. But that should be their decision, not the government’s.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/20/cartoon-by-rob-rogers/

A political science professor at Indiana University calls out IU leadership for its timidity in defending Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the woman who became a target for Indiana’s attorney general when she performed an abortion on the pregnant 10-year-old who came to her from Ohio, where the abortion was illegal. Bernard is an assistant professor at the IU School of Health.

President Whitten and Dean Hess especially ought to be ashamed of themselves for their cowardly silence. Indiana University is a public university, not an extension of the state’s Republican administration or the attorney general’s far-right, anti-abortion agenda. If it stands for anything, it is the freedom of its faculty and professional staff to do their jobs without being attacked for doing so.

and the pandemic

Numbers have definitely turned upwards in the last few weeks. For a long time deaths in the US had stayed in the 300s per day. Now they’re averaging 444.

President Biden tested positive for Covid Friday. He seems to be doing fine, which is a credit to the effect of vaccination. President Trump, if you remember, got very seriously ill in the days before vaccines.

and fascists being as outrageous as possible

Before getting angry, consider that these folks are trying very hard to make people like us angry. So if you’re in a bad mood already, I recommend skipping this section.

The quotes below are from the Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa this weekend. Turning Point USA claims it’s mission is “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote freedom”, but it has basically become a Young Fascists organization. Recognizing the similarity (and possibly looking to recruit), local neo-Nazi groups showed up outside the conference. But TPUSA did at least find it necessary to officially denounce them. And I have to confess that the far right is so bizarre these days that it’s hard to tell whether someone is attempting to parody them. (I mean, is the guy carrying a “DeSantis Country” flag next to the guy with a swastika flag really a DeSantis supporter? He could be, but who can say for sure?)

https://www.cltampa.com/tampa/photos-neo-nazis-gather-outside-turning-point-usa-summit-at-tampa-convention-center/Slideshow/13849084/13850127

Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz won the prize for provoking the most social-media backlash with this gem:

Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? … Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.

Because, of course, only women Gaetz finds attractive are entitled to have opinions or constitutional rights. (This quote is reminiscent of Trump defending himself against charges of sexual assault by claiming that his accusers were too ugly to assault, as if that ever stopped anybody.) Gaetz also went on an anti-Hunter-Biden rant, inspiring the crowd to chant “Lock him up!” Meanwhile, Gaetz himself is under investigation for sex trafficking and sex with a minor. Las Vegas should offer odds on whether Hunter or Matt sees the inside of a prison cell first.

Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled herself a “Christian nationalist”, because that always turns out well, particularly for Jews and Muslims, and even the occasional liberal Christian. “I think that’s what the Republican Party needs to be about,” she said.

Rick Scott used the classic Nazi technique of accusing opponents of your own sins.

In their new socialist America, everyone will obey, and no one will be allowed to complain. … The modern Left in America are the modern day version of book burners.

His state of Florida is where math books are banned from the schools for political reasons, and teachers are ordered to remove rainbow flags from their classrooms. The state’s largest school district currently has no sexual education curriculum, because the board has rejected all the texts.

Ted Cruz informed the crowd “I’m Ted Cruz, and my pronoun is Kiss My Ass.” I hope people start using that preferred pronoun to refer to Kiss My Ass. It’s the respectful thing to do.

Trump Jr. gave such an unhinged (and possibly drug-fueled) speech that liberals didn’t even bother to argue with whatever he was trying to say. Instead, Molly Jong-Fast asks “Is he OK?” I suspect the answer is no.

Donald Trump easily won the 2024 presidential straw poll with 79%, followed by Ron DeSantis with 19%. Mike Pence and other would-be contenders definitely need to worry about their lack of fascist appeal.

and you also might be interested in …

https://jensorensen.com/2022/07/21/polarization-both-sidesism-cartoon/

Cities across Europe have been setting heat records. Large chunks of the US have been pretty hot too.

Somebody tried to stab Rep. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor of New York. The guy has been arrested and charged. President Biden immediately denounced the attack. “Violence has absolutely no place in our society or our politics.” I completely agree.

A note to the Republicans still making excuses for the January 6 rioters: See how easy that is? You can Just Say No to violence.

One thing the Speaker of the House can do without support in the Senate is force the other party to go on the record. This week Speaker Pelosi held votes on two of four bills that passed the House, but will probably die in the Senate:

  • The Women’s Health Protection Act, which codifies into law abortion rights that were constitutional rights before the Dobbs decision. In particular, no state can restrict abortion prior to fetal viability. This passed the House on July 15 with no Republican votes.
  • The Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, which ensures that “no person acting under state law could prevent, restrict, or otherwise retaliate against a person traveling across state lines for lawful abortion services.” This also passed on July 15, with three Republican votes and 205 votes against.
  • The Right to Contraception Act, which passed Thursday with eight Republican votes and 195 against. This codifies the right to use contraception, which is currently protected by the Supreme Court’s Griswold decision. That precedent is shaky now because it rests on the same legal base as Roe v Wade.
  • The Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies the right to same-sex and interracial marriage. These rights also are currently backed by Supreme Court precedents that the current Court might overturn. This passed Tuesday with 157 Republicans voting against it.

Expect to hear about these votes again in the fall campaign. These are all bills with substantial popular support, but they offend a small-but-influential sliver of the Republican electorate. Many Republicans would like to soft-pedal their position on such issues, but Pelosi forced them to vote Yes or No.

and let’s close with something squirrelly

Every photographer needs a theme. Geert Weggen’s theme is squirrels. I’m not sure how much he stages, how much he photoshops, and how much he captures in the wild, but the images are both amusing and amazing.

https://geertweggen.com/
Posted in Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story

July 25, 2022 – 9:24 am
https://theweek.com/political-satire/1015269/the-wild-things

Before you complain about the 1-6 hearings being “one-sided”, you might want to ask Trump what his side of the story is.

As the January 6 Committee wraps up its public hearings until September, it’s time to assess what we’ve learned and where we are. Using primarily testimony from people inside Trump’s orbit (and occasionally inside his family), the Committee has put together a compelling narrative of how the January 6 riot happened. The key points are:

  • Trump lost the election.
  • His own experts, in his campaign as well as his appointees in the government, knew that his claims of widespread election fraud were false, and told him so on numerous occasions. This was not a matter of debate among administration officials. Every official in a position to investigate came to the same conclusion.
  • Trump tried everything he could think of to stay in power in spite of the voters. At every level, he tried to influence and intimidate Republican officials to change the results in his favor.
  • He pressured Justice Department leaders to lie about the conclusions of their investigations and back his false claims of election fraud.
  • He promoted a series of dubious legal theories, ranging from the unlikely to the absurd, that would give various intermediate entities (state legislatures, Congress, the Vice President) the authority to reverse the will of the voters and keep him in power. Again, the experts within his own administration unanimously told him that these theories had no merit.
  • He encouraged Republicans in seven states to assemble false slates of electors, and to submit fake electoral-vote totals to Congress. He then pressured Vice President Pence to count those phony votes, or to illegally refuse to count the votes of legitimate electors because their slate was “disputed”.
  • When it became clear that key departments within his administration — Justice, Homeland Security, Defense — would not abuse their powers to cooperate with his schemes, he called for a massive rally on January 6, promising it would be “wild”.
  • On January 6 itself, Trump knew that some members of his audience were armed when he told them to go to the Capitol.
  • Although a march to the Capitol was not announced in advance (even in drafts of Trump’s speech), right-wing militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys knew it was coming. Before Trump started speaking, they were already preparing to breach the Capitol’s defenses and spearhead the mob Trump would send their way.
  • He intended to go to the Capitol himself, with his armed Secret Service detail, but the Secret Service refused to take him there. Instead, they returned him to the White House.
  • For three hours as the attack unfolded, he sat in the Oval Office dining room watching Fox News. The official White House records from that period are blank — no phone records, no photographs. During that time, virtually his entire staff pleaded for him to do something to stop the riot. But he made no effort to interfere with the attack, either by asking the mob to go home, or by mobilizing federal resources to aid the Capitol Police. Such orders, when they finally came, were given by Vice President Pence.
  • He knew that the mob was already angry with the vice president when he tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”. He never called Pence to make sure he was safe. Meanwhile, members of Pence’s Secret Service detail were sending messages to their families in case they died.
  • Although the White House call record for those three hours is blank, President Trump was calling Republican congressmen, urging them to continue the work of the mob by delaying further the counting of electoral votes.
  • Only when the tide had already turned, and law enforcement was beginning to regain control of the situation, did Trump ask the rioters to go home. In that video message, he repeated the false stolen-election claims that had inflamed the mob, and told the rioters “We love you. You’re very special.”

If Trump supporters are forced to comment on this narrative, they nearly always say, “That’s just the Democrats’ version. The hearings don’t present Trump’s side of the story.”

I’ve heard various responses to this point, all of which are true as far as they go:

But there is a more fundamental answer that I seldom hear: Trump doesn’t have a side of the story to tell.

I know that sounds crazy: We’re often told that every story has at least two sides. But Trump has had every opportunity to tell his side of the story, and he has offered us nothing. If he wants to get his version out, he has immediate access to the vast resources of right-wing media, including Fox News, which I’m sure would love to be running shadow hearings orchestrated by his followers.

