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thebreakfastgenie · 1 year

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Some man on twitter took the opportunity of someone literally celebrating Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 90th birthday to push the "Ginsburg should have retired and this is her/Democrats' fault" line and unfortunately I have some time on my hands so you're getting this rant from me again.

First and foremost, putting the blame on a dead woman when there is a living man who is more directly responsible for losing control of the Supreme Court is profoundly stupid and while I doubt it's consciously misogynistic it does reflect a society that holds women responsible for everything.

I don't know how many times I can say this, but we didn't lose the court in 2020, we lost it in 2018 when Anthony Kennedy retired and Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed. A 6-3 conservative majority is certainly worse, but the Dobbs decision, for example, would have been the same.

You don't get to blame Democrats or Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the fact that you dismissed the importance of the Supreme Court in 2016. Whatever you think should have been done in 2014, you knew what the reality was in 2016. There was already an open seat on the Supreme Court during that election.

If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, Antonin Scalia would have been replaced by a liberal justice, likely Merrick Garland, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have been replaced by another liberal justice. Anthony Kennedy would either have remained in his seat or been replaced by a moderate or liberal justice. The tentative 5-4 liberal majority we had prior to 2016 would have become a tentative 6-3 majority with a solid 5 liberal votes. This Supreme Court would not have overturned Roe and would not be threatening policies like student loan forgiveness and affirmative action. That is the court we would have if 50,000 people in three states had voted for Hillary Clinton.

Instead, Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court Justices and there is a solid 6-3 conservative majority that will continue handing down horrible decisions that are nakedly political and barely even bother with constitutional justification. At the moment we're basically waiting for a couple of them to die and hoping there is a Democratic president and senate when it happens.

I think the position that Ginsburg should have retired in 2014 is heavily influenced by hindsight, but even accepting that it was a good idea, it's not as simple as people who began believing it in 2020 make it sound. First of all, I cite 2014 because Democrats lost control of the senate that year. This argument relies on Democrats seeing that loss coming. Even if they could do that, Democrats did not have filibuster-proof majority in the senate in 2014. At the time, senate rules required such a majority for supreme court confirmations. Harry Reid had only recently changed the rules to allow all other federal judicial nominations to be confirmed with a simple majority.

It's easy to forget now, but the level of Republican obstructionism during the Obama administration was unexpected. The rule change came about because there were so many judicial vacancies. Unfortunately, not all of them were filled even after the rule change, which allowed a number of Republican appointments during the Trump administration. I didn't have a position on senate rules in 2012-14 because I was in high school, but my position now is that I support ending the filibuster.

I think it's very clear that Republicans will simply change the rules to benefit themselves anyway the second they have power, so Democrats are not gaining anything by preserving the filibuster. However, I reached this position with the benefit of having observed Mitch McConnell's actions as Majority Leader between 2015 and 2019. Democrats in 2012-14 did not have that benefit. I don't know how predictable this Republican behavior was, but it's certainly not the same as having observed something that already happened. If Mitch McConnell had not already changed the rule for Supreme Court confirmations in 2017 in order to confirm Neil Gorsuch, I would have urged Democrats to do it in order to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson. But I don't know if it's fair to expect Democrats to have done so in 2014.

It's also worth remembering that the open politicization of the Supreme Court is fairly recent. It's been obviously political at least since the 1980s, but for quite a long time both parties kept up a pretense that it wasn't. It's easy to see why Democrats might not have expected Republicans to keep a seat open for an entire year rather than even give a Democratic nominee a hearing.

I think "in hindsight, things would be better if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had retired in 2014 and Harry Reid had changed the senate rules so Democrats could confirm a replacement" is a reasonable take. But it's academic. There's no point in assigning blame. And Democrats clearly did learn from this, because Stephen Breyer retired and was replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson.

And, once again, whatever you think should have happened in 2014, we all went into 2016 knowing exactly what did and did not happen. Few people were saying Ginsburg should have retired at that time, and even those who were would not have been justified in not voting for Hillary Clinton, or discouraging others from supporting her, or downplaying the importance of the Supreme Court.

#the way i feel about scotus is so weird like #if any of the people i spent 2016 begging to care about the supreme court came to me like i'm sorry you were right #i don't think i would feel anything??#like tell me something i don't know!!#and yet it DOES bother me when i see takes like this on twitter #like you STILL refuse to accept responsibility and will blame literally anyone else huh?#i'm just angry that i'm living under the thumb of an unchecked right wing extremist court and it didn't have to happen #it's turned me into a person who cheers when an old man falls down and breaks his ribs #and openly hopes for several other old men to die

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eretzyisrael · 1 month

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by Stacey Matthews

Teaching about the Holocaust should be a non-negotiable thing in the public education system, not just because it’s important to learn history for history’s sake, but also because students need to learn from the past, which hopefully will ensure the horrible parts of it never happen again.

While Holocaust history is indeed taught in the Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) system, Cooper Middle School has given parents of students the option to opt them out of attending a presentation to be made by a Holocaust survivor on Monday, March 18th on grounds that “We understand that all students have different experiences.”

Adele Scalia, a former attorney who is the wife of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s son, Christopher, posted on Twitter Thursday about an email she received from their son’s school regarding the upcoming presentation:

Fairfax County Public School System Provides ‘Opt-Out’ Option for Students on Holocaust Presentation

“A Holocaust survivor is coming to speak to my son’s 7th grade History class on Monday. Wonderful. What’s less than wonderful, though, is the opt-out for this lesson because ‘We understand that all students have different experiences.'”

Posted by Stacey Matthews Saturday, March 16, 2024 at 06:00pm 33 Comments

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Incredibly, when contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the FCPS issued the following statement claiming it was actually done so Jewish students who might have felt uncomfortable sitting through the presentation didn’t have to:

“Some Jewish students have previously expressed discomfort while engaging in dialogue around this visit. For that reason, school leadership makes every effort to partner with families of these students, who are 12 and 13 years old, to keep them informed,” the statement read. “This opt-out allows the family the opportunity to make the best informed decision on behalf of their student.”

That is, however, hard to believe considering not only Fairfax County’s notorious woke history but also because it has become a “hotbed of Muslim extremism” according to The Daily Wire:

Fairfax County contains a hotbed of Muslim extremism. A mosque there, attended by several 9/11 hijackers as well as the Fort Hood terrorist, was presided over by the father of Abrar Omeish, who until this year was a member of the Fairfax County school board. Omeish voted against an FCPS resolution offering a moment of silence for victims of 9/11 and another for victims of October’s Hamas attacks on Israel, said the decisive World War II victor at Iwo Jima was “unfortunate,” and gave a graduation speech encouraging students to “remember your jihad” and reject capitalism. Jennifer Katz, a founding member of United Against Anti-Semitism and a Jewish parent of two FCPS students, told The Daily Wire that hearing from a Holocaust survivor is supposed to be emotionally difficult, and is part of gaining a full understanding of the tragedy.

#holocaust #holocaust education #opt out #fairfax county #fairfax county virginia

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anamericangirl · 6 months

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You are right.

Even the greatest monsters of history were innocent children full of potential once. Sometimes, when a person dies, you mourn who they were. Other times, you mourn who they should have been if they hadn't chosen to become someone we're all better off without. Just because someone has to go doesn't mean it doesn't diminish us all for them to die. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

And anyway, let's not kid ourselves: in most cases, we're not talking about cheering when a Hitler or a Bin Laden dies. Rejoicing because a politician or a talking head who said some things you didn't like is dead is just ghoulish, full stop.

Exactly. I don't rejoice in the death of anyone but some people can't seem to differentiate being glad a person has died and feeling relief that the evil is over.

