#ian millhiser

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #republicans #conservatives #twitter #tweet #ian millhiser #gop #us supreme court #justice clarence thomas #justice samuel alito #harlan crow #paul singer #scotus #private jets #billionaires #fuck billionaires #student loans #student loan debt #student loan forgiveness #freeze student debt #student debt forgiveness #2023

[dontfightyourwaralone]

#august 2023 #2023 #articles #vox #Ian Millhiser #gerrymandering #wisconsin

[gwydionmisha]

Hint for Alito: It's not the coverage, it's the behavior that's putting the court into disrepute.

#Ian Millhiser #The Supreme Court #Samuel Alito #Scandals #News

[stephenist]

#ian millhiser #scotus #supreme court #clarence thomas #equal protection #fdisinfo #Twitter #dystopia #nightmare

[joe-england]

#vox #america #politics #conservatives #student loans #student loan forgiveness #biden #biden v nebraska #nebraska #ian millhiser #law

[arcticdementor]

(link)

#twitter #screenshot #richard hanania #ian millhiser #democracy #quoted tweet has been deleted

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ian Millhiser at Vox:

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear Mckesson v. Doe. The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act.

It is possible that this outcome will be temporary. The Court did not embrace the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision attacking the First Amendment right to protest, but it did not reverse it either. That means that, at least for now, the Fifth Circuit’s decision is the law in much of the American South. For the past several years, the Fifth Circuit has engaged in a crusade against DeRay Mckesson, a prominent figure within the Black Lives Matter movement who organized a protest near a Baton Rouge police station in 2016. The facts of the Mckesson case are, unfortunately, quite tragic. Mckesson helped organize the Baton Rouge protest following the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling. During that protest, an unknown individual threw a rock or similar object at a police officer, the plaintiff in the Mckesson case who is identified only as “Officer John Doe.” Sadly, the officer was struck in the face and, according to one court, suffered “injuries to his teeth, jaw, brain, and head.”

Everyone agrees that this rock was not thrown by Mckesson, however. And the Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware (1982) that protest leaders cannot be held liable for the violent actions of a protest participant, absent unusual circumstances that are not present in the Mckesson case — such as if Mckesson had “authorized, directed, or ratified” the decision to throw the rock. Indeed, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in a brief opinion accompanying the Court’s decision not to hear Mckesson, the Court recently reaffirmed the strong First Amendment protections enjoyed by people like Mckesson in Counterman v. Colorado (2023). That decision held that the First Amendment “precludes punishment” for inciting violent action “unless the speaker’s words were ‘intended’ (not just likely) to produce imminent disorder.”

The reason Claiborne protects protest organizers should be obvious. No one who organizes a mass event attended by thousands of people can possibly control the actions of all those attendees, regardless of whether the event is a political protest, a music concert, or the Super Bowl. So, if protest organizers can be sanctioned for the illegal action of any protest attendee, no one in their right mind would ever organize a political protest again. Indeed, as Fifth Circuit Judge Don Willett, who dissented from his court’s Mckesson decision, warned in one of his dissents, his court’s decision would make protest organizers liable for “the unlawful acts of counter-protesters and agitators.” So, under the Fifth Circuit’s rule, a Ku Klux Klansman could sabotage the Black Lives Matter movement simply by showing up at its protests and throwing stones.

The Fifth Circuit’s Mckesson decision is obviously wrong

Like Mckesson, Claiborne involved a racial justice protest that included some violent participants. In the mid-1960s, the NAACP launched a boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Mississippi. At least according to the state supreme court, some participants in this boycott “engaged in acts of physical force and violence against the persons and property of certain customers and prospective customers” of these white businesses. Indeed, one of the organizers of this boycott did far more to encourage violence than Mckesson is accused of in his case. Charles Evers, a local NAACP leader, allegedly said in a speech to boycott supporters that “if we catch any of you going in any of them racist stores, we’re gonna break your damn neck.”

With SCOTUS refusing to take up McKesson v. Doe, the 5th Circuit's insane anti-1st Amendment ruling that effectively bans mass protests remains in force for the 3 states covered in the 5th: Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

#SCOTUS #Deray McKesson #Protests #Black Lives Matter #5th Circuit Court #Texas #Louisiana #Mississippi #1st Amendment #Counterman v. Colorado #NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware #McKesson v. Doe

[saywhat-politics]

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.

On February 28, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could effectively make it legal for civilians to own automatic weapons capable of firing as many as nine bullets every second.

The case, known as Garland v. Cargill, involves bump stocks, devices that use a gun’s recoil to repeatedly fire the weapon. Bump stocks cause a semiautomatic firearm’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger, as the gun’s recoil causes it to jerk back and forth — repeatedly “bumping” the trigger and causing the gun to fire as if it were fully automatic.

#u.s. supreme court

[cogitoergofun]

In remarks following a��mass shooting at the Chiefs Super Bowl parade, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas made a pointed statement about how the tragedy was able to take place even with more than 800 police officers stationed at the parade to secure the area.

“That’s what happens with guns,” he said plainly.

At least one person was killed in the violence and 21 people — including 11 children — were injured. As of Thursday, police had detained three people and confiscated multiple firearms in connection with the shooting, which they attributed to an interpersonal dispute.

