;)
June 26, 2022
Afternoon Update:
Alan Feuer of the New York Times: "One week before scores of Proud Boys helped lead a pro-Trump mob in a violent assault on the Capitol last year, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the group, and some of his top lieutenants held a foul-mouthed video conference with a handpicked crew of members.... The team of several dozen trusted members was intended, Mr. Tarrio told his men, to bring a level of order and professionalism to the group's upcoming march in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that had, by his own account, been missing at earlier Proud Boys rallies in the city. Over nearly two hours, Mr. Tarrio and his leadership team -- many of whom have since been charged with seditious conspiracy -- gave the new recruits a series of directives: Adopt a defensive posture on Jan. 6, they were told. Keep the 'normies' -- or the normal protesters -- away from the Proud Boys' marching ranks. And obey police lines.... There was one overriding problem with the orders: None of them were actually followed when the Proud Boys stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Far from holding back, members of the far-right group played aggressive roles in several breaches at the Capitol, moving in coordination and often taking the lead in removing police barricades.... Lawyers for the Proud Boys say the recorded meeting is a key piece of exculpatory evidence...."
Stuart Thompson of the New York Times: "After more than a year of silence, the mysterious figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory has reappeared. The figure, who is known only as Q, posted for the first time in over a year on Friday on 8kun, the anonymous message board where the account last appeared. 'Shall we play the game again?' a post read in the account's typical cryptic style. The account that posted had a unique identifier used on previous Q posts. The posts ... signaled the ominous return of a figure whose conspiracy theories about an imaginary ring of elite sex traffickers marshaled support for ... Donald J. Trump. Message boards and Telegram channels devoted to QAnon lit up with the news, as followers speculated about the meaning of Q's return."
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Six Privileged Bigots Complicated/Ruined the Lives of American Women. Quoctrung Bui, et al., of the New York Times: "At the start of the month, nearly all women in America lived within a few hours' drive of an abortion clinic. But with Roe v. Wade overturned, and the constitutional right to an abortion ended, clinics are quickly closing in huge swaths of the country. Now a new set of political fights will begin, playing out in state legislatures and courthouses across America. By the time they are done, a quarter of U.S. women of reproductive age could have to travel more than 200 miles to obtain a legal abortion. Under the farthest-reaching scenarios, that number could rise to nearly half. The longer the distance to the nearest clinic, the fewer women make the trip, research has shown.... Abortion may also become harder to obtain even in states where it remains legal, because clinics may be overwhelmed with out-of-state patients." Includes maps....
Caroline Kitchener of the Washington Post: "On the heels of their greatest victory, antiabortion activists are eager to capitalize on their momentum by enshrining constitutional abortion bans, pushing Congress to pass a national prohibition, blocking abortion pills, and limiting people's ability to get abortions across state lines. At the National Association of Christian Lawmakers conference in Branson, Mo., on Friday several dozen state legislators from across the country brainstormed ideas -- all in agreement that their wildly successful movement would not end with Roe v. Wade.... Former vice president Mike Pence and other GOP leaders have called for a national ban."
Karin Bruillard of the Washington Post: "In interviews, many Americans described alarm that a nation proud of its hard-won expansion of protections for people never acknowledged by its White, male founders had begun to feel more like an unfamiliar land where established rights may melt away in its highest court.... 'It's like we've woken up in the 1950s,' said Madison David, 26..., of Madison, Wis.... The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., rested on the view that the individual liberties guaranteed by the 14th Amendment protect only rights that had 'deep roots' in states when it was ratified in 1868 - a time when abortion was prohibited in many states.... [Clarence] Thomas said precedents establishing rights to contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex intimacy should be reconsidered. And the dissenting opinion, penned by the court's three liberals..., wrote [that those other rights], are 'all part of the same constitutional fabric,' noting that 19th century laws also did not protect the Supreme Court-recognized rights to interracial marriage or to not be sterilized without consent."
Silvia Foster-Frau of the Washington Post: "The Supreme Court's ruling overturning a constitutional right to abortion sent fear through the LGBTQ community Friday, after the release of the decision set out potential targets: Supreme Court cases legalizing same-sex intimacy and marriage.... 'In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell,' [Clarence] Thomas said in his concurring opinion. 'We have a duty to "correct the error" established in those precedents.'... In the abortion ruling, Justice Samuel Alito argued any rights that are 'unenumerated' -- or not laid out --- in the Constitution can't be recognized as a fundamental right in the country unless they are 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition.'"; Read through. Heartbreaking.