They all want to pretend we're talking about Hitler, Bin Laden or Stalin and not the actual present people. Like the actual people who recently died and people are celebrating.

It's a problem on the left and the right. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dianne Feinstein, even Queen Elizabeth, died the right was awful about it and the left was repugnant when Antonin Scalia died and I'm always seeing people talk about how much they want Kissinger to die so those are the people they're dancing on the graves on when they pretend they're morally superior and only celebrating the deaths of Hitler and Bin Laden.

It's perfectly possible to dislike a person and acknowledge the things they do are bad without wanting them dead and frankly you're no better than the person you hate when you celebrate death.

When you allow yourself to engage in the behavior of celebrating death with the justification of "well, they were bad" it's going to pervert your brain and you will let yourself celebrate the death of anyone you want for any bad thing you can find, which is what happened in the case of someone rejoicing in the death of Matthew Perry because he didn't like a joke he made.

#anon #answered

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madtomedgar · 11 months

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so there's a post going around about how if we were in the succession universe we would all be reblogging the video of roman's breakdown to make fun of him and like...

a) yeah, that would go viral like that and

b) i think that that's bad, actually, and part of the point of that scene, maybe.

So like... I love laughing at evil people experiencing consequences for being evil. Generally I also find random minor misfortunes befalling them funny. But there are a lot of things the internet seems to treat as like... funny or cause for celebration that I don't get. Like. I don't see how someone who is evil dying of old age in their bed surrounded by family is cause for celebration because I don't want that for them! I want them to get hit by a bus! I want them to die young so they can't spend decades destroying other people's lives! It is obscene to me that Antonin Scalia lived so long, while so many Gay people died so young. It is obscene to me that Ronald Reagan got to see 85 and Kieth Harring did not. The older they are the angrier I get because how dare they get so much life, and so many chances to destroy, at the expense of others. So like. Ok sure crab rave when the nasty octogenarian dies but like... we do understand that that's hollow, yeah? We understand that that isn't cosmic justice, right?

And also, I am pretty uncomfortable laughing at people who are evil for normal human things, like crying at their dad's funeral. Or being old. Or having caner. And I think like... yeah ok. Sympathy for the devil etc, Alinsky would roll his eyes so hard because the only important thing is winning and to win you have to take advantage of any weakness in your enemy, and when it's your communists they're glorious freedom fighters but if it's your enemy's communists then they're the end of civilization, BUT.

If one accepts that prefiguring is part of the work of creating the world we want to live in, and if the world we want to live in is one where we have rejected the conservative notion that it is not shameful to have a body that behaves like a body, or to experience and express emotions that have been deemed "weak" by reactionary and conservative philosophies, and if we actually believe all of that stuff about fascists etc being human as we all are, and not inhuman monsters, then...

Idk maybe part of it is that we aren't the kind of people who would mock you for crying because your dad died? Because sometimes the most life-changing thing you can say to a person is actually "I'm so sorry, that shouldn't have happened to you. That must hurt a lot." And like... do I think that "we should just be nice to them"? No, of course not. Is this maybe me just being annoyingly autistic about wanting people to be punished for the things they've actually done in a way that makes sense? Probably. Do I actually think it would have any impact on the Roman Roys of the world if the left responded with sudden sympathy to the video of him breaking down at the funeral, or would make him reconsider anything or change his actions? No.

But it's kind of like how you don't respond to the person who made the bigoted conspiracy theorist post debunking them because you think it will change their mind, but because it might make someone in their audience, or someone on the fence, stop and think and change their mind.

Like. And this is actually how whacko xtian "it's not a cult if it's christianity in america" cults get a lot of people, is they find them when they're vulnerable (like, grieving a loved one) and are just. So so so so so kind and sweet and comforting and supportive, while other people in that person's life are not. And so even though the person doesn't agree with them ideologically, they start going to them because they offer something on a human level that they need, and eventually the whacko beliefs become mandatory for maintaining relationships that person is now invested in and needs.

So like. I think what I'm saying is that while sure, mocking or not mocking Meghan McCain will have no effect on her politics either way, and mocking or not mocking the royals for being old will have no effect on them either, it will have an effect both on other people who agree with you and aren't evil, and an effect on conservatives who aren't famous but who also aren't entirely a lost cause as human beings.

Because it's hard to maintain the necessary cognitive dissonance of "it's funny when they cry because their dad died because they're evil and don't deserve sympathy, but when I cry because my dad died I do deserve sympathy and it's not funny because I'm not evil" when you're fucked up because your dad died. So like... are you actually going to feel good going to people you regularly see mocking people crying for good reason (not people crying because they experienced a consequence. your family dying isn't a consequence, it's an awful universal human experience) with your own pain? It's worth asking.

And also, if someone is a member of that white conservative macho culture that views any sign of humanity as weakness to be exploited, stamped out, or mocked, and something horrible happens to them, and the only people offering genuine sympathy and support are like... their gay cousin and their feminist coworker, that actually might make them reconsider which group of people really has their best interests in mind.

I have seen people get out of nasty christian evangelical cults this way. A family member committed suicide and their church was awful about it because they believe that that's a mortal sin and those people go to hell, and that choosing to do that was indicative of a lot of awful things about a person's character, and therefore they shouldn't be mourned and instead held up as a shameful object lesson for everyone else. And their coworkers who were either members of kinder gentler more liberal churches or who were not christians at all meanwhile were sweet and comforting and supportive, and treated this as a tragic loss and the dead person as someone worthy of love and of being celebrated and remembered. And they weren't high handed about it, like "well maybe that'll make them think about their horrible belief system," they were just there for this person in a non-judgemental way specifically when their church wasn't. And that, not anything about ideology or beliefs, had a major impact, enough so that they left that church (cult) not long later.

So yeah idk. I personally would not be reblogging that video if I lived in the succession universe and I think it's pretty obvious that he breaks down when and how he does specifically because that culture of conservative white machismo that he lives in views any kind of expression of grief as a weakness, and continuing to treat it that way, regardless of the other politics involved, only serves to perpetuate that white conservative machismo culture.

To br clear though I *would* reblog a video of Roman crying about his stupid rocket blowing up and mock him relentlessly for that, because that is just play stupid games win stupid prizes.

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mariacallous · 2 years

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On Friday, June 24th, Justice Clarence Thomas got something he’s sought his entire adult life: recognition. Writing in support of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Thomas recommended that the Court, as a next move, strike down a half century’s worth of “demonstrably erroneous” precedents establishing the right to contraception, the right to same-sex sexual conduct, and the right to same-sex marriage. On television and across the Internet, commentators took notice.

Insiders have long known that Thomas is the right’s pacesetter on the Court, laying out positions that initially seem extreme yet eventually get adopted. For years, Thomas pulled Justice Antonin Scalia—even, on occasion, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice William Rehnquist—to the right on issues of crime and punishment. His opinions on campaign finance, once seen as recklessly deregulatory, now command a majority. In 1997, Thomas signalled his belief that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, a fringe position that the Court would come to accept, eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller. Even Thomas’s extraordinary claims, in a concurring opinion three years ago, about the racist foundations of abortion and birth control, found their way into a footnote in the Court’s recent abortion decision.

Despite this track record of stealth and success, liberals have often dismissed Thomas as stupid or a sellout, a patsy and a puppet, the Justice who cannot speak. That era is over. Yet Thomas’s significance far outstrips his captaincy of the Court’s war on liberalism. The most powerful Black man in America, Thomas is also our most symptomatic public intellectual, setting out a terrifying vision of race, rights, and violence that’s fast becoming a description of everyday life. It’s no longer a matter of Clarence Thomas’s Court. Increasingly, it’s Clarence Thomas’s America.

