The Weekly Sift

It’s June, so I continue to write about the Supreme Court. This week I’m focusing on the Rahimi case, which hasn’t gotten a lot of press, largely because it came to a common-sense conclusion that doesn’t make good clickbait: The Second Amendment doesn’t give domestic abusers an unfettered right to have guns.

It was an 8-1 decision with only corrupt Clarence Thomas taking the side of domestic abusers. Nobody really expects Thomas to make sense, so the mainstream press didn’t see a lot to write about.

I found the case fascinating from another point of view: What’s going to happen to originalism? The late Justice Scalia developed originalism when he was in the minority, and it gave him a theoretical framework for criticizing more liberal ideas about interpreting the Constitution. Only recently, though, has the Court had a clear originalist majority, which faces the challenge of turning Scalia’s critical theory into a governing theory.

The Rahimi case follows from the Bruen case decided two years ago on originalist grounds: Any current law has to be in accordance with “the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”. But the Founding era didn’t consider domestic abuse to be a problem — wives are just women, after all — so there is no “historical tradition” of disarming abusers. The obvious originalist conclusion, which the conservative Fifth Circuit came to, is to give Rahimi’s guns back and wait to see whether he kills the estranged mother of his child.

But five of the Court’s six conservative justices decided to step back from that abyss. Four of them felt a need to write their own opinions justifying that move. I’d been meaning to write an abstract piece about originalism anyway, so this gave me a lot to work with. The result is “The Limits of Originalism”, which I’ll try to get out by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the cases still to be decided in the next week or so, the upcoming Biden/Trump debate, Biden’s slight momentum in the polls, Louisiana’s law to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Reggie Jackson’s moving and disturbing account of the racism he faced in the minor leagues, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but I seem to be moving slowly this morning.

After one presumptive nominee for president gets convicted of felonies, you might expect to hear talk about one of the summer’s political conventions choosing someone else. What you wouldn’t expect, though, is that it’s the other party having that discussion.

So far it doesn’t seem to be a serious discussion: The Democratic Convention is going to renominate President Biden without significant opposition. Nonetheless, this week we went through yet another round of Democrats and left-leaning pundits fretting about Biden’s age and poll numbers, and speculating about alternatives.

Republicans never seem to suffer from this kind of self-doubt. During the primaries, nobody cared that polls consistently showed Nikki Haley running much better against Biden than Trump did. Now, Trump is a convicted felon in New York, and only his political clout has delayed his three other trials long enough to avoid pre-election convictions for even-more-serious federal and Georgia felonies. But prominent Republicans have wasted no time lining up behind their criminal leader, and even Larry Hogan’s tepid plea to “respect the verdict and the legal process” has all but gotten him run out of the party.

In this week’s featured post, I’ll explain why it’s time for all these anxiety-driven can’t-we-dump-Biden conversations to stop. Hoping for another candidate was a totally appropriate fantasy a year ago, but at this point there’s only one scenario that avoids a second Trump term and the threat of fascism it poses: re-elect Biden. We need to get focused on that project, which means boosting Biden rather than tearing him down.

Democracies fall to fascism when the non-fascist opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. Let’s not do that.

That post, “To stop fascism, unite around the old guy”, is just about done and should be out soon.

The weekly summary has a bunch of other stuff to cover: Israel’s costly raid to recover hostages, the ceasefire proposal, Alito’s flag story falls apart, Biden’s new border policy, Hunter’s trial, and a few other things, plus a book about the anti-CRT campaign in one Texas suburb. That should be out around noon EDT.

Like most people who follow the news, I spent much of the week thinking about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who (for reasons I’ll explain in the featured post) has long been my least favorite justice. (I suppose one sign that you might be a news nerd is that you have a least favorite Supreme Court justice.)

Alito made headlines this week because we found out that an insurrectionist flag flew over a second Alito home. This led to a lot of calls for him to recuse himself from any cases concerning January 6, which he obviously will not do, in keeping with the well-established grade-school principle of “Make me.” I’ll cover all that in the weekly summary.

