pvn
July 1, 2023, 5:45pm
481
biden has been amazing for foreign policy, just incalculably waaaaaay above replacement value, and a LOT of the domestic failure has been congressional, but Biden absolutely could have gone Dark Brandon mode and put more pressure on Chuck and Nancy to get more done.
1 Like
You know who gets a bad rap?
1 Donald Trump
2 You know why?
3 Because he fucking deserves a bad rap
3 Likes
goofy
July 1, 2023, 6:26pm
483
EhhhhâŚ
They are justified in protesting a church whose teaching doesnât acknowledge their right to be who they are, but they do it in a way that dishonors the nuns who live in poverty serving the poor. They do it in a sophomoric way designed to cause offense. In a healthy society, we try to assert differences without demeaning one anotherâs identities.
Good for him for showing some personal growth but letâs not get too carried away here.
2 Likes
Very fair. I donât read him in the Times and my exposure is almost exclusively through his appearances on the Newshour, where he is unfailingly civil and reasonable (which allows him to keep coming back).
Heâs never going to change on issues of religion and especially (what he sees as) morality. But even in the piece quoted above heâs at least being reasonable * and I think thereâs some value in having conservative intellectuals that value civility and reasonableness, and who are able to model a complete separation between his brand of âcompassionate conservatismâ and support for Trump.
*âReasonableâ in the sense of making a good-faith effort to find the right balance between competing interests.
1 Like
goofy
July 1, 2023, 7:07pm
485
ehhhh I donât know, like maybe âbad faithâ is the wrong way to describe this but I think heâs enough of a partisan hack that heâs not really trying to find the right balance so much as heâs trying to defend his interests and making up excuses to do so. Like, if the Dodgers had hosted Wayne LaPierre, there would be a lot of outrage but would David Brooks have written this same column about how the Dodgers shouldnât get involved in culture wars? Probably not.
He might not even be aware of this, like I think itâs very natural for people to go through that kind of mental exercise above (people are doing stuff I donât like â they should stop â I canât just say itâs because I donât like it though â oh great, here are some limiting principles that make my position look much better) without even thinking about it, and I donât give the guy who writes about morality after ditching his wife for his 25-years-younger former assistant that much credit for self-awareness. So maybe you canât blame him too much if he thinks heâs doing the reasonable, good-faith thing you describe.
2 Likes
Dodgers should shut up and dribble.
1 Like
Oh, yeah, thatâs totally legit. These companies are often a mess and lose papers, etc. The problem is you have to file a lawsuit in federal court, which is a high bar for your average student loan holder.
Surf
July 3, 2023, 2:24am
488
So is it possible for the Rs to preemptively sue to stop them from forgiving the debt via new method or they have to wait until it officially becomes a policy? Now that education department has all the info about people who applied previously feel like they should day 1 itâs announced ship letters to millions people saying loans forgiven/update credit monitors/etc and then make scotus try to put that genie back in bottle
Standing is apparently no longer a thing so who knows. Itâs Calvinball all the way.
d10
July 3, 2023, 2:53am
490
Within a few years our Supreme Court overlords wonât even wait for Congress to pass laws, theyâll just be making up their own rules out of thin air
goofy
July 3, 2023, 3:18am
491
It really is staggering that, like, the TX anti-abortion bounty law was treated by SCOTUS as some super interesting legal theory (they refused to issue an injunction stopping it from going into effect iirc) because, how could anyone have standing to sue? Everyone took it for granted that you needed a real injury to have standing, and no abortion clinic or doctor would have such an injury until putting themselves into a situation where they could get sued into oblivion and only then could we find out whether the law was constitutional or not.
But then this Geocities-ass Karen comes around with the fakest of fake cases and SCOTUS bends over backwards like âyes, of course Karen, anything you need, weâre here for you.â Same with the student loan cases where the states absolutely did not have standing to sue, but âstandingâ is only a problem for liberals.
I mean, we have an unstoppable force (SCOTUS making increasingly absurd decisions in service of conservative grievances) and an immovable object (Bidenâs unshakable faith in the sanctity of the court), but the latter doesnât want to get in the way of the former, so we just get to see SCOTUS accelerate to the right until their relativistic infinite momentum induces a gravitational collapse that kills us all.
goofy
July 4, 2023, 9:24pm
494
An MJS + Dahlia Lithwick joint:
As the Supreme Court term crashed to a close last week, in a string of stinging defeats to progressives , a familiar narrative began shaping up in the public discourse : The court had, on balance, remained largely loyal to the conservative legal project while delivering just enough compromises to quell any meaningful challenge to its power and legitimacy. That story is the one Chief Justice John Roberts would probably like to have you tell; it is both descriptively accurate and superficial to the point of distortion. The court did, indeed, refuse an invitation to clobber several liberal precedents and policies, which had the effect of leaving the law in place, a set of status quo decisions dressed up as liberal âwins.â It then used the resulting good press as cover to pulverize laws that directly improved the lives of tens of millions of Americans, including the most vulnerable and underprivileged among us. And it achieved these goals largely through the invisible hand of docket manipulation , a trick thatâs unique to the modern Supreme Court.