But in the last year and a half, Trump and his loyalists have made literally no positive contribution to the public record of the Capitol riot. From the beginning, Trump’s position has been consistent: No one should talk about January 6. No one should investigate it. No one should testify about it. (Josh Marshall comments on what Jim Jordan et al might have added to the hearings: “The point is to find out what happened … not to have a public presentation of findings along with another group making fart sounds and jeering and generally trying to throw the presentation or testimony off track.”)

Such comments on the hearings as Trump and his people have made are entirely negative: This event never happened, that witness shouldn’t be trusted, this testimony is hearsay, and so on.

But what did happen, Mr. Trump?

Crickets.

Well, that’s not entirely true: TrumpWorld does occasionally offer some transparent gaslighting about January 6, like when Trump described the mob that injured 150 police officers as “loving“, or Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde compared the Capitol invasion to “a normal tourist visit“, or the Republican National Committee characterized mob violence as “legitimate political discourse“.

But if any of the points in the Committee’s narrative are false, it shouldn’t be hard to assemble an alternative narrative and flesh it out with evidence. Did some investigator inside Trump’s Departments of Justice or Homeland Security (and not just amateur yahoos like Sidney Powell and the My Pillow guy) find evidence of the kind of widespread fraud that could have turned the election? (And not just a handful of people submitting false ballots, many of them for Trump?) Was there a faction — or even one person — inside DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel or the White House Counsel’s office who supported Trump’s Pence-can-decide-what-votes-to-count theory? Can Trump tell us about any call he made to send help to the Capitol Police, and get the person he called to back him up? What’s the innocent explanation of how the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys knew ahead of time that a mob was coming to storm the Capitol?

Tell us about it. That would constitute another side of the story.

Or Trump could discuss his intentions. When he told the mob that he would go with them to the Capitol, did he mean it? Where exactly was he planning to go? What was he planning to do when he got there? Why didn’t he tell his supporters to go home sooner?

Other Trumpists could also tell us interesting facts, if they were so inclined. We know Roger Stone spent a lot of time with right-wing militia leaders prior to January 6. Maybe he could tell his side of that story (rather than pleading the Fifth in response to every question). Steve Bannon seems to have been tipped off about the riot. (“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” he said on his January 5 podcast. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen.”) I’d love to discover how he knew, but he’d rather go to jail than talk about 1-6 under oath.

Mike Flynn retweeted a call for then-president Trump to declare martial law and hold a new election, and called for similar actions himself in public speeches. Other Trump officials have testified that Flynn wanted Trump to order the military to seize voting machines. Maybe he could tell us what he had in mind, rather than pleading the Fifth to a basic civics question like “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?”

Those accounts could turn into another side of the story. But it’s not the 1-6 Committee that’s preventing you from hearing such a narrative. It’s Trump.

So if you’re still a Trump supporter in spite of the evidence accumulated and presented by the Committee so far, your problem isn’t that Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney are suppressing Trump’s side of the story.

Your problem is that Trump doesn’t have a side.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , | Comments (7)

The Monday Morning Teaser

July 25, 2022 – 8:40 am

Thursday was the final 1-6 Committee hearing of the summer. The weekly summary will link to a complete video and transcript, plus summarizing the main points.

I thought this was a good time to take a step back and reflect on the larger picture. In particular, I wanted to answer the objection that the hearings are “one-sided”, because no one on the committee is representing Trump. I summarize that objection’s flaw in the featured post “Trump doesn’t have a side of the 1-6 story”, which should be out shortly.

From the very beginning, the effort of Trump and his allies hasn’t been to tell his side of the 1-6 story, but to prevent any discussion of the incident at all. Mitch McConnell blocked the proposal for a bipartisan commission, and Kevin McCarthy pulled his nominees off the House committee in an attempt to discredit it. Fox News has been refusing to air the hearings. Many of Trump’s closest allies have refused to testify, and Steven Bannon seems ready to go to jail rather than tell his “side” of the story.

People who complain about not hearing Trump’s “side” during the hearings should instead be asking Trump what his side is.

The weekly summary will also discuss the further response to the Dobbs decision, the bizarre speeches at the Young Fascists Turning Point USA conference this weekend, the House’s attempt to codify rights before the Supreme Court takes them away, the European heat wave, and a few other things. It should be out a little before noon EDT.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (1)

To Bind or Protect?

July 18, 2022 – 11:48 am

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

– Frank Wilhoit

This week’s featured post is “No Victims Allowed“.

This week everybody was talking about January 6

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=598169388321160&set=pb.100043843133639.-2207520000..

The public hearings will return to prime time on Thursday, with a “minute by minute” recreation of what Trump was doing (and not doing) while the Capitol was under attack.

Last Tuesday’s hearing [video transcript] centered on the decision to call a mob to Washington, and who some of the key organizers were. Vox lists the key takeaways from the hearing.

I had not previously made the connection between the “unhinged” White House meeting of December 18 — when Rudy, Sid Powell, Flynn and “the Overstock guy” urged Trump to have the military seize voting machines — and Trump’s “will be wild” announcement of the January 6 demonstration that he tweeted only hours later. In context, it looks like Cipollone et al convinced him that martial-law tactics wouldn’t work, so he moved on to the riot plan.

The other detail that struck me: Even though the call to march to the Capitol was only added to Trump’s speech at the last minute, lots of people seemed to know it would be there.

As one organizer texted a conservative journalist on January 5, “Trump is supposed to order us to capitol at the end of his speech, but we will see.” Another organizer texted that the plans had been kept under wraps to keep it a surprise: “It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”

That starts to sound like conspiracy.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony continues to pick up corroboration. None of the TrumpWorld sources who supposedly were going to dispute her account have gone on the record. Meanwhile,

a Metropolitan Police Department officer corroborated details of Hutchinson’s account and recounted what was seen to committee investigators.

Rep. Raskin:

[Pat] Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings. I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.

The Committee continues to warn Trump about witness tampering. It’s a simple crime that is not that hard to prove — kind of like Al Capone’s tax evasion.

Part of putting together an account of Trump’s behavior during the 1-6 riot involves looking at Secret Service text messages. But it turns out that some texts were deleted as part of a “device-replacement program”. We’ll see if that’s really as suspicious as it sounds. The committee says it will try to “reconstruct” the deleted messages.

The most amusing take on the Secret-Service-text-deletion story is that it vindicates Major Biden, who had to leave the White House because he kept biting agents. Maybe he had sniffed out that some of them weren’t good boys.

https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/major-biden-vindicated-secret-service-agents-deleted-january-6th-texts-so-disgraced-presidential-dog-may-have-had-reason-to-bite-them

Steve Bannon’s trial starts today. He tried to delay or derail it every possible way, but it’s happening. Also, the Trump-appointed judge is not allowing the spurious defenses that Bannon pledged would turn the trial into a “misdemeanor from Hell”. “What’s the point in going to trial here if there are no defenses?” his lawyer asked.

Other investigations also seem to be picking up steam. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has sent “target letters” to a number of Georgia Republians

informing them they could be indicted for their role in a scheme to appoint alternate electors pledged to the former president despite Joe Biden’s victory in the state

Target letters are typically used to invite lower-level members of a conspiracy to come in and make a deal to testify against higher-level conspirators.

Willis has already subpoenaed Senator Lindsey Graham and Rudy Giuliani.

DoJ reportedly is also looking at the fake electors, possibly because it would be easy to make a case: People signed their names to false documents and sent them to the National Archives.

and more Manchin sabotage

Early on, I was inclined to give Joe Manchin the benefit of the doubt: He represents a conservative state, and is entitled to vote his worldview just like any other senator. If Biden’s Build Back Better plan doesn’t make sense to him, he shouldn’t vote for it.

And in a 50-50 Senate, each Democrat is in a position to hold out for whatever deal they want. That’s how politics is, and if people don’t like it they should elect a few more liberal Democratic senators to take Manchin’s veto away.

What’s been driving me nuts, though, is that Manchin doesn’t seem to be negotiating in good faith. Negotiations that have no reason to take more than a few weeks instead stretch into many months, and then at the end there’s no deal. If there was nothing he could agree to, why didn’t he just say so early on?

This week the climate portion of Build Back Better fell apart.

Sen. Joe Manchin appears to have torpedoed a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, telling Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer Thursday evening that he won’t support moving forward on proposed tax hikes on wealthy Americans and corporations that would pay for a package of climate change and energy policies, at least not right away, this according to two aides familiar with the matter.

Manchin cites fears about inflation, but since the spending is balanced against taxes, and won’t drive up the deficit, it’s not clear why the bill should be inflationary.

Meanwhile, new climate anomalies keep popping up. Europe is seeing wildfires in France and Spain, and England is set to break 40 degrees Centigrade (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time ever.

and abortion

The featured post discusses the pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to leave the state for an abortion.

I don’t think this story is a one-timer. Abortion is fundamentally a more complicated decision than conservatives picture, and their simplistic bans are going to lead to a long series of I-didn’t-mean-that cases.

The Biden administration is insisting that hospitals have to provide abortions in emergency situations, even if state law bans them.

[HHS Secretary Xavier] Becerra said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act pre-empts state laws that restrict abortion access in emergency situations. … Although most of the state abortion bans make exceptions for when the woman’s life is in danger, U.S. health officials worry that wary doctors could wait too long to treat ectopic pregnancies and complications from miscarriages while awaiting legal guidance.