Jonathan Weisman & Jasmine Ulloa of the New York Times: "Even as leaders of conservative advocacy groups celebrated a landmark victory on Friday [-- the Supreme Court's overturning Roe v. Wade --] decades in the making, they said that they were already gearing up for the next phase of the battle in statehouses and state Supreme Courts. Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws designed to effectively ban abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.... In many states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia and Florida, abortion's new battleground is decidedly unlevel, tilted by years of Republican efforts to gerrymander state legislatures while Democrats largely focused on federal politics. As abortion becomes illegal in half of the country, democratic self-governance may be nearly out of reach for some voters. By neutralizing federal rights and powers, the Supreme Court is turning states into battle zones. That goes beyond abortion and includes voting, immigration and civil rights. And if, as expected, the court restricts the federal government's ability to regulate carbon dioxide, state governments, stepping in for a gridlocked Congress, will be left to address climate change as well." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Do you know who your state legislators are? I don't. ~~~
~~~ What the Supremes are laying out, if Weisman & Ulloa's assessment is correct, is a sort of slow-rolling secession, a "revolution" where in most matters, states are not subject to federal law. As the extremist, right-wing Supreme Court and nincompoor-dominated state legislatures take over governance of the country, the nation as a whole is only going to slip further & further into third-world territory. I predict that one of those ways the country will become an unstable mess, is that it will descend into relative lawlessness. Not just criminals, but ordinary people, will simply decide that laws passed by bigots & nitwits are not worth obeying. People are just not going to accept abiding by laws stuck in the 1860s. Meanwhile, the name of our country -- United States -- has become cemented as a cruel irony.
Sam Alito Always Resented You Sexy Ladies. Charlie Savage of the New York Times: In, 1985, "In a memo offering advice on two pending cases that challenged state laws regulating abortion, [Samuel] Alito[, then a DoJ lawyer,] advocated focusing on [an] ... incremental argument [to address Roe]: The court should uphold the regulations as reasonable. That strategy would 'advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects.'... Later that year, Mr. Alito ... [wrote,] 'I personally believe very strongly ... [that] the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.'... More than three decades later, Justice Alito has fulfilled that vision, cementing his place in history as the author of a consequential ruling overturning Roe, along with a 1992 precedent that reaffirmed that decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.... He slowly and patiently sought to chip away at abortion rights throughout his career before demolishing them in the majority opinion on Friday."
... the current majority's approach is itself a kind of undead constitutionalism -- one in which the dictates of the Constitution retrospectively shift with whatever Fox News happens to be furious about. -- Adam Serwer of the Atlantic ~~~
~~~ Scott Lemieux in LG&$: "Judges -- much less their clerks -- are not historians and have no ability to do real history. But they are capable of finding enough historical factoids to adorn every assertion that the Constitution enacted Mr. Tucker Carlson's most recent opening monologue. That's the only 'grand theory' of constitutional interpretation you need be aware of."
~~~ Marie: Yeah, and how about setting their salaries at $1/year?
Max Boot of the Washington Post: The founders were worried about the tyranny of the majority, but they also were concerned about the tyranny of the minority. "In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton warned that giving small states like Rhode Island or Delaware 'equal weight in the scale of power' with large states like 'Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York' violated the precepts of 'justice' and 'common-sense.' Hamilton's nightmare has become the reality of 21st-century America. We are living under minoritarian tyranny, with smaller states imposing their views on the larger through their disproportionate sway in the Senate and the electoral college -- and therefore on the Supreme Court.... Twenty-one states with fewer total people than California have 42 Senate seats.... It is hard for any disinterested observer to have any faith in what the right-wing justices are doing.... ~~~
"Conservatives can plausibly argue that liberal justices invented a constitutional right to abortion, but how is that different from what conservative justices have done in inventing an individual right to carry guns that is also nowhere to be found in the Constitution? The Supreme Court did not recognize an individual right to bear arms until 2008 -- 217 years after the Second Amendment was enacted expressly to protect 'well-regulated' state militia.... The majority conveniently favors state's rights on abortion but not on guns. It is obvious that the conservative justices ... are simply enacting their personal preferences, just as liberal justices ... do."~~~
~~~ Marie: Boot is a conservative. So what he doesn't write about is the essential difference between liberal & confederate prejudice: generally, the Court's liberals (and that has included some appointed by Republican presidents) lean toward expanding human rights and increasing public safety; i.e., providing that potential victims of violence can instead enjoy the Declaration's "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Court's right-wing extremists favor making life easier for mass murderers (mostly, but not exclusively, white guys) and making it harder for women, minorities & the poor.