What does that all mean? Nothing too lofty. Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have finally embraced the chief justiceâs tried-and-true formula of years past, joining a series of decisions rebuffing some of the most radical Republicansâ most cynical efforts to yank the law far rightward. The sloppiest, least defensible big swingsâpushed by Alabama, Texas, and North Carolinaâwere rebuffed. Slightly less sloppy big swings were embraced joyfully and written into law, including a case that had no facts and a case that ignored the record below . In swinging at only some of the worst pitches served up, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and the chief justice got a chance to tick off a bunch of policy agenda items that are too unpopular and misery-inducing to pass via the democratic process. After last termâs eruption of molten, cruel conservatism, the 6â3 majority has sought safer political ground without sacrificing any of its most cherished goals.
This is a particularly good point about how well the conservatives manipulate the media that I donât think Iâve seen before:
As a result of this discretion, the court has granted itself a singular role in crafting the narrative of each term. It could have declined to take up Moore v. Harper , which was decided in accordance with the law by the court below. But by granting the case, the court built up months of totally unnecessary national tension and uncertainty, followed by a sense of relief that it hadnât done something so unprecedented as to be crazy. Each time the court reaches out to take a fringe-theory case, commentators who score the refusal to adopt a fringe theory are carrying the courtâs water. By batting away fringe cases like Moore , Brackeen , or Milligan , the majority gave itself maneuvering room for a decision like 303 Creative , a manufactured case with fake facts and no real record, which the majority nonetheless used as a vehicle to roll back Civil Rights laws. Just as you cannot weight every merits case equally and call it âdata,â you cannot give the court a participation award every time it grants and then does not rubber-stamp a baseless case.
And the majority is already setting the stage for next term. After dropping its last decisions on Friday, the court released its final orders list . Over liberal dissents, the majority refused to consider a voter suppression law in Mississippi that was explicitly designed to âexclude the negroâ from the political process. It also turned away a case challenging a Mississippi prosecutorâs use of strikes to keep Black citizens off the jury in the capital trial of a Black defendant. Milligan , it seems, represented quite enough racial justice for the 2020s.by revanchist billionaires , and we keep trying to stretch the rules of the game to cover it.
1 Like
d10
July 6, 2023, 12:48pm
496
Already working as intended.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/05/missouri-biden-judge-censorship-ruling-analysis/
When tech companies and State Department officials meet, âthey talk about foreign influence, they compare notes. It gives them the opportunity to ask questions about foreign influence they are seeing,â this person said. âState will share Russian narratives, things they are seeing in state media in Russia about U.S. topics. They will ask whether Facebook is seeing things from known entities, such as the Chinese Communist Party or the Internet Research Agency,â the Russian entity thought responsible for much of the interference in the 2016 election.
goofy
July 7, 2023, 7:24pm
497
Great jbouie piece about the way conservatives use Justice Harlanâs dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson disingenuously:
The language of colorblindness that Roberts and Thomas use to make their argument comes directly from Justice John Marshall Harlanâs lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that upheld Jim Crow segregation. âThere is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,â wrote Harlan, who would have struck down a Louisiana law establishing âequal but separateâ accommodations on passenger railways.
But thereâs more to Harlanâs dissent than his most frequently cited words would lead you to believe. When read in its entirety, the dissent gives a picture of Harlan not as a defender of equality, but as someone who thinks the Constitution can secure hierarchy and inequality without the assistance of state law. Itâs not that segregation was wrong but that, in Harlanâs view, it was unnecessary.
âThe white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power,â Harlan wrote. âSo I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.â What follows are the words with which we are most familiar.
If you read the most-quoted part of Harlanâs dissent in isolation, you might get the impression that this former slave owner was some kind of anti-racist pioneer. The context makes clear he was nothing of the sort.
Conservatives will surely disagree with this assessment of Harlanâs dissent. So will others. Even if Harlan was no egalitarian, his words were used by generations of civil rights activists in their war against legal caste.
But the text is the text, and Harlan the sophisticated defender of white racial dominance is more consistent with his life, his views (as a younger man, he initially opposed the Reconstruction Amendments) and his jurisprudence (three years after Plessy, he would uphold a system of school segregation that taxed Black families for the exclusive benefit of white ones) than is Harlan the anti-racist.
