July 3, 2023
Marie: I hope you're enjoying part of a long holiday weekend today. So far, it's a slo-gnus day:
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Afternoon Update:
David Siders of Politico in Politico Magazine profiles the shrinking South Baptist Convention and the sad the group had at its convention in New Orleans. "White evangelicals are a relatively small part of the nation's overall population, about 14 percent. But they play an outsize role in the Republican Party, to which they have been fused since the days of Ronald Reagan.... The problem for the Republican Party, and for the church, is that religious affiliation has for years been fading.... The Southern Baptist Convention, still the nation's largest Protestant denomination, lost nearly half a million members last year.... Rather than moderate, the [GOP] response of MAGA diehards has been to focus on invigorating the base -- which is what members of the Southern Baptist Convention seem to be doing, too." This year the centerpiece of their convention was the banning of churches with women pastors, including megachurch Saddleback in Orange County, California.
Nick Anderson & Susan Svrluga of the Washington Post: "A civil rights group announced Monday that it has petitioned the federal government to force Harvard University to stop giving a boost to children of alumni in the admissions process, another sign of the mounting pressure on prestigious schools to change their policies following last week's Supreme Court ruling that rejected race-based affirmative action. Lawyers for Civil Rights said it filed the complaint with the Education Department, alleging that so-called legacy admissions preferences at Harvard violate federal civil rights law because they overwhelmingly benefit White applicants and disadvantage those who are of color.... About 34 percent of applicants from the United States who were children of Harvard alumni were admitted from 2009 through 2015, court records showed. That was far higher than the overall 6 percent admission rate for non-legacy applicants. Selective colleges defend legacy preferences as a legitimate way to recognize and nurture crucial ties they have with alumni. Often the alumni are donors. But the public appears to be deeply skeptical." The AP's story is here.
Israel. Isabel Kershner of the New York Times: "Israel launched its most intense airstrikes on the occupied West Bank in nearly two decades on Monday, and sent hundreds of ground troops into the narrow streets and alleys of the crowded Jenin refugee camp, saying it was trying to root out armed militants after a year of escalating violence there.... At least eight Palestinians were killed, according to the Palestinian health ministry.... The military said a drone attack struck a joint operations center used by militants of a group known as the Jenin Brigade in the refugee camp, and that Israeli forces also targeted a facility for weapons production and explosive device storage. Gunfire echoed through the camp as Israeli troops and armored vehicles went in, and the military said they had located and confiscated caches of weapons, hundreds of explosive devices and an improvised rocket launcher." A Guardian report is here.
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Alan Rappeport & Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: "Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen will travel to China on Wednesday, a high-stakes visit that is intended to help stabilize the fraught relationship between the world's two largest economies." An AP story is here.
What Applies to the Goose Does Not Apply to the Gander. Andrew Kaczynski & Abby Turner of CNN: "... Donald Trump said in 2016 that a president under indictment would 'cripple the operations of our government' and create an 'unprecedented constitutional crisis' -- years before he himself was indicted on federal charges while running for a second term as president.... 'We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial,' Trump said during a November 5, 2016, campaign rally in Reno, Nevada.... 'It would grind government to a halt.' Just days earlier, on October 28, then-FBI director James Comey publicly announced they had reopened the investigation into [Hillary] Clinton's handling of classified information.... At another rally on November 3, 2016, in Concord, North Carolina, Trump made similar comments. 'If she were to win, it would create an unprecedented Constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government,' he said. 'She is likely to be under investigation for many years, and also it will probably end up -- in my opinion -- in a criminal trial.... She has no right to be running, you know that,' Trump said.'"
Marcy Wheeler on Republicans' "fake scandals," trolling and ancillary stunts. Thanks to Patrick for the link. I admire Wheeler for how closely she examines issues, much more closely than I do, alas. For instance, I've linked dozens of stories written or co-written by the Washington Post's Devlin Barrett. But I never noticed this: "Regurgitating right wing law enforcement claims of scandal credulously is what Devlin seems to do best." (Also linked yesterday.)
Roberts Rules: Do Not Criticize the Supreme Court! Joan Biskupic of CNN: "In a highly unusual move, [Chief Justice John Roberts] took issue on Friday with dissenting colleagues and broader criticism of the court. 'It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary,' he wrote in the 6-3 student-debt relief case.... It is important that the public not be misled either. Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and the country.' Justice Elena Kagan countered with a dissent dripped with ridicule.... Roberts' approach to external concerns has been to recast them. He has suggested that public complaints arise simply from disagreement with the outcome of cases rather than doubts about the impartiality or integrity of the justices, who are appointed for life." (Also linked yesterday.)
Beyond the Beltway
Radley Balko, in a New York Times op-ed, provides a few statistics and some anecdotal evidence that crime decreases when the number/percentage of aggressive, racist white cops decreases.