But what struck me is a decision the Supreme Court released this week in which Alito wrote the majority opinion: Alexander v South Carolina NAACP. In this decision, the Court gives its approval to a congressional map that a lower court said was an illegal racial gerrymander. But (as with Alito’s abortion opinion in Dobbs), the implications go much further: Under the logic laid out in Alexander, just about any racial gerrymander is OK, as long as you don’t say it out loud. Going forward, any racist legislator who wants to pass a new round of Jim Crow laws should know that he’ll get a sympathetic hearing at the Supreme Court.

This week’s featured post centers on Alexander and its larger implications. It’s called “Alito’s Flags Aren’t the Worst of It”, and it should appear shortly.

That leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: the flags, the International Criminal Court targeting Israel, the Manhattan Trump trial, Trump’s crazy charge that the FBI tried to kill him (and Jack Smith’s response), Nikki Haley endorsing Trump, Memorial Day, and a few other things.

In addition to the newsy stuff, I found some more general articles worth your attention, like Cory Doctorow’s comparison of AI to jetpacks, and a thoughtful woman’s blog from rural Missouri. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it’s a holiday, so the schedule might slip.

I’m back from my “vacation”, where I went back to my home town in Illinois to lead a church service about how to watch the news without going crazy. I’ve put the text on my other blog, where you can read it if you want.

The featured post this week focuses on the Time magazine article about Trump’s second term. Almost as interesting as the conclusions their interviewer draws is his strategy for interviewing Trump at all: Eric Contellessa doesn’t challenge anything in Trump’s wild rambles, but keeps coming back to the questions he asked. It’s a print-media tactic that gets around many of the problems of interviewing Trump on TV.

Anyway, that should be out before too long, certainly by 10 EDT.

The weekly summary covers Trump’s Manhattan trial, which mainly consisted of Stormy Daniels this week. Michael Cohen should start testifying today. Also Israel’s attacks on Rafah, the last refuge of Palestinian civilians, and the Biden administration’s increasing conflicts with Netanyahu. I’ve got more to say about The New York Times. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to oust Speaker Johnson came to nothing. It sure looks like Steve Bannon is going to jail at long last. And I may have missed the northern lights, but lots of people got good pictures of it.

The summary should post around noon or so.

This week, a Trump criminal trial actually started, and a jury is already in place. Opening arguments should begin this morning.

During jury selection, we saw right-wing media mount an all-out offensive against the fairness of the jury system. Trump, they claimed, could never get a fair trial in New York, or in any venue where most people didn’t vote for him. In the Manichean world of MAGA, there are Trump lovers and Trump haters, and no Trump haters could possibly put aside their hatred to listen objectively to the evidence of the case.

In this week’s featured post, I push back on that. I think we need to, because trial by jury is close to the heart of Democracy. If ordinary people can’t be trusted to be jurors, then how can we trust them to be voters?

I think it’s important to see this attack on the fairness of juries as part of a larger authoritarian attack on all sources of truth other than the Great Leader himself. Over the last few years, we have heard that we can’t trust public health officials, climate scientists, women, the news media, judges, election officials, historians, librarians, or pretty much anyone else. Only the Leader speaks the Truth. Only he can be trusted. That’s the essence of any authoritarian system.

I look back on my own experience on a jury and argue that we can trust juries, including this jury. Rigging a verdict, even if that’s what you intend at the beginning of the trial, is actually pretty hard.

That post should appear shortly.

The weekly has a lot of other news to cover, including some Trump trial news other than jury selection. But the big news is that Speaker Johnson stood up to Marjorie Taylor Greene and let Ukraine aid come to a vote. It passed easily, as it would have if it had come to the floor six months ago. The House also passed aid to Israel and Taiwan, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza. MTG is promising a vote to depose Johnson as speaker, which may or may not turn into yet another pointless Republican circus.

It looks like the Iran/Israel trade of attacks won’t escalate into a larger war. A VW plant in Tennessee voted to unionize. The Senate gave the Mayorkas impeachment effort exactly as much attention as it deserved. The Supreme Court is about to consider several interesting cases. And somebody shot a video of an Icelandic volcano erupting under the Northern Lights.

I’ll aim to get that out around noon EDT.