1 Like
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1674800568328675330
This is a huge part of the best way to get broad political support to pack the court. âThe justices took luxurious gifts from a billionaire who lobbied to overturn student loan forgiveness, then overturned it, ripping $20,000 out of your pockets for a billionaire. This Court is corrupt, illegitimate, and must be packed.â
Progressives should be hammering that point and Dobbs as their main selling points for SCOTUS reform. Repeat that shit on loop for years.
goofy
July 8, 2023, 5:41pm
499
More prime jbouie, this time on how Roberts opinions talk about race without racism:
non-paywall link
In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 , which struck down race-based âtiebreakersâ in school admissions programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. âThe way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,â Roberts famously wrote, âis to stop discriminating on the basis of race.â
Last week, in his opinion for the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard , which ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Roberts echoed his earlier self with a similar assertion which I also discussed in my column on Friday: âEliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.â
Both lines encapsulate Robertsâs view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions.
One thing I noticed, reading both opinions, is that while Roberts may mention ârace,â âdiscrimination based on raceâ and âracial discrimination,â he doesnât discuss racism. In both opinions, Roberts underpins his argument with the courtâs decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
The issue here is that Brown v. Board of Education was not about states making distinctions based on race. The question before the court was whether state governments could use racial classifications to separate Black Americans from white Americans in order to deny rights to the former and extend privileges to the latter. The question, in other words, was whether racism was a legitimate state interest.
âBrown did not raise the issue of whether states could use race-conscious classifications to integrate schools,â wrote the legal scholar Joel K. Goldstein in a 2008 analysis and critique of Robertsâ opinion in Parents Involved. âWith one pertinent exception, the briefs and oral arguments focused entirely on the way in which the government then used racial classifications â to segregate and demean blacks.â
Racecraft, the Fieldses write in âRacecraft : The Soul of Inequality in America,â âtransforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.â They offer a useful and pertinent example:
Consider the statement âblack Southerners were segregated because of their skin colorââ a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke â paff â reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.
This, you might say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. Whatâs left is the mark of racism, that is, race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy â Brown v. Board of Education â becomes, in Robertsâs hands, a case about the use of race in school placement.
To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that thereâs no social force to push against â no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize.
3 Likes
goofy
July 8, 2023, 10:55pm
500
Serwer on Thomasâs bonkers affirmative action concurrence and what it exposes about the lie of âoriginalismâ:
non-paywall link
Midway through his concurrence with the Supreme Courtâs decision to strike down affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas deploys one of the most absurd and baffling arguments ever put to paper by a justice.
In order to argue that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to authorize racially specific efforts to alleviate inequality, Thomas finds himself forced to explain the existence of the Freedmenâs Bureau, which was reauthorized in 1866 by the same Congress that approved the Fourteenth Amendment. To square this circle, Thomas insists that the term freedmen was a âformally race-neutral categoryâ and a âdecidedly underinclusive proxy for race.â
âFreedmenâ cannot be a âformally race-neutral category,â because American slavery was not a formally race-neutral institution. Moreover, an extensive historical record illuminates the intentions of the lawmakers who passed the Freedmenâs Bureau Acts. They certainly did not see the term freedmen as racially neutral, and they intended the bureau to protect the rights of Black people in the South, whether formerly enslaved or not. We know this because they said so; the insistence to the contrary is the result of conservatives projecting their version of âcolor blindnessâ backwards through time.
But look, you donât have to take my word for it that freedmen was widely understood as a synonym for Black . You donât have to take Fonerâs or Westâs word for it. You can take Clarence Thomasâs word for it, because in the 2022 Bruen decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down state restrictions on gun possession, Thomas uses the terms freedmen and blacks or negroes interchangeably.
For example, Thomas writes that âin the years before the 39th Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, the Freedmenâs Bureau regularly kept it abreast of the dangers to blacks and Union men in the postbellum South.â Not âfreedmen and Union men,â but âblacks and Union men.â Thomas uses blacks here in reference to those protected by the Freedmenâs Bureau, and distinguished from the more race-neutral Union men , precisely because he understood that it did not matter to the defeated Confederates what a Black manâs prior condition of servitude was. He does the same thing in another passage cited by the New Republic legal reporter Matt Ford. Here we have the glorious alchemy of originalism in full view, where the âoriginal meaningâ of the same words in an identical context changes depending on which policy is preferred by the originalist.
The âoriginalismâ that purports to examine the Reconstruction amendments as they were seen at the time replaces the perspective of their creators with the sensibilities of the contemporary conservative movement, in which virtually any form of discrimination can be justified by a veneer of color blindness while every means to pursue equality is constitutionally suspect. Thus a president can rant publicly about wanting to ban an entire religion from American shores and have his aims sanitized by white-shoe lawyers to the majorityâs satisfaction , while race-conscious methods of fighting anti-Black discrimination are treated as the moral equivalent of a segregated water fountain.
2 Likes