David Savage of the New York Times: President "Biden returns to Europe on Saturday night at a moment when everything about the war [in Ukraine] is [difficult]. While Russia's oil exports have fallen precipitously, its revenues have actually been on the rise, a function of soaring fuel prices. After concentrating its efforts in Ukraine's south and east, Russia is making incremental but significant gains, as the Ukrainians, surrounded, begin to give up key cities: first Mariupol, and now, in the east, Sievierodonetsk. So Mr. Biden must prepare his allies for a grinding conflict -- a return to the 'long, twilight struggle' that President John F. Kennedy talked about during the Cold War -- amid shocks in the food and energy markets, and inflation on a scale few imagined six months ago. Not surprisingly, a few cracks are already emerging, as popular discontent, and coming elections, begin to worry allied leaders." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Donald Judd of CNN: "President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law the first major federal gun safety legislation passed in decades, marking a significant bipartisan breakthrough on one of the most contentious policy issues in Washington.... In his remarks Saturday, the President announced he'd host members of Congress who supported the landmark gun safety legislation at a White House event on July 11, following his return from Europe, to celebrate the new law with the families of gun violence victims. The package represents the most significant new federal legislation to address gun violence since the expired 10-year assault weapons ban of 1994 -- though it fails to ban any weapons and falls far short of what Biden and his party had advocated for, and polls show most Americans want to see." A New York Times report is here. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
Natasha Korecki of NBC News: "U.S. Rep. Mary Miller [R-Ill.] immediately drew fierce backlash on social media and elsewhere at a Saturday night rally with ... Donald Trump when she credited him for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade calling it a 'victory for white life.'... [The crowd cheered.] 'You can clearly see she is reading off a piece of paper, she meant to say "right to life,"' Miller spokesman Isaiah Wartman said.... The statement unleashed a forceful rebuke on social media, likening Miller to a white supremacist and recalling her quoting Adolf Hitler on Jan. 6, 2021 -- the day a mob broke into the nation's Capitol. She later apologized.... The Trump rally drew thousands of people on Saturday...." MB: Sorry, Mary You're-So-White, you can pretend you're Elmer Fudd & pronounce your Rs as Ws, but a reasonable person would call that a Freudian slip.
Ryan Goodman, Norman Eisen & Barbara McQuade in a Washington Post op-ed: "For a number of the possible crimes the [January 6] committee has identified, it doesn't matter what Trump believed about the election. Focusing on that aspect misses the true test of criminal intent. He still had no legal right to use forged electoral certificates or to pressure election officials in Georgia to 'find 11,780 votes' that did not exist, or to engage in other extralegal means to try t hold onto power. That includes pressuring the vice president to assume powers he didn't have. State and federal criminal laws prohibit these things. Vigilante justice is against the law, even if you (wrongly) believe you are a victim." MB: IOW, if you believe "I wuz robbed," or even if you really wuz robbed, you cannot commit or participate in illegal acts to get what you think is a fair & just outcome.
Way Beyond the Beltway
Ukraine, et al. The Washington Post's live updates of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky remained defiant in the face of what military analysts called an 'abnormally large' barrage of nearly 50 Russian missile strikes across Ukraine on Saturday.... Moscow is closing in on the city of Lysychansk, on the bank of the Donets River opposite the strategically important city of Severodonetsk, which Russia captured last week in one of its biggest wins since it launched its offensive in Donbas nearly three months ago. If Lysychansk falls, it would give Russia almost complete control of the eastern Luhansk region."
Jim Tankersley of the New York Times: "The United States and other Group of 7 countries >will ban imports of gold from Russia, seeking to undercut a key source of revenue for Moscow as it wages war in Ukraine, President Biden said on Sunday as G7 leaders gathered in the Bavarian Alps.... A senior administration official told reporters that the move would be formally announced on Tuesday, and that it would help to further isolate Russia from the international financial system."
Norway. Henrik Libell & Mike Ives of the New York Times: "A 10-day Pride festival in Norway was cut short on Saturday after an early-morning shooting left two people dead and at least 10 others seriously wounded outside a popular gay club in downtown Oslo. The police are investigating the attack as an act of terrorism. The shooting, on a warm summer night that saw streets filled with revelers, came hours before Oslo was set to host big crowds for its first Pride parade since 2019. The event's organizers canceled the parade and the rest of the festival, which was to run through Monday, at the suggestion of the police." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
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Reader Comments (12)
The Traitors have proven to be incredibly well organized and relentless in shoving their ideology down our throats, and similarly indefatigable when it comes to knee capping democracy.
Democrats, as usual, are disorganized and only intermittently assiduous about pursuing their goals.