Like so much else in this country, the largeness of Thomas’s vision hinges on the smallest of claims: two clauses, all of thirty-eight words, in the second sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. One is the due-process clause, which Thomas believes has been misread. In Thomas’s view, that misreading is a stain on the nation—and the reason for its fall.

The due-process clause, which prohibits the state from depriving anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without the due process of the law,” is the basis for the constitutional right to contraception, same-sex sexual conduct, same-sex marriage, and, until a few weeks ago, abortion. To some, it might seem strange that the clause contains an affirmative right to anything. Doesn’t it simply require that the state declare the law, set out a punishment for violating the law, charge a suspect for its violation, try him in court, and so on? That, as it happens, is Thomas’s view.

But there’s a second, more expansive, interpretation of the clause, which holds that certain rights are so intrinsic to “liberty,” so fundamental to what it means to be free, that they may never be abridged without a vital reason. It’s not enough for the state to dot its “i”s and cross its “t”s before it takes those rights away. The state should not take them away at all—unless it must. Among those rights is privacy, from which derive the rights to contraception and so on.

Most liberals and conservatives accept some version of this second interpretation—which is called “substantive due process”—but argue over which rights it protects. Liberals say abortion; conservatives say guns. Thomas rejects the entire idea of substantive due process. In his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Thomas calls substantive due process an “oxymoron” and a “legal fiction.” The due-process clause “guarantees process” only. Because it “does not secure any substantive rights,” he writes, “it does not secure a right to abortion.” The same goes for birth control, same-sex sexual conduct, and gay marriage.

Thomas’s argument against substantive due process is more than doctrinal. It’s political. In a speech before the Federalist Society and the Manhattan Institute which he gave in his second year on the Court, Thomas linked a broad reading of the due-process clause, with its ever-expanding list of “unenumerated” rights, to a liberal “rights revolution” that has undermined traditional authority and generated a culture of permissiveness and passivity. That revolution, which began with the New Deal and peaked in the nineteen-sixties, established the welfare state, weakened criminal law, and promulgated sexual freedom. The result has been personal dissipation and widespread disorder. Workers lose their incentive to labor. Men abandon wives and children. Criminals roam and rule the streets.

Today, the left ties itself into knots over whether it should defend sexual minorities, dismantle the carceral state, or fight for social democracy. For Thomas, these are three fronts of the same war. To reverse the downward spiral of social decadence and patriarchal decay, conservatives must undo the liberal culture of rights, starting with the unenumerated rights of substantive due process.

Thomas has never made a secret of his belief that the rights revolution hit Black people especially hard, destroying the Black patriarch whom Black women, children, and communities need for protection and instruction. “The salvation of our race,” he declared in 1985, depends upon “the strength and the will of black men.” But welfare “takes your manhood away,” as his grandfather told him. Sexual freedom takes husbands and fathers away, he told the students at a Black college in Savannah. Liberal criminal-justice policies take sons and brothers away: “The people who will suffer from our lofty pronouncements,” he writes in a dissent from a liberal Court opinion defending the rights of gang members, are those who live in Black neighborhoods. Because of their vulnerable position in American society, Black people have the greatest need of the stern patriarchal authority from which self-discipline and communal strength derive. Black fathers must become “the lion of children’s safety” and “the sheep of their peace.”

If misreading the due-process clause has caused the dissolution of Black men, another part of the Fourteenth Amendment offers their rehabilitation. For Thomas, the privileges-or-immunities clause, an obscure and mostly discarded provision that he has sought to resurrect for decades, promises the restoration of both his community and the country.

The privileges-or-immunities clause has its roots in the battle over slavery and emancipation. Before the Civil War, many Americans, particularly Southern slaveholders, argued that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government, leaving the states free to deny basic rights like the freedom of speech. With the privileges-or-immunities clause, which declares that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the United States,” the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment hoped to abolish the distinction between the rights of national and state citizenship. From now on, all Americans, especially Black Americans, would enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms—“privileges or immunities”—which would be secured by the federal government. “No general assertion of human rights can be of any practical value,” Frederick Douglass declared, while “there remains such an idea as the right of each State to control its own local affairs.”

A persuasive argument, but it was never accepted. In a series of cases during Reconstruction and its aftermath, the Court gutted the meaning of the privileges-or-immunities clause, forcing later activists and lawyers to rely upon the equal-protection clause and the due-process clause to advance the claims of Black people, women, and queer people. Thomas believes that this was a crucial mistake, and that the Court’s precedents on the privileges-or-immunities clause should be revisited. The clause “gives us a foundation for interpreting not only cases involving race,” he writes, “but the entire Constitution and its scheme of protecting rights.”

Lest we think that Thomas imagines anything like the rights that contemporary liberals defend, he made clear, in Saenz v. Roe (1999), that his interpretation of the privileges-or-immunities clause would protect only a narrow range of rights. Abortion is not one of them; neither is same-sex marriage. But he does include the right to bear arms, which he views as the right that precedes all others. Citing Justice Joseph Story, Thomas calls the right to bear arms “the palladium of the liberties of a republic.”

Liberals often claim that there is something hypocritical, if not perverse, about conservatives enshrining the right to bear arms without enshrining the right to abortion. Conservatives have an easy response: one right is found in the Constitution, both as tradition and text; the other is not. That’s what Justice Samuel Alito argues in Dobbs and in his concurrence, the day before, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., et al. v. Bruen, which struck down part of New York’s concealed-carry law.

Bodily autonomy is so foundational to contemporary understandings of freedom, however, that it’s hard to imagine a reason for denying it to women other than the fact that they are women. The fetish for guns, meanwhile, can seem like little more than a transposition of America’s white settler past onto its white suburban present, a reading Alito suggests at the end of his concurrence in Bruen:

In 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted, there were no police departments, and many families lived alone on isolated farms or on the frontiers. If these people were attacked, they were on their own. . . . Today, unfortunately, many Americans have good reason to fear that they will be victimized if they are unable to protect themselves. And today, no less than in 1791, the Second Amendment guarantees their right to do so.

It’s worth comparing this passage with Thomas’s reading of the right to bear arms. Alito argues that the Second Amendment can be enforced, over and above state law, because of the due-process clause. Thomas roots his justification in the privileges-or-immunities clause, and in its backstory of slavery and abolition. Not only does that free Thomas from Alito’s white frontiersmen of yore but it also allows him to conjure the history of Black slaves arming themselves against their masters, and of Black freedmen protecting their families during Jim Crow. In his concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), a landmark guns case, he concludes with this resonant image:

One man [in 1919] recalled the night during his childhood when his father stood armed at a jail until morning to ward off lynchers. . . . The experience left him with a sense, “not ‘of powerlessness, but of the “possibilities of salvation” ’ ” that came from standing up to intimidation.

Thomas tells some of this history in Bruen. He dedicates a paragraph to the horror Chief Justice Roger Taney expressed—in the infamous Dred Scott decision declaring that Black people, enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States—at the prospect of Black citizens having the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Mocked and misunderstood on Twitter, the paragraph reprises a longer story, which Thomas narrates in McDonald, of how terrified whites were of Black slave revolts in antebellum America. Citing the work of Herbert Aptheker, the Communist author of a pioneering history of slave rebellions, Thomas notes that white fears of Black revolt would be “difficult to overstate.” Those fears “peaked” during Reconstruction, to which Thomas devotes even more attention in his McDonald and Bruen opinions.