North Carolina. Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: "A closely watched political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and control of elections.... In the Republican-led legislature, the State House is considering two bills passed by the Senate that would sharply alter how elections are run, adding voting restrictions and effectively neutering the state elections board, which is now controlled by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. And in a looming redistricting clash, the newly conservative State Supreme Court has ordered lawmakers to redraw the state's congressional and state legislative maps, which will most likely be far friendlier to Republicans."
Way Beyond
The Washington Post's live briefing of developments Monday in Russia's war on Ukraine is here: "About 700,000 children have been brought into Russian territory from war zones in Ukraine, a lawmaker in Russia's upper house of parliament said late Sunday. Grigory Karasin, chairman of the international committee in the Russian Federation Council, wrote on Telegram that hundreds of thousands of children had 'found refuge' in Russia in recent years. The United States and Ukraine have previously said that many children have been forcibly and illegally deported from their homes during the conflict.... About 100 nuclear specialists have left Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the mayor of the Russian-occupied town of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, told Ukrainian Radio. In recent weeks, senior Ukrainian officials have stepped up warnings that Russian forces plan to sabotage the plant, the largest such facility in Europe, The Washington Post has reported."
News Lede
Independence Day Eve in Guns America. New York Times: "A heavily armed gunman wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire in southwest Philadelphia on Monday evening, killing four people and injuring four others, the police told local media. At least two of the people shot were juveniles, but their conditions were not immediately known, the police said, adding that all of the victims were taken to the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, and that the two children were expected to be transported to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. A man wearing a ballistic vest was taken into custody by the police just before 8:40 p.m., the authorities said...."
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Reader Comments (12)
In local gnus, Chicago yesterday reversed the flow of the Chicago
River to alleviate flooding in Chicago. Instead of flowing into the
Mississippi, it is going into Lake Michigan.
Our house is in a flood plain next to Lake Michigan,
I can't swim.
My doctor forbids me to climb ladders after the last accident so
won't be able to get on the roof.
Oh well, as someone said yesterday, it can't get much worse.
@Forrest Morris: Bobby Lee wrote yesterday: "Do you ever wonder if every time someone mouths off with 'It can't possibly get any worse than this' if the forces of darkness take that as a personal challenge?"
Maybe since your situation seems to be challenging the forces of darkness, you should work out a plan to move any cherished items off the ground floor and think of finding temporary accommodations on higher ground yourselves. Or, "How bad can a few nights at the Bates Motel be?"
THE TRAGEDY OF JOHN ROBERTS:
The historian Jeff Shesol has written an excellent essay in the NYT.
"The chief justice is portrayed by some as a tragic figure, powerless to save his court from itself. But the tragedy of John Roberts is that he does have the power to restore some measure of the court’s reputation — he just hasn’t used it. He has attempted, here and there, to restrain the court’s crusaders — by siding with liberals in the Alabama voting rights case, for example, and soundly rejecting the “independent state legislature” theory — but mostly, he has suggested that their methods and conduct are above reproach. His idea of integrity, it turns out, is a brittle thing, and self-defeating. It has put the court’s reputation at greater risk; it has made the court more, not less, vulnerable to public scrutiny and to encroachment by Congress and the White House...
As their conduct has grown more unrestrained, so has the tenor of their public statements. Justice Alito’s peremptory, self-exculpatory op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in June, denying even a hint of an appearance of impropriety, was shocking — unless you happen to have caught his comments in the right-wing echo chamber. At conferences and galas, the justice unspools his grievances — against nonbelievers, same-sex marriage, the 21st century — sounding less like a jurist than “a conservative talk-radio host,” as Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court.html
I remember Robert's confirmation years ago and how he impressed congress--and me–--how sad that all that good will ended up with him in the dugout with three strikes out one too many times.
Oh Forest! So sorry for you––-but maybe it won't be as bad as you think. But heed the call to preserve your treasures and yes, a few nights at the Bates might not be too bad or on secound thought Betsy might take you in her cottage for old time's sake.
I must take issue with the characterization of John Roberts as a tragic figure. We covered this ground recently and determined, correctly, I believe, that the idea of a classic tragic figure involves a fatal flaw that brings down an otherwise virtuous or at least sympathetic character. John Roberts is a liar. Has been for decades. He’s also one of these people who declares that he can’t be racist even though he does racist things.
A little history. After Nixon lost to Kennedy, the right began what amounted to their own Stop the Steal movement. When JFK was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson came on the stage and vowed to pass Civil Rights legislation, especially the Voting Rights Act (which would ultimately be killed by none other than John Roberts).
The fear, for Republicans then, was that uppity negroes would no longer know their place and actually try (horrors!) to vote. Of course, they assumed, they wouldn’t be lining up to vote for Republicans. Something had to be done. Dirty tricks were needed.