But we now have an excellent chance to strike back at the liars, cheats, begrudgers, traitors, and theocrats. If this latest series of power grabs and dangerous policy implications doesn’t arouse voter ire and send millions to the polls who normally stay home while complaining “Why bother? Both parties are the same”, then we deserve what we get. Well, maybe not deserve, but we’ll get it anyway and then some.
Right now, today, rather than making speeches about how awful things are, congressional Democrats need to put forward a bill to federally legalize abortion. Then force these motherfuckers (for once, a very accurate term) to vote against it. THEN beat them over the head with that vote, all the way to the midterms, shouting on a daily basis that more rights—Americans’ rights— are being readied for a confederate chopping block.
Make these assholes put their fingerprints on this atrocity. Otherwise they can weasel out by telling independent voters that they did nothing, it was all the doing of the Supreme Court, so pretty please, send us back to Washington to stop that mean Joe Biden from going full socialist and raising a gallon of gas higher than a $10 lottery ticket.
Time to make these bastards own this shit, and pay through the nose.
Acta, non verba.
Yesterday, I had the bright idea that the feds should set up abortion clinics in military facilities around the country & I asked for comment. RAS quickly pointed out that this wasn't my bright idea; rather, Elie Mystal had expressed something similar on MSNBC earlier in the day. And Patrick pointed out that my bright idea would come up hard against the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits using federal moneys to fund abortions. Okay then.
But I'm not quite giving up. What Mystal proposed was to put the federal abortion clinics not in military facilities but in "federal buildings," which he said could get around the Hyde Amendment. I'm not sure why that is, or if he's right, but Mystal specializes in covering the judiciary, so I don't doubt he knows a lot more about the subject than I do.
Another thing Patrick pointed out was that many military facilities already have very fine medical units & hospitals, including maternity wards.* Besides, it seems to me that having armed soldiers at the gate might help protect women from anti-abortion protesters.
Patrick is right about the Hyde Amendment. But it isn't set in stone, despite the fact that it's been renewed -- in one form or another -- every year since 1976 and despite the fact that in 2017 Paul Ryan tried & failed to enact it into law. Rather, the amendment is attached every year to applicable spending bills. Well, every year till 2021. That year, Biden did not include reference to the Hyde Amendment in his proposed budget/wish list. And the House passed a spending bill that eliminated the Hyde Amendment. Democrats in the Senate tried that, too, but Republicans insisted the Hyde Amendment be restored, and it was. I had sort of thought the Hyde Amendment had been "repealed," but no, it's still there. Till the end of September of this year, when the fiscal year ends.
So here's the thing: if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema & any other recalcitrant senators could be persuaded to get on the bandwagon, the Hyde Amendment could be eliminated in the upcoming budget. Since we're talking about appropriations bills, the 60-vote threshold does not apply. Eliminating the Hyde Amendment takes only 51 Senate votes (including the veep's). Of course a Hyde-free bill would have to pass the House, too. I'm making this sound A LOT easier than it would be in actuality, but from here it does not look entirely impossible.
*I myself was born in a military maternity hospital at MacDill Field, Tampa, during WWII. This became a point of embarrassment for me when I was in junior high school and I casually mentioned, as part of some conversation, that I was born at MacDill Field. A girl I'll call Linda was appalled, and some weeks later I learned that she was telling everyone that my people were so poor that my mother gave birth out in a field. I confronted Linda to set her straight, but by then, the damage was done, and I felt humiliated. (Good thing I didn't tell Linda I probably was born in a Quonset hut, or she'd have told everyone my family lived in a mud hut with a dirt floor.) It wasn't till several years later I developed the stomach for ignoring dimwitted criticism or at least belittling the people who smacked me down. And a few years after that, as I recall, Linda failed to graduate with our high school class because she was pregnant, speaking of someone who might have benefited from an abortion had they been legal at the time.
Once again the preacher and his Sunday Sermon have been overtaken by events.
After Friday's news, his latest expression of righteous indignation seems mildl and off the mark.
Nonetheless here it is:
"From the beginning of his presidency, accounts of Trump’s lies and corruption were so common that amid recent revelations about this twice-impeached president’s attempt to cast the Constitution aside and become President for Life, his venality no longer raises eyebrows.
After four years of Trump, no wonder the nation wanted a return to the kind of “normal” that Biden promised but has found so hard to achieve.
There’s a massive war in Ukraine. Soaring world-wide inflation. Gas prices at record highs. And always lurking in the wings, the continuing fossil-fuel-induced climate crisis that is emptying the Colorado River, while it floods Yellowstone Park.