Texas, meanwhile, appears to be holding out for a hospital’s right to let a woman die.

Texas on Thursday asked a federal court to block the Biden administration’s requirement that physicians and hospitals provide abortions in medical emergencies.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, argued that federal law does not confer a right to an abortion.

Dov Fox is a law professor and the director of University of San Diego’s Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics. In a NYT column, he raises the issue of doctors who perform illegal abortions for reasons of conscience.

The American legal regime that governs medical conscience is broken. While conscientious providers find virtually no refuge in the conscience clauses that are codified in almost every state, refusers are protected almost categorically. And just about all of these conscience laws are reserved for denials of care.

It’s not hard to imagine what a conscience-based abortion would look like: Even if the state has a life-of-the-mother exception in its abortion ban, the doctor may draw that line in a different place than the legislature does. A doctor said this to ABC News:

When I see patients, for instance, who have a major cardiac problem, a lot of the time they have a risk of a major cardiac event of up to 15% to 25%, even up to 50%. At the moment they’re fine. But as they get further into pregnancy, that’s going to put their life more and more at risk.

So do I have to wait until they’re on death’s doorstep, or can I intervene at that point to prevent more harm and more damage to them?

The NYT is covering the Kansas referendum on abortion. A Yes vote amends the state constitution to allow the legislature to restrict or ban abortion. The Republican legislature has scheduled the vote to coincide with the August 2 primary election, which has a lower turnout than a November election. The amendment is also confusingly worded. It doesn’t sound like what they’d do if they thought the electorate was solidly behind them.

The whole process smacks not so much of returning power to the people as of showing contempt for them and for the democratic process, a trend that is becoming standard operating procedure throughout much of the G.O.P.

and you also might be interested in …

Remember what a to-do it was last week, when protesters came to a restaurant Justice Kavanaugh was eating at, but there was no interaction, no one was harmed, and nothing was damaged?

A source told Politico that Kavanaugh did not actually see or hear the protestors in question during his dinner at Morton’s, though he did reportedly leave the restaurant before dessert.

What? No dessert? Is this Nazi Germany or something?

My comment was:

Any time liberal protesters inconvenience a conservative official, it’s going to get national attention. (Generally, conservative protesters have to shoot somebody to get similar coverage.)

Well, Saturday an armed man was arrested outside Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s home in Seattle. He was armed, and was yelling that she should “go back to India” because he was going to kill her. The story just didn’t seem to take off like the Kavanaugh story did, even though the threat seems far more serious.

Maybe if he’d actually shot her, that would get Kavanaugh-level attention.

The New Yorker has an enlightening article about LGBT children’s books. Often the issues that children bring up in a book discussion are not the ones that adults anticipate. The article also makes a distinction between “didactic” queer stories (which are suppose to teach children that difference is OK) and “just-are” queer stories (in which gay or trans people are just characters in a story about something else).

Ron DeSantis types assume that the presence of LGBTQ characters makes a story “sexual”, when kids don’t read that into the text at all.

Several prominent Republicans — former senators, former judges, etc. — have put out a report debunking the various stolen-election theories Trump supporters have put forward. It’s called Lost, Not Stolen, and it goes through the claims state by state.

If you’ve been following this stuff closely, you won’t find anything new. I already knew, for example, that when the Cyber Ninjas were hired by Arizona’s Republican legislature to “audit” the state’s 2020 election results, Biden’s lead actually grew in their recount. And that when a committee in Michigan’s Republican state senate investigated their state’s election, they found “no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters”.

But the report is significant for two reasons

  • This isn’t Democrats saying Biden won and Trump lost, it’s Republicans.
  • The report is encyclopedic, so it addresses the whattabout-this/whattabout-that tactic of Trumpists, where refuting one conspiracy theory just causes them to raise another.

A committee of the Texas House has put out its report on the Uvalde school shooting. The Texas Tribune summarizes:

No one was able to stop the gunman from carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in part because of “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by nearly everyone involved who was in a position of power

Police from various jurisdictions, from the school district to the state to the Border Patrol, descended on Uvalde, but nobody took charge of the 376 officers.

The report speculates that the shooter had never fired a gun until the day of the massacre.

and let’s close with something cosmic

I like to close with something you haven’t seen before, and often the closing is some set of spectacular photos. This week, though, the most spectacular photos (maybe ever) were headline news: The first returns from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Posted in Articles, Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

No Victims Allowed

July 18, 2022 – 9:13 am

Right-wing policies have obvious victims, but right-wing voters can’t be allowed to notice them. This week, reports of a pregnant 10-year-old brought out the full arsenal of denial.

In the TV version of Westworld, the robots — or “hosts” in the corporate vernacular of the eponymous wild-west theme park — aren’t supposed to realize that they are manufactured pieces of an inauthentic environment. During each post-repair reactivation cycle, they are asked: “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” If the answer seems to be drifting towards “yes”, more tinkering is needed.

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?“

Fail-safes are built into their programming. Evidence of the world beyond the park, or of their own artificiality, isn’t supposed to register. “That doesn’t look like anything to me,” says one host as she examines a color photograph anachronistically dropped by a “guest”. Much later, another host says the same line while holding his own blueprints [spoiler].

No victims. The political fantasy world of American conservatives has similar safeguards. Conservative policies have certain obvious victims, people whose undeserved hell stems directly from those policies. But the voters who support those policies are not supposed to notice.

Kids who go hungry or become homeless when social programs are cut? Neighbors of poorly regulated industrial sites who develop bizarre cancers? Communities destroyed by climate-change-induced wildfires? They don’t look like anything, do they? Conservative policies work out best for everybody, other than a few corrupt and power-hungry Democratic politicians, or lazy people of color who want to sponge off the hard work of real Americans (or, conversely, to steal their crappiest jobs). Why would you ever question the nature of that reality?

Usually, right-wing media filters narrative-busting facts out of the news stream before they can disturb right-wing voters’ peace of mind. Has the January 6 Committee proved beyond the shadow of doubt that Trump knew his “stolen election” claims were lies? Fox News will protect its viewers from seeing that evidence. Does the Biden administration have the best job-creation record in the history of the modern presidency? Are vaccinated-and-boosted Americans 17 times less likely to die of Covid than unvaccinated Americans? Does right-wing political violence kill many, many more people than left-wing political violence? Do countries with national health care have lower expenses and higher life expectancies than the US? Nobody wants to hear that stuff; just leave it out.

School shootings. Every few weeks, though, something happens that is too big for the filter to handle, like a school shooting. The connection to policy couldn’t be clearer: Children are dead because the shooter had easy access to weapons that should only exist on a battlefield. Democrats would like to ban or restrict or control such weapons, but conservatives have blocked restrictions, and have even pushed to make such weapons more ubiquitous.

Republican lawmakers and judges have innocent blood on their hands.

That’s when you can see the conservative bubble’s immune system in its purest form. Some parts of it will tell you the apparent victims aren’t real. Those well-spoken kids from Parkland, the ones who survived their harrowing experience and became anti-gun activists? The reason they’re so articulate isn’t that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High did a good job educating them, it’s that they are “crisis actors” who weren’t present for the shooting at all. Similarly, the Sandy Hook parents didn’t really lose any children, they just participated in a “FEMA drill to promote gun control” [scroll down three pages to see text].

Nothing to concern yourself about. If those victims evoked a feeling of empathy, you can turn it off, because (like the hosts at Westworld) they’re just characters in a story, and not people at all.

Or maybe the events that disturb you are “false flag operations“. Remember the Las Vegas shooting, where one guy killed 60 concert-goers and wounded hundreds of others with multiple bump-stock-enhanced AR-15s? It wasn’t the kind of thing that’s bound to happen occasionally in a country with more guns than people. No, it was “the Islamic State and Antifa” carrying out a false-flag conspiracy “scripted by deep-state Democrats and their Islamic allies”. And the guy who responded to Trump’s “invasion” rhetoric by killing as many Hispanics as possible at a WalMart in El Paso? Antifa. Gotta be antifa.

The very act of connecting horrible events to conservative policies is itself illegitimate. Noting the clear cause-and-effect is “politicizing tragedy“. (Framing mass shootings as “tragedies” is an additional sleight-of-hand: Tragedies arise from inexorable Fate rather than human choices.) Learning from the Uvalde shooting that 18-year-olds should not be able to buy assault weapons is “politicizing” the deaths of children. Discussing gun policy “too soon” after a shooting disrespects the dead. (Oddly, though, it was never too soon to blame President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal for the deaths of 13 Marines. That could start immediately.)

Discussing other kinds of policy issues after a shooting is fine: mental health, video games, broken families, reinstating school prayer. The NRA’s politicians toss those topics into the post-shooting conversation the way radar-evading aircraft scatter reflective chaff. It’s never “too soon” to raise one of these issues, because (unlike guns) they’re not “political”. You can also propose “solutions” like armed teachers and schools with prison-like security, but not gun control.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/08/paralyzed-by-inaction/

The pregnant 10-year-old and Ohio’s laws. This week, though, we saw the clearest right-wing denial operation yet: the pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to leave the state to get an abortion.