If there is any rational basis to the Court’s claim that people have the right to carry guns because they fear violence at the hands of a generalized other, it is in Thomas’s account of Black arms and Black history. Of the four pro-gun opinions in Bruen, Thomas’s is the only one in which we find an empirical example of a people’s justifiable need for armed self-defense in the face of violent enemies and government indifference. “Seeing that government was inadequately protecting them” under Jim Crow, he writes, Black people took up arms “to defend themselves” against white terrorists. The only history that can make sense of the Court’s position on guns, in other words, is that of race war.

In his second year on the Court, Thomas said that he was “proudly and unapologetically irrelevant and anachronistic.” Almost thirty years later, he has become what conservatives of every era seek to be: anachronistic and relevant.

Under Thomas’s aegis, the Court now assumes a society of extraordinary violence and minimal liberty, with no hope of the state being able to provide security to its citizens. In his Bruen concurrence, Alito extends Thomas’s history of Reconstruction to all modern America: “Many people face a serious risk of lethal violence when they venture outside their homes.” Like the Black citizens of Reconstruction, he argues, few of us should expect the police to protect us. “The police cannot disarm every person who acquires a gun for use in criminal activity,” Alito writes, “nor can they provide bodyguard protection for [New York] State’s nearly 20 million residents.”

Once upon a time, Alito’s claims of systemic danger and state incapacity would have been dismissed as the rantings of a mountain survivalist. But, after decades of mass shootings, his assertion that the cops can’t protect you reads as a corollary to the left’s warning that the cops won’t protect you. What makes both beliefs plausible is the failed state that America has become, with no small amount of help from Thomas, the right-wing Court, and elected officials from both parties.

Today’s felt absence of physical security is the culmination of a decades-long war against social welfare. In the face of a state that won’t do anything about climate change, economic inequality, personal debt, voting rights, and women’s rights, it’s no wonder that an increasing portion of the population, across all races, genders, and beliefs, have determined that the best way to protect themselves, and their families, is by getting a gun. A society with no rights, no freedoms, except for those you claim yourself—this was always Thomas’s vision of the world. Now, for many Americans, it is the only one available. ♦

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futurebird · 8 months

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Power Dress

Thinking about judges wigs and other trappings of power. Apparently in Poland when they have legal court everyone wears robes: different colors for attorneys and the judge etc.

Of course, in the UK judges still wear wigs which US judges are free to wear too, but simply don't.

On the US Supreme court it's just black robes-- Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Stephen Breyer have all tried to make skull caps happen but no one else cared.

It's weird how people have always put on strange clothing to be important.

#human #human culture #clothing

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tim-hoe-wan · 1 year

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I met Emily several times when we both volunteered for Bernie's campaigns. I'm actually disappointed because she does seem like she's smarter than people would expect, but she almost always somehow falls short or she ends up being shallow. Make no mistake, I don't think models need to be smart to have value or make sense. Just that I feel she can do so much better in educating herself about feminism considering she does seem smarter than people would perceive. She did go to UCLA, so I think it's at least a testament of something.

To be fair it's not just about being smart. You don't need to be smart to understand the importance of intersectionality or taking into consideration the various socioeconomic struggles into ideas of feminism.

I also believe it does not exactly follow that if you're smart you automatically believe or subscribe to certain principles or theories. Just using him as an example considering I had to read cases for years, but take for example Antonin Scalia. Everyone I know who has ever met him attest that he is a brilliant mind, yet you could see where he stands on most issues is one that will drive you crazy. It also happens a lot with my colleagues in law school, two brilliant people can read the same books on certain political theories and end up with two different conclusions. When I was in college and had to take literary analysis, a lot of brilliant people had different analysis on Wise Blood for example. I believe people always try to equate if you use your brain, you go to this conclusion, completely ignoring that people have subjective biases that goes with their environment, experience, observations etc.

EmRata's case, she claims to have read a lot of books that usually admired feminist have read and maybe she did, but clearly she made her own conclusion based on her own perception of it. I very much believe she's an awful feminist, but she always had a shallow understanding of it, and in my theory she read a book and thought it reinforces her own conclusions rather than challenges it.

You'd wonder if it's really as internet intellectuals say it is, the world wouldn't have this much problems.

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fuckyeahtx · 2 years

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Letters From An American

May 26, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

One of the key things that drove the rise of the current Republican Party was the celebration of a certain model of an ideal man, patterned on the image of the American cowboy. Republicans claimed to be defending individual men who could protect their families if only the federal government would stop interfering with them. Beginning in the 1950s, those opposed to government regulation and civil rights decisions pushed the imagery of the cowboy, who ran cattle on the Great Plains from 1866 to about 1886 and who, in legend, was a white man who worked hard, fought hard against Indigenous Americans, and wanted only for the government to leave him alone.

That image was not true to the real cowboys, at least a third of whom were Black or men of color, or to the reality of government intervention in the Great Plains, which was more extensive there than in any other region of the country. It was a reaction to federal laws after the Civil War defending Black rights in the post–Civil War South, laws white racists said were federal overreach that could only lead to what they insisted was “socialism.”

In the 1950s, the idea of an individual hardworking man taking care of his family and beholden to no one was an attractive image to those who disliked government protection of civil rights, and politicians who wanted to dissolve business regulation pulled them into the Republican Party by playing to the mythology of movie heroes like John Wayne. Part of that mythology, of course, was the idea that men with guns could defend their families, religion, and freedom against a government trying to crush them. By the 1980s, the National Rifle Association had abandoned its traditional stance promoting gun safety and was defending “gun rights” and the Republican Party; in the 1990s, talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh fed the militia movement with inflammatory warnings that the government was coming for a man’s guns, destroying his ability to protect his family.

That cowboy image has stoked an obsession with guns and with military hardware and war training in police departments. It feeds a conviction that true men dominate situations, both at home and abroad, with violence. That dominance, in turn, is supposed to protect society’s vulnerable women and children.

In 2008, in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision, the Supreme Court said that individuals have a right to own firearms outside of membership in a militia or for traditional purposes such as hunting or self-defense, and dramatically limited federal regulation of them. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority decision, was a leading “originalist” on the court, eager to erase the decisions of the post-WWII courts that upheld business regulation and civil rights.

In 2004, a ten-year federal ban on assault weapons expired, and since then. mass shootings have tripled. Zusha Elinson, who is writing a history of the bestselling AR-15 military style weapon used in many mass shootings, notes that there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.

For years now, Republicans have stood firmly against measures to guard Americans against gun violence, even as a majority of Americans support commonsense measures like background checks. Notably, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, when a gunman murdered 20 six- and seven-year-old students and 6 staff members, Republicans in the Senate filibustered a bipartisan bill sponsored by Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) that would have expanded background checks, killing it despite the 55 votes in favor of it.

Since Sandy Hook, the nation has suffered more than 3500 mass shootings, and Republicans have excused them by claiming they didn’t actually happen, or by insisting we need more guns so there will be “a good guy with a gun” to take out a shooter, or that we need to “harden targets,” or that we need more police in the schools (which has simply led to more student arrests), or as Senator Ted Cruz said today, to limit the number of doors in schools, or, as a guest on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show said, to put “mantraps” and trip wires in the schools.

The initial story of what happened on Tuesday in Uvalde fit the Republican myth. Police spokespeople told reporters that a school district police officer confronted the shooter outside the building before he barricaded himself in a classroom, killing 19 and wounding 22 others in his rampage.

But as more details are emerging today, they are undermining the myth itself.