And still the grift hasn’t stopped. Trump’s up to his old tricks, continuing to promote the stolen election lie that has already fattened his PAC by over $250 million (news.yahoo.com).
But it’s not just Trump. Over the years, grift has become the new Republican normal. Along with their pretense to economic expertise, Republicans also run a continuing bait and switch operation.
When campaigning, Republicans bait the public with promises to solve real problems, but after winning, they do little but lower taxes on the wealthy, dismantle workplace and environmental regulations that get in the way of corporate profit, and ignore the problems they promised to fix.
The Republican economic long con is more subtle but equally deadly. It consists of waving their arms and talking about the magic of “market forces,” as if markets were somehow independent of human behavior.
Skyrocketing gasoline prices are a matter of supply and demand, they say, but oil companies and cartels control the supply. They decide how much crude to pump, how much to refine, how much to charge and how much to profit. Right now, that’s a lot.
The grifters and their marks: It’s a marriage made in Republican Heaven."
Not related to Friday's news, but the preacher will be out of the country and off the net for the next week, most of those days away I'm sure still shaking his head at the sad country he left behind...
Keep well, All.
Marie wrote:
"People are just not going to accept abiding by laws stuck in the 1860s."
And a corollary to that spread of lawlessness, from disrespect for the law, is that law enforcers (cops, regulators, prosecutors, justices of the peace, judges) would tend to enforce laws selectively, and tend to ignore those for which they can be easily bribed. Why risk your health and career with the strenuous business of impartial law enforcement if you can avoid harm and make money by taking a few bucks to look the other way?
Corruption becomes endemic. And that is not the country we used to live in.
If you consider an abortion to be a standard medical procedure, which it is if you don't think a a clump of cells is a "person" prior to viability, how can any state outlaw the procedure based on what people thought or knew in 1868? (Alito's 14th amendment "established rights" concept)
Nevertheless, whether or not there is a person there, the supremes say that states can prohibit such a medical procedure.
Logically, since defibrillators didn't exist in 1868, states can also decide to save money by prohibiting state-funded emergency medical teams and ERs to use defibrillators on public-charge heart attack cases.
This 1868 watershed is going to have many interesting court cases. Trial lawyers and ambulance chasers are salivating.
Lawrence Tribe accused the tribe of S.C.'s evil jesters of cherry picking his quotes and then proceeded to take them to task, unmasking their true colors:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/laurence-tribe-samuel-alito-supreme-court-roe_n_62b79da2e4b04a61736b4b14
M.B. I can see where you get your pee and vinegar ––we keep having to fight off Lindas in our lifetime.
Ken: I wish you well on your travels––breathe deeply if you can and come back to us safe and as sound as this life of late will let you be.
Congress needs to think seriously of impeaching Thomas and throw in Alito for good measure and then start planning for cleaning up the court with different rules like no more lifetime appointments. And as I propose this I laugh out loud–––pie in the sky, I say to myself––another botched notch in the old belt.
One more for the road:
Cribbed from a WAPO commenter. Sorry, don't remember the author's name:
"Unborn children makes no more sense than dead old folks.."
Unless, perhaps, one is referring to some old men on the zombie SCOTUS.
But more babies will mean more gun sales when they grow up
which will lead to more mass shootings and more thoughts and
prayers. Is that what the christianistas are counting on?
(Sarcasm) Or not? I don't know at this point.
@KW: Or the old folks in Congress, both houses and both parties, that we the people keep electing because they "have experience and know what they're doing". As if that is a recommendation.
I hope that in states that ban abortions, many women can still get them the way they did when I was growing up in the 1950s and abortions were illegal. If my lower-middle-class neighborhood was any indication, abortions were quite common and they were done in a doctor's office.
I can recall several occasions when the ladies came to tea & gossiped about a neighbor who had gone to the doctor for a D&C (dilation & curettage). My observations suggest these "procedures" were gossip-worthy but did not rise to the level of disapproval. After all, some of the ladies at the table -- all of whom were married -- would soon enough be requiring their own D&Cs.
I now get what Elie Mystal was suggesting. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on the teevee this morning and she said members of the House would ask President Biden to open federal lands in red states where abortion clinics could operate. That is, the government would not be running the clinics, but private abortion providers would. That could work. And it could work quite quickly.
Another scary thought, because there aren't enough right now, is what will the conservative judges on the lower courts think they can get away with now that they know they have enough allies at the Supreme Court. Many lower courts have ignored the Constitution for years, but now with a majority on the Court that does not care about precedent and only about the results we may see more rulings that are solely based on these unqualified judges' fever dreams or the highest bidders' desired outcome.