Inside the conservative information bubble, the abortion issue is about healthy women with healthy fetuses who conceived their babies in wantonness and are killing them out of selfishness. If they didn’t want to raise a child, they shouldn’t have been so promiscuous. As right-wing mega-donor Foster Friess put it in 2012: “Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” More recently, Republican Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina defended the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe with this gaslighting tweet: “No one forces anyone to have sex.“

So how did a 10-year-old get pregnant? Did she consent? Does that question even make sense? I mean, reasonable people can argue about exactly where to draw the age-of-consent line, and some teen-age girls are closer to adulthood than others born on the same day. But ten?

So it’s rape. I don’t need to know the details.

Somehow, her body managed to ovulate. But was it capable of carrying a fetus to term and giving birth without suffering long-term damage? What about psychological trauma? And after birth, what then? Would she be old enough to decide whether to keep the child, or would that choice be taken away from her too?

Then we come to Ohio’s “heartbeat law“, which was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Mike DeWine in 2019. It blocks abortions after “cardiac activity” can be detected, which is said to happen at about six weeks. (“Cardiac activity” is a deceptive term, and intentionally so. No six-week fetus has a beating heart. To be blunt, the anti-abortion movement is full of liars. You shouldn’t believe what they say about heartbeats, fetal pain, risks related to abortion, post-abortion regret, or pretty much anything.)

At first courts blocked the law, because it blatantly contradicted the Roe/Casey interpretation of the constitutional right to privacy. But then the Dobbs decision reversed Roe, and that same evening Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced that the heartbeat bill was once again in force.

When the girl, whose name thankfully has not been released (we’ll see how long that lasts), showed up in the office of a child-abuse doctor, she was six weeks and three days pregnant. (I’m amazed she responded that quickly. A pregnancy that early is sometimes hard for an adult woman to spot, much less a girl with a strong temptation to think “This can’t be happening.”)

That doctor called a colleague in Indiana (which probably won’t get around to banning abortion until a special session of the legislature starts next Monday), and a non-surgical abortion was performed in Indianapolis.

Media firestorm. The Ohio girl quickly became a symbol of the heartlessness of abortion bans. Abortion bans aren’t just about “saving babies”, who would all live to be cute and fat and happy if only their mothers weren’t so self-centered. The bans also have victims.

Sometimes abortion bans inflict hellish experiences on women and girls who have no good options. Sometimes the baby survives only to live in terrible pain for a few months before dying anyway. Some women are not going to get the best treatment for their miscarriages, because that treatment can look like an abortion.

And the Ohio girl is not unique; such cases will come up again. Similar but less extreme cases come up every day.

In Ohio alone, 52 girls under 15 received an abortion in 2020 — an average of one every week, according to the state Department of Health.

Abortion decisions are complicated, and each pregnant woman or girl who doesn’t want to become a mother has a unique story. That’s why I believe the decision should be left to the people involved rather than mandated by law.

In this particular case, the girl got an abortion before a long list of worse things could happen. But to a certain extent, that’s just the luck of timing. Indiana hasn’t gotten around to passing a heartbeat bill (or some even stricter ban) yet. Republicans haven’t managed to ban abortion nationwide — but they’d like to.

So it’s perfectly fair to ask anti-abortion zealots, like Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, how she would like such cases handled. The question is not some kind of trap. And there are reasonable ways, short of supporting reproductive rights, to respond to the pregnant-10-year-old story. I can think of two off the top of my head.

  • Anti-abortion politicians could make a more-good-than-harm argument. Sure, if we ban abortion, some 10-year-olds are just going to have to try to carry their rapists’ babies to term. Some women with difficult pregnancies will probably die because the law will keep doctors from intervening until it’s too late. Some women will die from unsafe illegal abortions. But think of all the babies we’re saving!
  • They could admit that abortion is a complicated issue, and start crafting a longer list of exceptions to the bans, acknowledging that the life of the fetus is not the only consideration.

Either option, though, would involve admitting that abortion bans have victims. And Republicans can’t do that.

The counterattack. Instead, they unleashed the full arsenal of denial. The story first appeared on July 1, and for a while the filter held: Just don’t mention the story and it will eventually pass. But then President Biden referenced it on July 8, so something more was called for. That same day, PJ Media began casting doubt.

There are major problems and inconsistencies with this story that no one in Big Media noticed or cared about. First, where is the police report or the social services investigation into the rape of the child? Who will be held accountable for child rape and why isn’t that an issue in any of the reporting? I was unable to find any verified police investigation connected to this story. Another troubling fact is the source of this claim is one person: Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an abortionist and activist who is all over the media advocating for more abortions and unrestricted abortions.

Last Monday, the 11th, AG Yost went on Jesse Watters’ Fox News show to imply that the story couldn’t be true because his office hadn’t heard about it. “We don’t know who the originating doctor in Ohio was — if they even exist.” If any local police were investigating such a case, he claimed, he’d know about it, because that’s how well plugged-in he is.

The next day he went further.

Yost doubled down on that in an interview with the USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau on Tuesday, saying that the more time passed before confirmation made it “more likely that this is a fabrication.”

That opened the floodgates. With no new evidence beyond Yost’s statements, Tucker Carlson said definitively that the story was false.

Why did the Biden administration – speaking of lying – repeat a story about a 10-year-old child who got pregnant and then got an abortion or was not allowed to get an abortion when it turns out the story was not true.

The Wall Street Journal described the story as “fanciful” and “unlikely”, apparently because it concerned a victim “no one can identify” (as if the 10-year-old’s identity should be out there). It didn’t say the word “lie”, but attacked Biden for repeating an unverified story.

All kinds of fanciful tales travel far on social media these days, but you don’t expect them to get a hearing at the White House.

(I have a hard time not laughing out loud at that statement. Before January 20, 2021, just about every presidential speech contained “fanciful tales” about Covid miracle cures or immigrant crime or election fraud. But now that a Democrat is in the White House again, the WSJ has rediscovered its high standards for presidential truthfulness.)

Jonathan Turley wrote an article for the NY Post that was originally headlined (and promoted on Twitter as) “Activist Tale of a 10-year-old Rape Victim’s Abortion Looks Like a Lie” before somebody toned it down for the print edition.

Newsmax host Chris Salcedo labeled Dr. Bernard “a pro-abortion sicko” and called for her license to be suspended, while Ohio congressman Jim Jordan agreed that the story “looks like it may just be completely made up”. (Appearing on Fox Wednesday, Indiana’s attorney general announced an investigation into Dr. Bernard, who appears to have done nothing wrong. Her picture has been displayed on television, and according to a colleague, “The local police have been alerted to concerns for her physical safety.”)

At this point, everybody in the world is at fault except the people who passed Ohio’s monstrous abortion law and the Supreme Court that turned their monster loose on the world. Joe Biden, the “left-wing media”, Dr. Bernard — they’re the villains of the story. But think about it: Independent of whether this particular incident could be verified or not, these basic facts are undeniable:

  • Girls as young as 10 sometimes do get pregnant.
  • Many red-state abortion bans that are either already in place or pending in the legislature would force those children to carry their fetuses to term, unless and until that effort was about to kill them.

Those two facts by themselves should have lent credibility to the Ohio story: There was no need to make up such a tale, because it was bound to happen eventually; all you had to do is wait.

Truth can’t break through. Wednesday, the story turned out to be true. A 27-year-old man confessed to the rape, which had been reported to local police on June 22. DNA tests were underway. (I guess AG Yost isn’t as well plugged in to local law enforcement as he thinks.) Dr. Bernard filled out the appropriate paperwork. None of the things conservatives had been going on and on about had any basis in fact.

But none of them have apologized for their mistakes. Attorney General Yost’s response to the arrest did not even acknowledge the total irresponsibility of his previous statements:

We rejoice anytime a child rapist is taken off the streets.

But anyway, now that we know the story is true, can we finally talk about forcing 10-year-olds to have their rapists’ babies? No, no, of course not.

You see, the confessed rapist is Hispanic, so now this is the story:

Columbus police detective Jeffrey Huhn testified during Wednesday’s hearing that law enforcement does not believe that Fuentes is in the country legally.

Instantly, right-wing media has gone from outrage at the Left inventing the rape story to outrage at the illegal immigrants who are raping our children.

Why would Ohio try to force a 10-year-old to have her rapist’s baby? Conservatives will never, ever discuss that question, because even entering such a conversation might cause them to question the nature of their reality.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

July 18, 2022 – 8:34 am

This week we were all talking about a girl whose name none of us know: the pregnant 10-year-old who was denied an abortion in Ohio and had to go to Indiana. Maybe years from now she’ll decide to tell her story, but until then I hope we never know her name.

She was significant because she became a symbol of the fact that abortion decisions are not as simple as the Mike Pences and Kristi Noems would have you believe. Each story of a woman or girl who is pregnant but doesn’t want to become a mother is unique. Any one-size-fits-all decision made by a legislature is going to lead to outcomes we can all recognize as wrong — like forcing a 10-year-old to carry her rapist’s baby.

The aspect of the story most interesting to me, though, was watching how right-wing media handled the story, because the girl’s existence called into question one of the false assumptions central to the right-wing narrative: Right and Wrong are simple concepts, and it’s easy to draw the line between them.

For that reason, the story had to be short-circuited somehow: swept under the rug, denied, or diverted into some other story. That’s what I examine in the featured post “No Victims Allowed”, which should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will cover new developments in the 1-6 hearings and related investigations, the new Covid surge, the Uvalde shooting report, the continuing aftershocks of the Court’s reversal of Roe, and a few other things, before closing with some of the most spectacular photos ever, courtesy of the James Webb space telescope. That should be out noonish, EDT.