Robb Elementary School, where the murders took place, had already been “hardened” with the town investing more than $650,000 in security enhancements, but the shooter apparently entered through an unlocked door. The Uvalde police department consumes 40% of the town’s budget and has its own Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit. And yet, the stories that are emerging from Uvalde suggest that the shooter fired shots outside the school for 12 minutes before entering it and that he was not, in fact, confronted outside. Police officers arrived at the same time he entered the school, but they did not go in until after he had been in the building for four minutes. Seven officers then entered, but the lone gunman apparently drove them out with gunfire, and they stayed outside, holding back frantic parents, until Border Patrol tactical officers arrived a full hour later.

Parents tried to get the police to go in but instead found themselves under attack for interfering with an investigation. One man was thrown to the ground and pepper sprayed. U.S. Marshals arrested and handcuffed Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children were in the school and who had had time to drive 40 miles to get to them, for interfering as she demanded they do something. Gomez got local officers she knew to talk the Marshals into releasing her. Then she jumped the school fence, ran in, grabbed her two kids, and ran out.

A Texas Department of Safety official told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tonight that the law enforcement officers at the school were reluctant to engage the gunman because “they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.”

There are still many, many questions about what happened in Uvalde, but it seems clear that the heroes protecting the children were not the guys with guns, but the moms and the dads and the two female teachers who died trying to protect their students: Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia. News reports today say that Garcia’s husband, Joseph, died this morning of a heart attack, leaving four children.

Last week, in the aftermath of the deadly attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Democrats in the House of Representatives quickly passed a a domestic terrorism bill. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tried to get the Senate to take it up today. It would have sparked a debate on gun safety. Republicans blocked it. In the aftermath of Tuesday’s massacre, only five Republicans have said they are willing to consider background checks for gun purchases. That is not enough to break a filibuster.

Last night, Texas candidate for governor Beto O’Rourke confronted Texas governor Greg Abbott at a press conference. Last year, Abbott signed at least seven new laws to make it easier to obtain guns, and after the Uvalde murders, he said tougher gun laws are not “a real solution.” O’Rourke offered a different vision for defending our children than stocking up on guns. "The time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing," O'Rourke said, standing in front of a dais at which Abbott sat. "You said this is not predictable…. This is totally predictable…. This is on you, until you choose to do something different…. This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed, just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.”

Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin shouted profanities at O'Rourke; Texas Republican lieutenant governorDan Patrick told the former congressman, "You're out of line and an embarrassment”; and Senator Ted Cruz told him, “Sit down.”

But this evening the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays announced they would use their social media channels not to cover tonight’s game but to share facts about gun violence. “The devastating events that have taken place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable.”

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batboyblog · 2 years

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What Does Voter Harder Mean?

So you likely have seen "Vote Harder" over the last few days as either a literal response to what happened to Abortion rights, or mocking that reaction so some points:

Why does voting matter now that Roe has been overturned?

It's important to understand that the Supreme Court didn't make abortion illegal. What they did was make it no longer protected by the US Constitution. This means that state governments can pass laws banning abortion, a number of states have automatic laws in place that'll ban abortion with-in 30 days of Roe being overturned. Other states will have to pass laws. Some states have laws on the books still from before Roe. Michigan is one of those states, however Michigan has a pro-choice woman Democratic Governor who declares she will not try to enforce that law. She's also up for re-election. You seeing what I'm getting at? if she losing a Republican Governor will try to enforce that law and make abortion illegal in the state.

Thats the case literally everywhere in the US, 36 states are having statewide elections in November (the 8th!) if Republicans gain control of a states Governorship, and State House and Senate they WILL! ban abortion in your state.

On the Federal level the whole House of Representatives and 35 Senate Seats are up. Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have both floated the idea of banning abortion nationally if they win in November. Now as long as Biden is President that'd get vetoed. However if Democrats lose control of the Senate I'll remind you how we got here. In February 2016 Ultra Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia died. Obama appointed moderate liberal Merrick Garland to fill the seat in March. Mitch McConnell was Senate Majority leader at the time, and refused to hold hearings or a vote. Garland of course never became a Justice, by holding the seat open McConnell allowed Trump to fill it in 2017.

Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are old men in their 70s, if one of them dies while Joe Biden (or the next Democratic President) is President and Republicans control the Senate they will just refuse to fill the seat for as long as it takes for there to be a Republican President. They will do this to the Liberal Justices as well. When Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, 47 Republicans voted No even though there were no real objections to her.

So to sum up, what your state government looks like after November will determine if you have abortion rights in your state. If Democrats lose Control of Congress Republicans will pass a national abortion ban, if Democrats don't keep control of the Senate no more liberal Justices will be able to be appointed to the court.

But What Does Vote Harder Mean?

Assuming you are an American citizen, legal adult, and registered to vote, (If you are not registered to vote, please fix that ASAP) and you vote in major elections, this is what that means:

Vote in every, yes EVERY election. Do you vote for President? great! so glad to hear it! but dramatically fewer people vote in mid-term elections, these elections decide who controls Congress and your state Government. In Taxes before 2020 a majority of voting aged adults had NEVER voted in a statewide election in my life. current nightmare Governor Greg Abbott won his first election to be governor in 2014 with the votes of just.... 14.7% of Texas voting aged adults.....

Past midterms you have to vote in even less exciting elections, elections for city government, county government and school board as well as primaries. Lots of local races like City Council and School Board are "non-partisan" meaning what political party a candidate is a part of isn't listed or even they can't say. This means you're gonna have to do your research. Your votes for School Board will decide if teens are getting realistic sex education or abstinence only, if the school nurse is handing out condoms or reporting sexually active teens to their parents. Your vote can decide if your city gives a contract to Planned Parenthood or using zoning and red tape to harass a clinic out of town.

2. So you already vote in every election. You're great! and I love you! you're the kind of person who votes in school board elections during off-off years on a random Tuesday in June, love it! How about trying to register other people to vote? have you ever registered a voter? All States have different rules, but most allow you random citizen to help a fellow citizen fill out a brief card that you can hand over to a election clerk and get that person registered to vote.

3. Talk to people you know. Do you have ANY one in your life who's a flakey voter, or maybe they're flakey in general. An aunt, uncle, cousin, niece, nephew, friend or co-worker who doesn't vote every time? guess what it's now your job to remind them, call, text, talk to them remind them, keep reminding them. Do you have someone in your life with vague liberal ideas/ideals but don't really know how that translates into politics. It's your job to explain it to them, help them figure out what the candidates in their area are and when they need to vote. Are you LGBTQ, of color, disabled, or a woman of child baring age with a beloved older relative (who's white) who loves you very much but still keeps voting Republican? Its time, its time to have that really hard talk with great-grandpa, uncle Bob or grandma. Whoever it is, that talk you've been avoiding because its awkward and might be painful. You need to explain to them, as many time as it takes, that a vote for Republicans is a vote against you the person they love, that you WILL be hurt by Republicans in government.

4. Talk to people you don't know. Volunteer to talk to voters, to knock doors and make phone calls. Join the Democratic Party's effort to talk to voters. Look at your state Democratic Parties and sign up. You can sign up with Planned Parenthood Action Fund NARAL Pro-Choice National Organization for Women Human Rights Campaign or Lambda Legal

There is no fast easy way to overturn this, no magic bullet, no quick fix. Republicans worked for 40 years to do this. Since 1980 Republicans have controlled at least one branch of the federal government for 36 of those 42 years. Democrats have controlled all 3 branches of government just 6 years over the last 42. Since 2011 Republicans have controlled more State Governments and Governors offices in America every year for the last 10.

The only answer is to win, to organize and fight and win, and not to go "voted once and everything isn't all better, I give up!" because they will take more from you.