In Arizona, a group of right-wing lawyers came together under the leadership of one of their number to create Operation Eagle Eye, a dirty tricks scheme designed for maximum voter intimidation. The plan, among other things, was to send operatives to the polls to scream at minority voters, take their pictures, threaten them with arrest if they voted, demand to see their identification, etc. all illegal, of course.
The lawyer who dreamed this up and who was seen at Arizona polls going after Democratic voters was William Rehnquist.
As a reward for his work, Nixon, who credited Operation Eagle Eye with his election in 1968, put Rehnquist on the Supreme Court. A few years later, a president who worked as the most famous recruiter for Operation Eagle Eye (referred to by Democrats as Operation Evil Eye),
Ronald Reagan, named Rehnquist Chief Justice.
A few years later, Rehnquist’s clerk, John Roberts, known to be highly antagonistic to any government help or support for minorities, was named Chief Justice.
Don’t be fooled. The Alabama ruling and the North Carolina legislature scheme ruling don’t make Roberts a good guy. He plays the long game. Just as he said about the Voting Rights Act, we don’t need this anymore, he used the same “logic” when sticking the knife into affirmative action.
Roberts’ actions in killing the Voting Rights Act was met with a scathing response by RBG, who said “…throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
Roberts never gets wet. He doesn’t care who does, in fact, it’s been his long standing goal to make sure that the people his predecessors tried to screw with Operation Eagle Eye get wet and stay wet.
And he’s not a tragic figure.
He is, and always has been, a scheming racist asshole and ideologue. He might not be the obvious crook that Alito and Thomas are, but it’s that phony veneer of “moderation” that makes him much more dangerous.
I heard some reporter from Politico after the Alabama ruling mention that the lawyers in that case were incompetent and the Supremes couldn't work with the pathetic arguments they brought to the court. If they had put in a little effort to give Republicans on the bench some cover they probably would have gotten their way.
RAS,
You mean the “Cuz we say so” ploy didn’t fly? That almost always stands as the pinnacle of right-wing legal argumentation.
Akhilleus,
I think the Supremes were just angry that Alabama thought they could make them do all the work and phone in the case. Didn't show them the proper respect. And with all the attention being paid to the court right now they probably felt they needed to have a minimum of legal arguments to appease the media. Not that that is ever a difficult hurdle to climb. Plus they don't want to set the precedent of the crazies thinking that they will rubber stamp every half bake case they bring. Also their patrons need incentives to keep the trips and gifts coming for their desired outcomes. And there is no risk of Alabama going blue in the distant future and they can always change their mind on any of the dozen similar cases coming in the future.
AK: Shesol does not say Roberts himself is a tragic figure but what he has/has not done to the S. C. IS tragic. We could say the same about Trump who is NOT a tragic figure but what he has done to this country is indeed tragic.
@P.D.Pepe: The headline for the piece is "The Tragedy of John Roberts." It is not likely that Shesol wrote the headline, but the Times may have asked him if the headline was all right. Shesol writes, "... the tragedy of John Roberts is that he does have the power to restore some measure of the court’s reputation — he just hasn’t used it." I take your point, I think you're right, but it is hard to parse.
If a document can be tragic, then the U.S. Constitution is one. A minority of Americans voted for the presidents* who appointed Roberts as well as Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh & Barrett. I haven't done the arithmetic, but it's very likely that a minority of Americans voted for the senators who confirmed all or some of these miscreants. That is, the Constitution has imposed a system of government that rewards the minority with control of the majority. This is no accident.
This was the intent of many of the vaunted Founders who demanded this construction. Their success has been remarkable: their reason, at least in many cases, for demanding minority rule was to keep enslaved people "in their place." And that is precisely what rulings like the affirmative action decision and Roberts' infamous voting rights ruling did. This was the country's original sin, and the post-Civil War amendments did not wipe it out. This Court is extending and now expanding it.
Marie,
Yes, there was the slavery element, which certainly played a large role in our Constitution's construction, but there was more than protecting slavery in play as it was cobbled together.
Many of the Founders had a deep distrust of democracy and the rabble they feared too direct a democracy would reward. The the French Revolution occurred at roughly the same time and began to play out before the Bill of Rights was adopted only confirmed some of the Founders' conservative tendencies.
The sources of the tension between the John Adams Federalists and Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans (now there's a name to confuse us) political leanings were more than symbolic.
Today's conservatives still don't like democracy, especially since they can't win an election without cheating. That's why they keep saying we're not a democracy; we're a Republic.
PD,
It is indeed. And on this anniversary of Independence Day, the traitors to that event wish to saddle us once again with an evil king who answers to no one and nothing but his own vicious whims.