Posted in Morning tease | Comments (0)

Land of the Free

July 11, 2022 – 11:49 am

Even the most stalwart conservative who dares not venture out in the street at night and hesitates on occasion to drink the water or breathe the air must now wonder if keeping public services at a minimum is really a practical formula for expanding his personal liberty.

– John Kenneth Galbraith (1969)

This week’s featured post is “The Right has an immature notion of Freedom“.

This week everybody was talking about gun violence

https://claytoonz.com/2022/07/08/made-possible-by-the-gop/

I discuss the symbolic meaning of Highland Park (home of Ferris Bueller and Joel Goodsen) in the featured post. But I wanted to keep that post short, so I’ve got more to say here about guns.

Friday, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated. Still an influential politician after his retirement, Abe was giving a campaign speech for his party’s candidates when someone killed him with the homemade gun shown below. The gun would only allow two shots, so no one else was injured.

NRA shills are using Abe’s assassination, together with a recent shooting at a mall in Denmark, to argue that gun restrictions don’t work. “See,” they say, “even countries with serious gun control can’t stop shootings.”

This kind of thinking is similar to the claims that Covid vaccines and masks don’t work, because vaccinated people can still get sick, even if they wear masks. It exemplifies the conservative tendency to think in absolutes while ignoring numbers. (Scientific American analyzed statistics from March and deduced that vaccinated-and-boosted Americans were 17 times less likely to die of Covid than their unvaccinated countrymen. That’s not a guarantee, but I see it as an advantage well worth the inconvenience.)

It’s true that Japan and Denmark have both controlled guns much more tightly than the US, and so have fewer civilian guns. The US has 120 guns per 100 residents, Denmark 9.9, and Japan 0.3. Even those numbers don’t capture the full difference, since millions of American guns are powerful semi-automatics like AR-15 rifles or Glock handguns.

As a result, gun violence in both countries is rare and incidents are less deadly than in the US. In 2017, (the most recent year Wikipedia had statistics for) the US had 12.21 gun deaths per 100K residents per year, 4.46 of which were murders. In 2015, Denmark had 0.91 gun deaths and .18 gun murders per 100K residents. Japan in 2015 had 0.02 gun deaths and no gun murders. According to the NYT, Japan has had only 14 gun-related deaths since 2017, fewer than the number of Americans who died in the Uvalde shooting alone.

The Danish mall shooter apparently used a hunting rifle that was not semi-automatic and was purchased illegally. He managed to kill three people before being subdued. Abe’s assassin used a homemade zip gun that gave him only two shots.

https://www.spieltimes.com/news/homemade-gun-killed-former-japanese-prime-minister-shinzo-abe/

The Abe shooting could be a dictionary example of an exception that proves the rule. Months of planning and preparation allowed his shooter to get those two shots off. Contrast the Abe attack with the Gabby Giffords assassination attempt in Tucson in 2011, when a shooter with a legally purchased semi-automatic handgun got off dozens of shots, killing six and wounding 13 others.

The NYT sums up:

[A]n American-style shooter can, virtually on a whim, readily arm themselves with the firepower to kill large numbers of people before police can respond, targeting victims even hundreds of yards away.

But a Japanese shooter may require long stretches of dangerous preparation to build their weapon. They then must secret it to within feet of their victim and squeeze off what may be their only shot before they become effectively defenseless, and a bystander overpowers them.

It is also worth noting that, contrary to NRA propaganda, a disarmed citizenry has not made either Denmark or Japan vulnerable to tyranny. In 2021 the US had a democracy index of 7.85, noticeably lower than Denmark’s 9.09 and Japan’s 8.15. In neither country has a leader defeated at the polls tried to hang onto power by force, as Donald Trump recently did.

Quite the opposite of promoting democracy, America’s loose gun culture has made our politicians more distant and less approachable. Our presidents talk to us from behind shields and after we’ve been searched, because it’s not safe to do anything else.

Our gun culture is also related to the trigger-happy nature of our police. Police in America are now killing more than 1000 people per year. That’s a per capita rate a bit higher than countries we think of as repressive, like Pakistan and Egypt. By contrast, Denmark had no police killings in 2019, and Japan had two in 2018, the most recent years I could find statistics for.

Living with the risk of being killed by the police doesn’t sound like freedom to me. But it’s necessary, police tell us, because every suspect they meet might be armed and ready to shoot them.

and January 6

The next hearing is tomorrow at 1 p.m. It’s supposed to be focused on the role of extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Rep. Jamie Raskin said:

One of the things that people are going to learn is the fundamental importance of a meeting that took place in the White House [on Dec. 18, 2020].

That was the meeting when “Team Crazy” — Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn — urged Trump to take radical actions like seizing voting machines. The next day, Trump sent out his tweet inviting his followers to a protest rally in DC on January 6, promising it would “be wild”.

We’re also likely to see video from Pat Cipollone’s testimony Friday. Cipollone was Trump’s White House Counsel and figured in several of the stories told by Cassidy Hutchinson. (She described his attempts to put the brakes on before too many laws got broken.) Rep. Adam Kinzinger has said Cipollone’s testimony didn’t contradict what the committee had previously heard. I assume that means that when they asked him about the actions and statements Cassidy Hutchinson attributed to him, he didn’t say no.

We now know the reason Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was rushed into an “emergency” session: The Committee was afraid of TrumpWorld’s escalating witness tampering.

This isn’t a January 6 story exactly, but it’s part of the whole abuse-of-power theme. The IRS randomly selects a handful of taxpayers, about 1 in 30,000 for extreme audits. By some bizarre “coincidence”, both Jim Comey and Andy McCabe — FBI directors Trump blamed for the Russia investigation — got “randomly” selected. The Treasury Department inspector general will investigate whether the White House used inappropriate influence.

As so often happens, this Trump scandal appears to be a real version of a fake scandal Republicans tried to pin on Obama.

The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman looks into “What Happened to Michael Flynn?“

and Boris Johnson

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article263260458.html

After a series of scandals (that look fairly tame by Trump standards) caused members of his Conservative Party to quit his government, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation on Thursday.

It’s only sort of a resignation, though, because he will continue as “interim” prime minister until the Party can settle on a new leader, which might not happen for months.

Jonathan Pie is a fictional news commentator created by comedian Tom Walker. His “Bye-bye Boris” rant is epic. From an American point of view, it’s hard not to notice how much of Pie’s characterization of Johnson and the Tories also applies to Donald Trump and the Republicans who still bow down to him.

Lies on top of lies on top of lies. He lies and then gets people to lie on his behalf and then lies about the lying. … who is so blatant about his dishonesty that when accused of lying to Parliament, he simply tries to change the rules to make it OK to lie to Parliament. …

The devastating cries over the last few days from the Tory Party of “Enough is enough” and “one step too far” are coming from the same people who have sat and watched him take a flame-thrower to their party and our constitution for three fucking years. … All of them, talking about trust and integrity. If you cared so much about trust and integrity, then why the fuck did you put Boris Johnson in #10 in the first place?

and responses to Roe

So many red states are restricting or banning abortion that it’s hard to keep up. NBC has a state-by-state rundown as of Friday. CNN covers the legal challenges to those laws. In some states, the state constitution may protect reproductive rights even if the federal constitution no longer does.

The first real test of abortion’s new electoral significance will come in a few weeks in Kansas. On August 2, Kansans will vote on a constitutional amendment that will not outlaw abortion itself, but will give the legislature the power to do so — power it will almost certainly use.

  • YES, which supports amending the Kansas constitution to state, that nothing in the state constitution creates a right to abortion or requires government funding for abortion and that the state legislature has the authority to pass laws regarding abortion, or
  • NO, which opposes amending the Kansas constitution, thereby maintaining the legal precedent established in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, that there is a right to abortions in the Kansas Bill of Rights.

Interestingly, abortion has given blue states a way to appeal to business: Come here and you won’t have trouble recruiting women to work for you.

It’s hard to know what to make of President Biden’s response to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe. He waited three days to comment, but said more-or-less the right thing when he did, denouncing “the outrageous behavior of the Supreme Court” and calling on Congress to put aside the filibuster and protect reproductive rights by statute.

He issued an executive order on Friday, but it doesn’t have a lot of teeth. It’s mostly about instructing HHS and DoJ to identify actions the government can take, rather than telling them to do anything. Maybe those departments will come back in two weeks with a list of meaningful actions. Or maybe not. One way of the other, it raises the question: We all saw this coming after Alito’s draft leaked in May. Why wasn’t there a contingency plan in place?

Now quite possibly Biden has concluded that anything he can do without Congress will be set aside by the Supreme Court anyway, and he may be right. But my personal opinion is that he should force the Court’s theocrat majority to show its hand. Trump understood the importance of putting up a fight, even if you were going to lose; Biden doesn’t seem to.

Any time liberal protesters inconvenience a conservative official, it’s going to get national attention. (Generally, conservative protesters have to shoot somebody to get similar coverage.)

Wednesday night, reproductive-rights protesters learned that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was eating at Morton’s Steakhouse in downtown DC. They showed up in front of the restaurant and appear not to have assaulted anybody or broken anything. Kavanaugh avoided them by slipping out the back. Sources differ about whether he finished his meal first.