#vote #vote harder #Democrats #abortion #rant?

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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as a brit, may I ask - how did the us get to the point where the supreme court has the power to abolish rode like this? because the concept of people who can stay in their posts for life, can't be fired/voted out, and who have the power to pass this sort of law despite the vast majority of the population's opposition (including the president himself!) feels so contrary to the democratic ideals we associate with america, and I'm flummoxed to know how this monarch-like power came about?

Hoo boy. This is a complicated and difficult question that requires understanding a lot of background in American history and politics, how the Trump-era Republicans have systematically disregarded and ignored all previous precedents, and why. First, in brief, the Constitution created the Supreme Court, its jurisdiction, and its function as the highest level of the judiciary branch of the tripartite government (executive, legislative, judicial). One thing it did not specify was the size; you can read about the historical wranglings and acts of Congress that adjusted the number of members here. As such, expanding the court to compensate for its current rabidly ideological right-wing tilt is not actually unconstitutional (though one of the handy features of conservative textualism/originalism is that you can make it say pretty much anything you want and ignore the rest).

For example, there are thirteen Circuit Courts of Appeal, which are the regionally-based federal judiciaries that are the last stop before the Supreme Court. Expanding it to thirteen justices, to match each of these regions, is an entirely logical idea. However, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to expand the Supreme Court in 1937 and got witheringly smacked down to the point that the Senate Judiciary Committee claimed it should never, ever be tried again. And with how radical the Republicans have gotten on literally everything, there's no way in absolute fricking hell that they will support any changes to the one institution that is now, as designed, finally doing their exact and unchallengable bidding for the foreseeable future. And some Democrats will likewise have to be convinced to support such a drastic move, because of the general respect for "precedent" and the way "things have always been done." Which, as we have seen, constrains the Republicans exactly shit.

Ever since Roe was originally handed down in 1973, and Christian conservatism became the party’s dominant ideological theory in the 1980s under Reagan, Republicans have pursued a focused strategy of hijacking and politicizing the supposedly impartial judicial branch, especially the Supreme Court, especially because they realized that its decisions cannot be challenged, reversed, or otherwise easily gotten around. This exact kind of partisan takeover has always been the goal. They tried it in 1987 with Reagan's attempted nomination of hard-right ideologue Robert Bork to the Court (defeated by the Democrats and particularly then-Senator Joe Biden, resulting in Reagan being forced to pick Anthony Kennedy instead). That's why Mitch McConnell refused to even hold hearings after noted hard-right justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016 and Obama picked Merrick Garland to replace him. That's why McConnell and Trump then forced Kennedy to retire under sketchy circumstances in 2018, and rushed Amy Coney Barrett onto the bench as fast as possible, as an election was already happening, in 2020. They knew all along that ultimate capture of the Supreme Court was the best way to achieve their goal, especially in the case of Roe. Democrats have often ignored or disregarded the importance of the judiciary, and they're paying the price for that now, yes. But that doesn't make their actions morally or causally equal to the Republicans literally exploiting every bad-faith loophole they possibly could in order to do exactly this.

Trump didn't do much during his four years, aside from rage-tweeting, fomenting hatred, and cramming through right-wing judges and tax cuts for rich people with the eager assistance of Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Congressional Republican caucus, but boy, did he sure wreck both the office of the presidency and the entire honor-system precedent on which American democracy rests. Institutions don't maintain themselves, as we all saw when they were stretched to the very limit during the period between Biden winning the election in November 2020, the January 6 Capitol attack during the certification of the election results, and Biden finally being sworn in on January 2021. The January 6 Committee hearings have recently been putting all the evidence out there, as to how carefully and extensively orchestrated the plot to illegally keep Trump in power actually was. It failed because people made certain choices and followed the established rules, but that was not a given, and immense pressure was put on them to do otherwise.

Likewise as I have warned numerous times before, the Republicans are rehearsing for a 2024 encore in plain sight, especially by trying to get Big Lie loyalists installed in key positions. They are also terrifyingly close to doing this. In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, one of the most extreme Republican gubernatorial candidates in the country, who stormed the Capitol on January 6, has called for unregistering all voters and making them register again under harsh restrictions, and has promised to appoint a Big Lie advocate to the position of Secretary of State, is running only three points behind Democrat Josh Shapiro, which is within the margin of error. If Mastriano and a flunkey were in power in Pennsylvania in 2024, rather than its current Democratic governor and secretary of state, they could just simply refuse to certify the win of a Democrat in the presidential election. What would happen then? We don't know, because it's never happened before. We really don't want to find out.

Yet again, this demonstrates how fragile American democracy is on all levels, and how if people simply don't follow the established rules or operate in good faith, it can go to hell very quickly. The Supreme Court, like the rest of the American government, was set up according to eighteenth-century Enlightenment principles of reason, democratic self-governance, and the belief that people could be trusted to act rationally in their own best interests. As such, it's vulnerable to a concerted bad-faith effort to drive a nakedly partisan agenda forward, even while pretending to be "impartial." There's no law that says they can't, and since Trump, as president, exercised the presidential right to select judicial candidates, that likewise wasn't actually against the law. The founders didn't trust human nature unequivocally, which is why they set up checks and balances and didn't allow the president to directly pick Supreme Court members. That's why candidates have to go through Senate confirmation hearings, which is formally known as giving its "advice and consent" to the president's appointment. But during their confirmation hearings, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, the three Trump-picked justices, all baldly lied (under oath, no less) about whether they considered Roe to be settled law and established precedent, or even whether they had an open mind about it. So if would-be justices just flat-out lie to get confirmed, in the service of carrying out a partisan task like overturning Roe, then.... how do we respond to that? We don’t know, because we haven’t had to do that before.

America, for all its deep, DEEP flaws and shortcomings, has operated since its founding on the principle of a peaceful transfer of power from one elected administration to the other. This has been followed since George Washington's death in 1799. Even goddamn George W. Bush, the Iraq war criminal, No Child Left Behind-er, and Reagan-holdover hawk whose administration was largely run by fucking Dick Cheney, now manages to look like a saint for being gracious and cordial to Obama and helping to achieve a smooth transition. That is how low the bar has fallen. Bush did the bare minimum that every president before him had done, and that alone makes him look like a hero (which he fucking isn't) next to Trump. Bush was a hard-right neocon, but he also generally paid lip service to America's founding ideals and the practice of pluralistic democracy. Trump did absolutely none of that and did not care about anything except his own power, greed, and grift. He was willing to wreck everything in the country if it kept him in power (and shielded from lawsuits thanks to executive privilege). And yet, successfully marketing himself as an “America First!!!” champion to a lot of people who were motivated by nakedly racist, sexist, nativist, homophobic, and xenophobic appeals to the very worst parts of a country founded on the genocide of Native Americans and institutional slavery and brutalization of African-Americans. Because America has never properly reckoned with that past, and keeps trying to ignore, dismiss, or downplay it, it has once more become a raging cancer in the body politic.

Republicans, at this point, aren’t motivated by anything other than deliberate cruelty and white supremacy, especially since domestic racial issues have once more become the primary “Other” against which right-wing America defines itself. This was the case in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, but in the 1970s and 80s, the Cold War and the “Evil Empire” USSR became the chief existential threat. In the 90s, it was gay people; then came 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Scary Muslim Enemy. Now that the decades-long and utterly pointless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are finally over, the Republicans -- always in need of a good non-white boogeyman, and desperate to tamp down the reckoning on racial justice and the emergence of movements like Black Lives Matter -- have once more turned to whipping up the fear and resentment of white America against the idea of being “replaced.” This is because any systematic examination and discreditation of American racism threatens the foundations they have built their power on ever since the post-Civil Rights Movement partisan realignment. That is what the “Southern Strategy” literally was (and is). So when you have one party who simply flouts and ignores all the rules and norms of the country’s entire history, because the only thing that matters to them is the consolidation and maintenance of indefinite white-supremacist fascist minority authoritarian rule.... again, what do you do?