Anyway, this is now an outrage in right-wing media, with Fox News’ Steve Doocy hilariously denouncing the protesters for violating Kavanaugh’s “privacy”. Such moments make me miss Jen Psaki, who I’m sure would have had the perfect response.

Pete Buttigieg, though, did pretty well with the question yesterday on Fox News.

Look, when public officials go into public life, we should expect two things. One, that you should always be free from violence, harassment, and intimidation. And two, you’re never going to be free from criticism or peaceful protest, people exercising their First Amendment rights.

Implicit in that answer is that Supreme Court justices need to develop the same kind of thick skin politicians have, now that they’ve decided to start running the country.

It was going to happen: Chaz Stevens is asking a Florida high school that he attended if he can lead a Satanist prayer at the 50-yard-line at one of its football games. “There’s been no word back from them on that,” Stevens said.

Jonathan Rauch argues for a federal abortion compromise based on the Defense of Marriage Act:

Congress could take important steps to localize the issue. It could make abortion bans unenforceable across state lines, for example, which would please pro-choicers. It could clarify that states have the power to restrict abortion within their boundaries, which would please pro-lifers. Such measures allowing states to go their separate ways would provide time and political space for a durable policy consensus to form.

Rauch anticipates that consensus eventually mirroring Roe, just as the debate that raged during the DOMA years eventually settled on legal same-sex marriage. (According to Wikipedia, Mississippi and Arkansas are the only states where a majority opposes same-sex marriage, and those margins are narrow. Support is over 80% in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington.)

Here’s why I don’t buy that comparison: The main thing same-sex marriage had going against it in the 1990s was that most people had never seen one. That made the practice easy to demonize in the most outlandish terms: In 2004, as the first American same-sex marriages were being performed in Massachusetts, religious-Right leader James Dobson claimed they would cause the American family to crumble, “presaging the fall of Western civilization itself”.

Lots of people really believed that kind of nonsense. But those arguments collapsed as soon as same-sex marriages became real events rather than apocalyptic fantasies. It was hard for theocrats to claim that civilization would fall in New York, after it had obviously not fallen in Massachusetts. Once same-sex marriage became that woman at the office, or that gay couple down the street, the panic was hard to sustain.

Legal abortions, on the other hand, have already been happening for 50 years. I fail to see why a DOMA-like era will usher in a new consensus.

and the pandemic

It’s hard to know what to make of the numbers: deaths remain in the 300-350-per-day range they’ve been in for weeks, hospitalizations and positivity rates are rising, and nobody knows what the case numbers mean any more, now that so many people with minor cases never tell the medical system they’ve tested positive at home.

Meanwhile, the BA-5 omicron subvariant has become the dominant strain of Covid in the US. It circumvents immunity produced by both vaccinations and infections by previous strains.

and you also might be interested in …

The June jobs report came out and was surprisingly good.

The unemployment rate held steady at 3.6%, as analysts expected, while the alternative U6 measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged and some part-time workers, fell sharply to 6.7% — an all-time low that suggests the labor market remains exceptionally tight.

That alternate measure is known to economists as U6. The number you usually hear is U3.

More and more Democrats are discussing whether Biden should run for reelection — and mostly saying “no”. Personally, I think Biden has been dealt a difficult hand and does not get nearly enough credit for cleaning up Trump’s mess. But I also think he shouldn’t run. I believe his heart is in the right place, but that he’s not an effective spokesman for Democratic ideals.

I think alternative candidates should start declaring, without waiting for Biden to decide what he’s doing.

The situation reminds me of one early in Lyndon Johnson’s career. The congressman from his district died, and his widow was dithering about whether she would run. If she ran, she would be the obvious favorite.

Some mentor figure, I forget who, told LBJ not to wait for her decision. He should announce his own candidacy, and make it clear that the campaign would be a real battle rather than a coronation. If he did that, the widow probably wouldn’t run. And that’s how it worked out.

Obviously, people inside the administration like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg can’t do that without appearing disloyal. But there’s no reason why Democrats in Congress or in governorships shouldn’t try it.

The tables have turned: Now Elon Musk wants out of his agreement to buy Twitter, but Twitter’s board is trying to hold him to it.

Musk’s problem is that he overbid, and the market has turned against him. He offered $54.20 per share for the Twitter shares he doesn’t already own, but Friday’s closing price was $36.81. He needs to either sell or borrow against his Tesla stock to finance the purchase, but that share price also has dropped: from $985 per share to $752.

An unsuccessful Republican candidate in Georgia’s recent gubernatorial primary made an issue of the Georgia Guidestone monument, calling it “satanic” and promising to have it torn down. Wednesday it was bombed, reminding me at least of when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddha statues.

A new Arizona law makes it illegal to film police encounters within eight feet unless you’re the one being questioned.

GOP Senate candidate and ex-football-star Herschell Walker hasn’t just been lying to the public about his three secret children (that we know of). He’s been lying to his campaign staff. Quoting an anonymous source, The Daily Beast reported:

He spouts falsehoods “like he’s breathing,” this adviser said—so much so that his own campaign stopped believing him long ago.

“He’s lied so much that we don’t know what’s true,” the person said, adding that aides have “zero” trust in the candidate. Three people interviewed for this article independently called him a “pathological liar.”

The Walker campaign declined comment. But hours after this story published, [Scott] Paradise—the campaign manager—issued a statement broadly criticizing, but not denying, the story.

A small town in New Hampshire got a lesson in what happens when you don’t show up to vote. Libertarians took over the town meeting and cut the school budget in half.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but librarians are under fire from the Right.

and let’s close with something cultural

An article in Friday’s NYT combines high-tech, cloak-and-dagger tactics, and issues of cultural appropriation: The British Museum displays the Elgin Marbles, statuary that was originally in the Parthenon, but was bought from the Turks by a British ambassador (Thomas Bruce, earl of Elgin) in the early 1800s. Greece holds that the Ottoman Empire was an invading power, and had no right to sell the statues; it wants them back.

Repatriating them would require an act of Parliament, and the British Museum doesn’t want to give them back, for a variety of reasons, which I find unconvincing. For one: The marbles have been in England so long that they have put down cultural roots there as well. Keats wrote a poem about them, and Rodin was inspired by seeing them in the British Museum. But if you make that case, you also have to acknowledge another part of that cultural heritage: Byron’s characterization of Elgin as a “filthy jackal” in “The Curse of Minerva“.

For Elgin’s fame thus grateful Pallas pleads,  
Below, his name—above, behold his deeds!     
Be ever hailed with equal honour here     
The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer:  
arms gave the first his right, the last had none,  
But basely stole what less barbarians won.     
So when the lion quits his fell repast,     
Next prowls the wolf, the filthy jackal last

Byron envisioned an angry Athena withdrawing wisdom from Britain, resulting in the loss of both its empire and its industry — which has pretty much come to pass.

Enter high tech. Roger Michel, executive director of the Institute of Digital Archaeology, suggests a possible solution: Do detailed 3-D scans, and have his robot sculptors make near-perfect copies. Send the Marbles to the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and let the British Museum display the copies. “When two people both want the same cake, baking a second, identical cake is one obvious solution.”

This scenario opens up philosophical issues about the meaning of “identical”. (What happens to the Louvre if robot reproduction eventually allows anybody to own a brushstroke-by-brushstroke Mona Lisa copy that only a laboratory can distinguish from the original?) And since Michel’s plan involves repatriating the originals, the British Museum isn’t cooperating. That’s where the cloak-and-dagger comes in.

In March, after the museum refused a formal request to scan the pieces, Mr. Michel and Alexy Karenowska, the technical director of the Institute, showed up in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum as visitors and resorted to guerrilla tactics. While security staff looked on, the two used standard iPhones and iPads, as many of the latest models are equipped with Lidar sensors and photogrammetry software, to create 3-D digital images.

Then the robots got to work. Two samples will be displayed somewhere in London by the end of the month. Next, Michel plans to produce two more duplicates, which will (in some ways) be more authentic than the originals.

Later this summer, Mr. Michel plans to have the robot fabricate two more copies and touch them up to show how the originals would have looked, with any absent pieces restored and damage repaired.

But wait, there are more issues: If the Marbles aren’t Michel’s, and aren’t even the British Museum’s, what right does he have to make these copies?

The Greek government’s apparent reluctance to weigh in troubles Bernard Means, director of the Virtual Creation Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Means said he would only have attempted such a project with the consultation and full support of Greece. “Otherwise,” he said, “the effort is suggestive of that colonial mind-set, where those who appropriated objects without the informed consent of the colonizers feel they have the right to do with the objects as they please — often in the guise of science, and even if well-intentioned.”

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The Right has an immature notion of Freedom

July 11, 2022 – 8:48 am
https://theweek.com/political-satire/1014953/not-freedom

Highland Park is one more example of a simple truth:
Our inability to enforce sensible rules is destroying our liberty.

Many years ago, when my young body still tolerated harsh environments, I used to go to Burning Man. I happened to be there the first year (don’t ask me when it was) that the organizers laid out streets.

The difference it made was amazing: The year before, you’d leave your tent in daylight, go have a bunch of adventures, and then return in the dark. In the meantime, more tents had been pitched, some of the objects you had taken for landmarks had moved, and finding your way home had turned into an adventure of its own. Every night, the camp was full of lost people tripping over each other’s tent stakes.

But then: streets. Now you had a clear path home, and even an address of sorts. Staying out late and coming back exhausted (or impaired) was a workable plan. You didn’t have to allocate a big chunk of time for stumbling around in the dark.

Experiencing those first streets of Black Rock City taught me an important lesson: Accepting a simple rule — don’t camp in the streets — made us all more free to do the things we actually wanted to do.

Once you understand that idea, you can see it everywhere: Traffic rules, for example, are what makes the road system usable. Even if all the same slabs of concrete stayed in place, it would take forever to drive from New England to Florida, as I do every December, if there were no traffic rules. In theory, getting rid of the rules means I could drive 100 mph and get there much faster. But there’s no way I would do that in reality, for fear that some other guy was using my lane to go 100 mph in the opposite direction.

Without the rules, the whole plan of driving to Florida would be unworkable. I would lose that option, and hence be less free. Because freedom isn’t maximized by having no rules; it’s maximized by having the right rules.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it this way in 1969 when he wrote the introduction to the second edition of his 1958 book The Affluent Society:

Even the most stalwart conservative who dares not venture out in the street at night and hesitates on occasion to drink the water or breathe the air must now wonder if keeping public services at a minimum is really a practical formula for expanding his personal liberty.

It turns out that having really low taxes, and being free to burn or toss into the river whatever we want to get rid of, diminishes our freedom to do more important things, like drink and breathe.

The last few years, our political discourse has been dominated by the loud voices of people too immature to understand this simple notion. (Five of them have even made it onto the Supreme Court.) Throughout the pandemic, for example, sensible folks have been searching for public-health rules that would allow us all to do more things safely. Maybe, for example, it could be safe to eat in a restaurant if we knew everybody would be vaccinated, or go to a movie if everybody would be vaccinated and masked.

But no, we couldn’t do that, because those would be RULES, and rules restrict our FREEDOM.

In my case, being in my sixties and married to someone with a few additional risk factors, I had so much FREEDOM I could barely leave the apartment.

This week we got an even clearer example of how the no-rules notion of freedom in fact makes us less free: the Highland Park shooting. A rooftop gunman killed seven during a Fourth of July parade in an upscale suburb along Lake Michigan. Forty-six others were either wounded by gunfire or injured in the ensuing panic.

Different shootings affect people differently, independent of the number killed or injured. This one, I think, is going to stick with me. I suspect it’s going to stick with a lot of people.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to Highland Park, and you probably haven’t either. But you’ve seen it. The movies use Chicago’s North Shore suburbs to symbolize affluent communities so sheltered from the scary aspects of modern life that teens have to seek out adventure for themselves. Ferris Bueller lived in Highland Park; so did Joel Goodsen from Risky Business. That idyllic family life The Good Wife had before her crooked-politician husband went to jail and everything fell apart? It was in Highland Park. The town sits between Lake Forest, where 1980 Best Picture Ordinary People was set, and Winnetka, site of the Home Alone house. (But parts of that movie were shot in Highland Park too.)

During their glory days with the Bulls, basketball legends Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen had Highland Park mansions. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick was born there. About 30K people live there now, and the 2010 census says the median household income is over $100K.

Here’s what I’m trying to get across: If a mass shooting can happen in Highland Park, it can happen anywhere. It can happen in your town too.

And who hasn’t been to a Fourth of July parade? Or sat in a crowded park waiting for the fireworks to start? The last time you did that, did you think you were taking a chance? Putting your family at risk? Did you plan which way you’d all run if gunfire broke out?

Now you will. We all will. Or maybe we’ll just stop having Fourth of July parades at all. After all, our inability to make sensible rules about guns is leaving us with damn little real freedom to celebrate.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

July 11, 2022 – 8:35 am

It’s been another week with too much news: the Highland Park shooting; the Abe assassination; Boris Johnson resigning, sort of; wondering what Pat Cipollone told the 1-6 Committee; Georgia handing out subpoenas to Trump’s people; states racing to take away women’s rights, now that they’re allowed to; a surprisingly good June jobs report; and probably a bunch of stuff I’ve forgotten.

I’ll do my best to cover it in the weekly summary. This week’s featured post is short: I use the Highland Park shooting as an example of how our inability to enforce sensible rules makes us less free. Yes, you can easily walk into a store and buy an AR-15. But what you can’t do is take your kids to a Fourth of July parade without regularly glancing up at the rooftops and planning your escape route in case all hell breaks loose. That’s not freedom.

The featured post should be out shortly. The weekly summary should take until noon or so EDT.

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Exceptions

July 4, 2022 – 12:07 pm

Some years ago, I remarked that “[w]e’re all textualists now.” … It seems I was wrong. The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the “major questions doctrine” magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.

– Justice Elena Kagan
dissenting opinion in West Virginia v EPA

This week’s featured post was “Inside the White House on 1-6“.

It’s traditional on the 4th of July to say something patriotic and upbeat about America. But I don’t have it in me this year. As historian Michael Beschloss put it on MSNBC this week:

We’re living through a time where I can’t predict to you whether we’ll be living in a democracy five years from now or not. I hope we are.

https://claytoonz.com/2022/07/02/independence-day-2022/

This week everybody was talking about Cassidy Hutchinson

I discuss her testimony to the 1-6 Committee in the featured post. But here I’ll mention a couple of other things about Tuesday’s hearing.

One of the more amazing moments was video of Michael Flynn repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment (against self-incrimination) to avoid answering what ought to be softball questions, like “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” WTF, General Flynn?

The closed captioning on at least one stream of the hearing provided a little comic relief: Somebody forgot to tell the automated speech-to-text app about White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, so it struggled whenever anyone said his name. My favorite of its many attempts was “passive bologna”. I think Pat has a new nickname.

and new Supreme Court decisions

https://jensorensen.com/2022/06/29/supreme-court-overturns-roe-theocracy-cartoon/

Last week I focused on three major decisions: overturning Roe, telling Maine it had to support religious schools (in certain circumstances), and tossing out New York’s gun law. Two more important decisions have happened since then: supporting a public-school football coach’s right to lead public prayers on the 50-yard line, and blocking the EPA from pushing utilities to shift away from coal-fired power plants.

Both rulings were typical of this term: their direct effects were less significant than the principles they laid down, and how those principles might be used in future decisions. (Even the Roe reversal, significant as that is on its own, presages a still broader rollback of rights.)

Next term could be even worse: The Court has accepted a case that tests the right of state legislatures to handle federal elections however they want, independent of any previous laws or the state constitution that brought the legislature into existence. Some legislatures in swing states (Wisconsin, for example) are so gerrymandered that the voters have no real say any more. If this case goes wrong, those legislatures could deliver their states’ electoral votes as well, disenfranchising voters in presidential elections.

It’s hard to know what to make of the praying-coach decision, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, because Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion so badly misstates the facts of the case. Gorsuch says Coach Kennedy “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.” If that were true, Kennedy would never have lost his job and there would be no case to decide. But in reality, the coach’s “quiet, personal prayer” looked like this:

Bremerton, Washington is not far from Seattle, and a Seattle Times columnist tells the real story, going back to a 2015 Times article.

It was an account of a news conference Kennedy gave before the team’s big homecoming game against Centralia. “Football coach vows to pray” was the print headline.

It describes — in Kennedy’s own words — how he was inspired to start holding midfield prayers with students after he saw an evangelical Christian movie called “Facing the Giants,” in which a losing team finds God and goes on to win the state championship.

Kennedy “has held his postgame ritual at midfield after each game for a motivational talk and prayer ever since,” the story recounted. By doing so, Kennedy said he is “helping these kids be better people.”

So, the coach’s intention was never the personal “free exercise” of religion the First Amendment protects. He was abusing his publicly-financed position in order to influence his students to participate in a religious ritual, precisely the “establishment of religion” the First Amendment bans. This was not an obscure point that the lawyers overlooked — it was why the appeals court ruled against Kennedy.

Since the decision, I’ve seen lots of people on social media say that Muslims, Pagans, and Satanists should start leading students in prayer, now that the Court has said it’s OK. But that’s not going to work, because Muslims, Pagans, and Satanists won’t be able to find a Supreme Court justice willing to lie for them the way Gorsuch lied for Kennedy.

Dating myself a little, I’m recalling the cereal commercials that always ended “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.” Similarly, “religious liberty” is for Christians, as Muslims, Pagans, and Satanists will discover if they try to imitate Coach Kennedy.

The decision in West Virginia v EPA has no immediate consequence: In 2015, Obama’s EPA put forward a plan that would force utilities to lower carbon emissions by shifting from high-carbon generation (like coal-fired plants) to low-carbon generation (like renewables, nuclear, or from coal to natural gas). Red states sued to block the plan, the Supreme Court put a temporary stay on it, and then the Trump administration reversed it. In the meantime, the market forced the same shift the Obama administration had wanted to mandate.

So why is this a case? Well, the Biden White House is considering an updated version of the plan, which the Court is trying to scuttle preemptively.

More importantly, though, Chief Justice Roberts used this occasion to announce a newly invented legal principle: the major questions doctrine:

In certain extraordinary cases … [a regulating] agency must point to “clear congressional authorization” for the power it claims.

This is a relative of the “nondelegation doctrine” of the infamous Lochner Court, which Neil Gorsuch has been trying to revive since he came to the Supreme Court. (Gorsuch’s concurrence makes the connection more explicit.)