Anyway, to sum up: the Supreme Court is acting as it now is because the Republicans designed it to do exactly that over decades, played the long game, and trampled over every established rule or obstacle or moral objection in their way. Democrats didn’t act like that because Democrats aren’t fascists. How they -- and we -- respond to that is going to shape the future of the country for generations to come.

#anonymous #ask #history #american history #history of racism #politics for ts #long post

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bllsbailey · 4 months

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Harvard's Snooty Snobs SLAMMED for Denigrating Chris Rufo's Degree

In the wake of the resignation of Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard, leftists have found themselves in an embarrassing frenzy of rage-addled excuse-making for the prolific plagiarist and attacks against those who called her out.

Chris Rufo was one of Gay's biggest critics and also of DEI and other progressive ideologies infiltrating American academia.

Graduates of the illustrious David Hogg University, also known as 'Havard', wasted no time making a mockery of their alma mater in an attempt to belittle Rufo.

It started with an article from The New Republic that claimed Rufo was falsely passing himself off as a Harvard grad even though he went to the Harvard Extension School … a school of Harvard University.

It quickly became clear that attendees of the extension school are regarded as second-class citizens by 'real' (their words) Harvard degree holders.

This should come as no surprise given that one of the primary reasons for attending such a school is to allow these people to pretend they're better than the rest of us.

I read that whole thing and nowhere did it explain how Ex-President Gay didn’t break ethical standards and codes of conduct that everyone else at Harvard is bound by. Did I miss a paragraph?— ThorChiggins PHD (@ThorChiggins) January 5, 2024

Yep. You'll find none of that in there because it's just a hit piece because they're still seething over Gay being forced to the off-ramp. Buh-bye.

Recommended

politicspresumptuous.com

Rufo responded to the article:

There were plenty of folks who thought this was a real smoking gun. They were generally progressives who would have preferred to ignore Gay's plagiarism.

'Standard of ethics', she said.

What happened to that standard of ethics?

Look, we understand why Harvard degree holders are proud of purchasing such an expensive status symbol. There have, after all, been many brilliant and well-known individuals who have studied at the school over the years:

Antonin Scalia - King of the Supreme Court.

Matt Damon - went on to pretend to be a really smart person.

Jonathan Taylor Thomas - Randy Taylor and Simba.

Helen Keller - Bidenomics coordinator.

Ted Kennedy - expert swimmer.

Neil deGrasse Tyson - star of memes.

Theodore Roosevelt - considered by many to be a highly successful president.

Barack Obama - considered by many to be a president.

Al Gore - inventor of the Internet.

Ted Kaczynski - explosives expert.

Isoroku Yamamoto - air travel agent for Pearl Harbor.

Robert Oppenheimer - see Isoroku Yamamoto.

Of course, no list of esteemed Harvard grads would be complete without A.J. Delgado, known for … posting on Twitter/X. She probably could have learned how to do that at a local community college, to be honest.

There's that attitude we've come to expect from our Ivy League betters.

In case it's not clear, most of us out here in real-America aren't nearly as impressed with degrees from Pompous U. as the holders of the degrees are.

Miss 'Harvard real-degree' Delgado is boasting on Twitter/X while Rufo is getting real work done. We can understand why she's so salty.

A little bit of ad hominem, a pinch of appeal to authority, and there you have it - a recipe for 'so what if the president of my super prestigious university is a cheat, I'm better than you!'

As you might expect, the people of Twitter/X had zero room for such pretentiousness.

Just to be clear, there are people who graduated or worked at Harvard who aren't stuck-up snobs. The elitist ones just really like to tell everyone.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Delgado was steaming in reply to commenters:

She continued: ' … for some clown to come and say his online courses nonsense is the same. That’s not elitist- that’s stopping some a**hole from depriving me of what I earned … '

For those of you who do not speak Real-Harvardian, A.J.'s words roughly translate into English as 'REEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!'

She kept doubling down, simply because she wanted to keep saying she has a 'Harvard' degree. It's okay to laugh. We are.

The entire display was cringe-tacular. Harvard should send better representatives.

The feedback was not good for Delgado, and there was TONS of it.

The entire debacle brought up another aspect of Delgado's haughty view of the Harvard Extension School that hurled another layer of mud atop Harvard's reputation.

Why is the university selling 'Harvard' degrees to students if they're not 'real' Harvard degrees?

Bingo. Clearly, Harvard has no issue selling its name to would-be students at the other schools of Harvard University or explicitly telling them they will earn a Harvard degree.

It's best to just ignore them. After all, regardless of what they think of Rufo's degree, he's kicking their tails at every turn.

Pretty good for a guy without a 'real' Harvard degree.

The arrogance is pervasive.

Imagine speaking this way about the people who pay your salary.

There are always going to be the A.J. Delgados out there, looking down their noses at the rabble who didn't get the 'real' degree.

'Y'all suck.' Couldn't have said it better ourselves.

LOL.

Well done, King. Enjoy your ivory towers, snobs. Our people are friendlier and much more fun.

***

Editor's Note: Do you enjoy Twitchy's conservative reporting taking on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth. Join Twitchy VIP and use the promo code SAVEAMERICA to get 40% off your VIP membership!

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msclaritea · 11 months

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first major opinion saves Medicaid - Vox

2023. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Last November, the Supreme Court heard a nightmarish case that threatened to destroy a significant portion of the United States’ social safety net. Had the defendants’ arguments in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski prevailed before the justices, federal Medicaid law could have been rendered practically unenforceable — leaving patients with no resource if they were unlawfully denied care or abused by their health providers.

But the Court rejected that approach in a 7–2 decision. It’s also Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s first majority opinion in a case with this kind of sweeping policy stakes.

The case involved a somewhat byzantine area of federal law. Medicaid is a “conditional grant” program, meaning that the federal government offers a significant chunk of money to each state (total federal Medicaid spending in 2020 was more than $670 billion), which states are free to take or leave. Should they take the money (and all 50 states take at least some Medicaid funds), however, the states and Medicaid-funded health providers are required to comply with certain requirements laid out in federal law.

These conditions range from broad requirements that state Medicaid programs must cover certain individuals, such as low-income pregnant patients and children, to granular rules governing how Medicaid-funded facilities must operate. The Talevski plaintiffs, for example, accuse a Medicaid-funded nursing home of violating several provisions of Medicaid law that regulate how these facilities must care for patients — including a law that forbids nursing homes from using psychotropic drugs “for purposes of discipline or convenience and not required to treat the resident’s medical symptoms.”

Under well-established law, at least some of the conditions Medicaid law imposes on states and health providers may be enforced through private lawsuits. The defendants in Talevski effectively tried to neutralize all of these lawsuits, leaving patients who are mistreated by Medicaid officials or by Medicaid-funded health providers powerless if their legal rights were violated.

In any event, that won’t happen. The Court voted 7–2 to leave current law in place, in a fairly curt opinion by Jackson that rejects this effort to “reimagine” federal law “and our precedent interpreting it.” Indeed, only one justice, Clarence Thomas, signed onto the Talevski defendant’s most aggressive arguments. Justice Samuel Alito also dissented, but on narrower grounds that might still have allowed some of federal Medicaid law to be enforced by private litigants.