Justice Kagan’s dissent describes the situation in more detail: In the Clean Air Act, Congress understood that new environmental dangers would appear, and new regulatory tactics would become necessary. So it wrote a special section into the law, section 111, to give the EPA authority to handle such situations. This is the authority the EPA was using when it issued the Clean Power Plan.

The major questions doctrine says that authorization is not clear enough. Kagan writes:

The majority’s decision rests on one claim alone: that generation shifting is just too new and too big a deal for Congress to have authorized it in Section 111’s general terms. But that is wrong. A key reason Congress makes broad delegations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, appropriately and commensurately, to new and big problems. Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues—even significant ones—as and when they arise. That is what Congress did in enacting Section 111. The majority today overrides that legislative choice. In so doing, it deprives EPA of the power needed—and the power granted—to curb the emission of greenhouse gases.

Where in the Constitution does either “major questions” or “non-delegation” reside? Well, nowhere exactly. It’s supposedly implicit in the separation of powers. Why either doctrine is more obvious than the right to privacy is lost on me.

What these doctrines are is a major power grab by the conservative court. No criteria defines what makes a law’s delegation of power too “unclear” or an agency’s regulation too “major” to be invalid under these doctrines. So basically it’s open season on regulations, and the Court can invalidate whichever ones it doesn’t like.

One observation about the EPA ruling: If Congress is supposed to authorize policy changes at a level that previously has been left to administrative agencies, then the Senate filibuster has to go. A filibuster-gridlocked Senate is not nimble enough to address the regulatory challenges of fast-changing fields like climate change or technology.

To me, that statement is independent of partisanship. If the Supreme Court is going to force Congress to take a more hands-on approach to governance, then Congress has to be able to pass legislation. If Republicans get control of Congress again, they will probably pass laws that I consider bad. But even that would be action that the public could see and respond to, maybe by electing better people to Congress. I have more faith in such a back-and-forth process than in the current nothing-can-be-done logjam, which is more likely to cause voters to give up in despair.

Ezra Klein raised a good point on his July 1 podcast (where he interviewed Kate Shaw, who is a law professor and has her own podcast “Strict Scrutiny”): If the conservative majority is serious about this new focus on history as the determining factor in its decisions, then the Court needs to have world-class historians on its staff, rather than just law clerks.

After all, the justices were not chosen for their historical expertise, and their clerks are recent law-school graduates who have probably never studied American history to any depth. That’s why the historical debates between the conservative rulings and the liberal dissents sound so amateurish on both sides. (Robert Spitzer disparaged Justice Scalia’s Heller decision — the granddaddy of originalist opinions and the model for Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen — as “law office history“.)

When the current court does history, it’s as if the bankers at the Federal Reserve decided not to bother consulting economists, or using IT people to keep their computer models running. (“I’ve calculated on this napkin that we need to raise interest rates another half percent.”)

Of course, maybe that’s the point. Maybe the history lessons in the recent decisions aren’t intended to be accurate. Maybe they’re just stories that allow the conservative majority to justify whatever it wants to do.

and reaction to Roe’s reversal

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/tuesday-june-28th-not-your-business

Polls show abortion is rising as an election issue. A lot of pundits are calling on Democrats to make a clear commitment on the issue, more or less along the lines of the Republicans’ “Contract with America” in 1994. Being vaguely pro-choice and encouraging people to vote isn’t enough.

Josh Marshall (hardly a radical progressive) suggests this phrasing:

If the Democrats hold the House and add two Senators in November I will vote to pass a law making Roe’s protections the law nationwide and change the filibuster rules to guarantee that bill gets an up or down vote. And I will do that in January 2023.

As I mentioned in the Supreme Court note above, an ambitious and extremist Supreme Court means that the other branches of government have to step up and compete for power. If any vagueness in the laws is going to give this Court an opening it is eager to fill, then Congress has to be able to pass new laws as developments warrant. The filibuster absolutely has to go.

The Indianapolis Star reports that a 10-year-old girl who was six weeks and three days pregnant traveled to Indiana in order to get around Ohio’s six-week abortion ban. The girl was referred by a child-abuse doctor in Ohio.

Sunday, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was questioned about her state’s abortion ban, which criminalizes any abortion not necessary to save a woman’s (or girl’s) life. Asked how that 10-year-old would fare in South Dakota, Noem dodged the question.

But the messiness of real life is why this issue isn’t going to go away by November. (Ten-year-olds do get pregnant. Some fetuses can’t be saved, and endanger their mothers without any upside. Some men will kill their girlfriends rather than take responsibility for a child.) There’s going to be a steady stream of cases where radical anti-abortion laws lead to results that the public isn’t going to like. It’s not going to be as simple as “save the babies”.

The satire site McSweeney’s takes on the we-will-adopt-your-baby offers from anti-abortion couples, by describing all the things the couples won’t adopt.

We want that baby when it’s nice and cute and fully formed, but we aren’t planning on adopting anything else. Obviously, we can’t adopt your morning sickness, so when you wake up at 5 a.m. to puke your guts out before work, and when you also puke your guts out at work in the employee bathroom, we won’t adopt that.

… Oh, and if you have a miscarriage and nearly bleed out in your bathroom before the paramedics can get to you? That part is not a tiny little chubby baby, so we won’t be adopting it.

One particularly annoying anti-abortion argument keeps popping up: What about the lost potential of the aborted fetus? The memes are like “What if that baby would have grown up to cure cancer?” or “What if they had aborted Jesus?”

I’ve begun responding to these by pointing to the lost potential of women who are thrown off their life path by an unplanned pregnancy. “It’s more likely that cancer would have been cured by a woman who had to leave medical school to raise an unwanted child.” Or “Maybe Mary could have saved the world herself if God hadn’t forced motherhood on her.”

and the pandemic

Numbers continue to be flat-ish, but to me they look ready for a jump upward after the holiday weekend. Cases are up 13% in the last two weeks, and deaths up 24%. More and more people I know are getting sick, and I wonder how many of their cases show up in the official statistics. I believe a lot of people with minor symptoms test positive at home and never enter the medical system.

and primaries

Tuesday’s primary elections brought mostly good news for democracy.

In Colorado, Republicans rejected candidates for governor and senator who claim Trump won the 2020 elections. The GOP Senate nominee largely supports reproductive rights, and defeated a candidate who wants to ban abortion nationally (and who was at the 1-6 rally). Republicans rejected a secretary of state candidate who is under indictment for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to prove one of Trump’s election-fraud theories.

Mississippi Republican Michael Guest was renominated for his House seat, in spite of his minor rebellion against Trump: He voted to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate 1-6, a measure that MAGA Republicans are probably sorry they torpedoed.

The more moderate candidate won the Republican nomination for governor in Illinois, though Rep. Mary Miller, the woman who last week declared the Dobbs decision “a victory for white life”, defeated a less Trumpy congressman in a newly formed district that forced two sitting representatives to face off. (The district includes my hometown.) Progressive candidates won Democratic nominations for Congress in two districts in the Chicago area.

Illinois was one state where Democrats tried to game the system by helping the more radical Republican in the gubernatorial primary, in the belief that such a candidate would be easier to beat. This is a dangerous practice, and I’m happy that it failed.

and Ukraine

Russia has captured Lysychansk, the last major city in Luhansk province.

With Luhansk Province now in hand, Russian forces can aim squarely southwest at the remaining Ukrainian-held parts of the neighboring province of Donetsk, the other territory that makes up the Donbas.

The Economist predicts Putin’s strategy:

You can see where Mr Putin is heading. He will take as much of Ukraine as he can, declare victory and then call on Western nations to impose his terms on Ukraine. In exchange, he will spare the rest of the world from ruin, hunger, cold and the threat of nuclear Armageddon.

and you also might be interested in …

The Brownshirts are out.

Dozens of white supremacists marched through Boston on Saturday. The group wore white masks and were seen boarding Orange Line trains at Haymarket Station. Some carried police shields and flags. They are members of a group called Patriot Front.

Gallup reports that only 81% of Americans say they believe in God, down from 87% in 2017, and the lowest number since Gallup started asking the question in 1944. That number looks likely to fall further, because the people least like to believe are the young: only 68% of adults ages 18-29.

In Florida, the other shoe is dropping. After raising public anger about largely imaginary liberal indoctrination through “critical race theory” or “grooming”, the DeSantis administration is instituting indoctrination of its own.

New civics training for Florida public school teachers comes with a dose of Christian dogma, some teachers say, and they worry that it also sanitizes history and promotes inaccuracies.

The Miami Herald:

Teachers who spoke to the Herald/Times said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught. “It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School. “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents. That was concerning.”

Meanwhile, the Texas Education Agency is taking flak for considering changing the word “slavery” to “involuntary relocation” in the second-grade curriculum standards.

In Wisconsin, a novel about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II has been kicked out of the curriculum because it’s “unbalanced” and presents only one side of the issue. A parent in the district commented: “The other side is racism.”

and let’s close with something too small to work

In this age of miniaturization, smaller is often better. But once in a while the shrinking process goes too far. Well, it’s good to know that Nature also makes this mistake occasionally: Witness the pumpkin toadlet, a frog about the size of Skittle. It looks very froggish, but it doesn’t have that whole jumping thing down yet. I can’t explain why it’s so much fun to watch them try, but it just is.

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