Talevski is also, again, Justice Jackson’s first majority opinion that deals with a major policy question with sweeping stakes for millions of Americans — though she previously authored three majority opinions in relatively minor cases.

Given the lopsided result in the Talevski case, it may seem like Medicaid was never in any real danger. But three of the Court’s current members — Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts — signed onto a 2015 opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, which argued that “the modern jurisprudence permitting [Medicaid] beneficiaries to sue does not generally apply” to conditional grant programs like Medicaid.

In any event, two of those justices appear to have reconsidered, at least in part. And the full Court voted overwhelmingly to reject this attack on Medicaid.

What was at stake in Talevski?

One of the most consequential federal laws ever enacted by Congress is a statute lawyers refer to as “Section 1983.” This law permits state officials — and, in certain circumstances, private individuals implementing state programs — to be sued in federal court if they deprive someone of “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.”

This statute is the reason why state government officials may be sued if they violate the Constitution. It also permits suits if those officials violate ordinary federal laws, thus ensuring that both the Constitution and federal law remain superior to the whims of such officials.

About a half-century of law establishes that Section 1983 permits Medicaid patients (or, in the Talevski case, their estate) to bring lawsuits enforcing some provisions of federal Medicaid law. As the Court said in Edelman v. Jordan (1974), “suits in federal court under § 1983 are proper to secure compliance with the provisions of the Social Security Act on the part of participating States.” Medicaid was created by a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act.

Indeed, the argument that Medicaid law may be enforced through § 1983 suits could not be more straightforward. Section 1983 permits lawsuits against certain individuals who violate rights “secured by the Constitution and laws.” And Medicaid laws are laws. As Jackson writes in her opinion reaffirming that the rules governing Medicaid law will remain exactly as they are, “we have consistently refused to read § 1983’s ‘plain language’ to mean anything other than what it says.”

Nevertheless, the Talevski defendants, an Indiana health system operated by local government officials, and a private company that manages nursing homes, essentially claimed to have unearthed a secret history of § 1983 that undercuts its text and the way the Court has previously read this statute.

Much of this argument rests on a single line in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Pennhurst State School and Hospital v. Halderman (1981), which described conditional grant programs as “much in the nature of a contract” because states agree to comply with certain conditions in return for federal money. The Talevski defendants argue that, when § 1983 was enacted during the Reconstruction era, contract law did not allow third parties who were not signatories to the original contract to bring a lawsuit enforcing the contract.

Under this argument, Medicaid patients cannot sue to enforce Medicaid law because the Medicaid program is a contract between the federal government and the states, not between Medicaid providers and their patients.

In any event, the historical support for this argument is very weak. The Talevski defendants cite a hodgepodge of 19th-century legal sources, including an 1881 speech by future Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a list of contract cases decided by state courts in the 1800s, and an 1880 book by Harvard Law School dean Christopher Columbus Langdell.

But there is also considerable evidence suggesting that the Talevski defendants’ understanding of 19th-century contract law is simply wrong. Among other things, the Supreme Court said in Hendrick v. Lindsay (1876) that “the right of a party to maintain assumpsit,” an antiquated term for breach of contract lawsuits, “on a promise not under seal, made to another for his benefit, although much controverted, is now the prevailing rule in this country.“

In other words, the Supreme Court said in 1876 — just a few years after § 1983 became law — that, while courts disagree on whether third parties may sue to enforce contracts, most courts had concluded that third parties could file such suits. That one fact alone is devastating to the Talevski defendants’ historical argument. As Jackson writes, “something more than ‘ambiguous historical evidence’ is required before we will ‘flatly overrule a number of major decisions of this Court.’”

Again, nothing about this outcome should surprise anyone. The Talevski defendants’ historical argument was laughably weak, so weak that it is shocking that any judge took it seriously. It contradicts § 1983’s text, longstanding Medicaid precedents, and a 19th-century Supreme Court decision all at once.

If not for Scalia’s quizzical attempt to restrict Medicaid suits, and if not for the fact that several current justices seemed to endorse those efforts in previous opinions, there would have been no reason to take the Talevski case seriously. But Scalia’s old opinion raised the alarming possibility that a majority could be cobbled together on the Court to render Medicaid law virtually unenforceable (had the Talevski defendants’ historical argument prevailed, the federal government still would have had some tools to enforce Medicaid law, but those tools are rarely used — and for good reason).

As it turns out, that did not happen. Justice Jackson’s opinion in Talevski disarms a bomb that has threatened Medicaid for several years now.

Now, THAT'S Progressive, and I'll just bet that you won't hear a word about this victory from the Squad.

#President Joe Biden #Administration #Judte Ketanji Brown

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nothingnothingaaa · 11 months

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RFK Jr. on guns [twitter spaces transcript]:

My decision on the gun-control is I’m not going to take away anybody’s guns. I’m a constitutional absolutist. You know, we can argue about whether the second-amendment was intended to protect guns, but that argument has now been settled by the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia’s decision is a very expansive interpretation of the right to own a gun. But more importantly anybody who tells you that with incremental changes, with incremental laws in regulating guns… and by the way I want to say this: I have two members of my family that were killed in gun-violence. I understand the heartbreak that this is causing to so many Americans—it’s touched my family directly, and I know as President that you’re going to expect me and I’m going to everything I can to reduced gun-violence in this country. I think one of the tools that has been taking out of my hands is taking away people’s guns.

I don’t think it’s the right thing right now because it would just polarise our country. I’ve lived in rural areas of this country. I know how integrated gun-culture is in those areas and I know how important it is to them in the way they view the constitution. I know we’re living in a time where the constitution has been under attack. All the amendments in an unprecedented way and how that would be seen by people who believe strongly in the second amendment as part of a systematic assault on our Bill of Rights. And I don’t want to get into that debate. I want to stop the school shootings and if it comes down to protecting the schools the way we do airlines I will do that. I do not want any more children dying in our schools. I also am going to look very closely at the role of psychiatric drugs in these events, and there are no good studies right now that should have been done years ago on this issue, because there’s a tremendous circumstantial evidence that those SSRI’s and benzos and other drugs are doing this.

There is something happening in our country right now that is not happening anywhere else in the world and has never happened in human history. And you have to look at some of—almost all of these drugs. If you look at their manufacturer’s inserts they include a side effect of homicidal and suicidal behaviour. And prior to the introduction of Prozac we had almost no—none of these events in our country and we’d never seen them in human history where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people. There’s other nations that have as many guns per capita as we do, like Switzerland [inaudible] where the last school shooting was 21 years ago. We have one every 21 hours.

The one thing that we have that’s different than anybody in the world is the amount of psychiatric drugs our children are taking, and our people are taking. And we need to look at that and NIH should have done that years ago, but they will not do it and they’ll block other people from doing it because they’re working not for us but for the pharmaceutical industry, and this is their major profit center today, and so nobody wants to hear—none of those—Pharma does not want to hear about any problems with SSRI’s. But I will do those studies immediately when I get into office and we’re going to get to the truth.

Something is… you know, the proliferation of guns clearly abet violence, but anybody who tells you that they can remove enough guns; AR-15’s or whatever, but tinkering at the margins and get to the kind of situation that they have in western Europe is pulling your leg; it’s not going to happen. We need to look now at other solutions and the only way we’re ultimately going to get gun controls in this country is through consensus and that consensus cannot happen when we’re all at each other’s throats.

We need to assure the public; people who feel insecure about the Constitution, that our Constitution is no longer under threat; that nobody wants to come and take away their guns. And that will bring people to the table, and say ok how do we protect our children. And that’s what I’m gonna try to do as President.

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