“Parades, rallies, schools, movies, it seems like almost nothing is safe,” Lucas added.

According to reports, the violence began as an argument and escalated. It was not a single-shooter targeted attack like the kind that often receives more media attention. That makes it more in line with the vast majority of shooting incidents in the US.

Lucas’s statements highlight the fact that the proliferation of guns and weak gun control policies have fueled the United States’s mass shooting crisis, including the latest instance of violence in Kansas City. They also explicitly acknowledge the fallacy of the “good guy with a gun” argument: the idea that adding armed security — rather than limiting access to guns — can keep people safe.

The US has problems with gun violence because it has a lot of guns

The US is unique among industrialized countries when it comes to the frequency of fatal gun violence.

According to CNN, which referenced the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a University of Washington global health research group, the proportion of homicides caused by gun violence in the US was 18 times that of the average of other developed countries in 2019.

Similarly, the number of firearms people own in the US far surpasses that of any other developed country. The US has about 120 firearms per 100 residents, much higher than Yemen, the next closest country, which has about 53 firearms per 100 residents, according to a 2018 study by the Swiss-based gun research project the Small Arms Survey.

As Vox has explained, multiple studies have directly linked the country’s number of firearms with the frequency of gun violence. “One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent,” my colleagues Nicole Narea, Ian Millhiser, and I wrote. “And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.”

The impact of gun violence has already been evident this year. In the first month and a half of 2024, 1,639 Americans have been killed by firearms and 2,223 have been injured, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive, a not-for-profit group that tracks US shootings.

In response to shootings, gun advocates often argue that more guns are the answer, that having a so-called “good guy with a gun” helps as they can stop a “bad guy with a gun.” That argument was advanced by gun advocates following a recent church shooting in Houston, in which off-duty officers shot and killed the suspected shooter.

And it’s a myth directly peddled by the gun lobby: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” former National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre previously said. As Lucas noted, however, despite the strong presence of armed security and law enforcement at the Chiefs parade, the shooting still occurred and resulted in injuries and a fatality.

“We had over 800 officers there, staffed, situated all around Union Station today. We had security in any number of places, eyes on top of buildings and beyond — and there still is a risk to people,” Lucas said. That’s not to say law enforcement and civilians didn’t help prevent the situation from being worse: Bystanders assisted in subduing one suspect, per reports, and police arrested at least one individual as well.

Research has shown that increasing the presence of “good guys with guns” is not a fully effective way to reduce gun violence. This is because police often aren’t able to respond in time and the attack has already occurred when they’re able to react. Per a Texas State University study, police were able to stop less than a third of active attacks — including shootings — between 2000 and 2022.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Supreme Court creates train wreck over Texas immigration law.

Over the last forty-eight hours, the Supreme Court has made a monumental mess of its review of a Texas law that seeks to assume control over the US border. If the consequences weren’t tragic, it would be comical.

The Texas law is plainly unconstitutional. It is not even a close question. But the Supreme Court created a situation in which enforcement of that law was stayed and then permitted to go back into effect multiple times in a forty-eighth hour period. It was like the Keystone Cops—all because the Supreme Court does not have the fortitude to control the rogue judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Here's the bottom line: As of late Tuesday evening, the Texas law cannot be enforced pending further order of the Fifth Circuit. See NBC News, Appeals court blocks Texas immigration law shortly after Supreme Court action. As explained by NBC,

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in saying in a brief order that the measure, known as SB4, should be blocked. The same court is hearing arguments Wednesday morning on the issue.

The appeals court appeared to be taking the hint from the Supreme Court, which in rejecting an emergency application filed by the Biden administration put the onus on the appeals court to act quickly.

I review the complicated procedural background below with a warning that it may change in the next five minutes. For additional detail, I recommend Ian Millhiser’s explainer in Vox, The Supreme Court’s confusing new border decision, explained.

Let’s start here: The federal government has exclusive authority to control international borders. The Constitution says so, and courts have ruled so for more than 150 years.

There are good reasons for the federal government to control international borders. If individual states impose contradictory regulations on international borders that abut the states, the federal government could not promulgate a single, coherent foreign policy—which is plainly the job of the federal government.

Texas passed a law that granted itself the right to police the southern border and enforce immigration laws, including permitting the arrest and deportation of immigrants in the US who do not have the legal authority to remain in the country.

Mexico immediately notified Texas that it would not accept any immigrants deported by Texas. (Mexico does accept immigrants deported by the US per international agreements.)

A federal district judge in Texas enjoined the enforcement of state law, ruling that it usurped the federal government's constitutional role. Texas appealed.

When a matter is appealed, the court of appeals generally attempts to “maintain the status quo” as it existed between the parties prior to the contested action. Here, maintaining the status quo meant not enforcing the Texas law that allowed Texas to strip the federal government of its constitutional authority over the border.

However, the Fifth Circuit used a bad-faith procedural ploy to suspend the district court’s injunction, thereby allowing Texas law to go into effect. In doing so, the Fifth Circuit did not “maintain the status quo” but instead permitted a radical restructuring of state-federal relations in a way that violated the Constitution and century-and-a-half of judicial precedent.

In a world where the rule of law prevails, the Supreme Court should have slapped down the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith gambit. It did not. Instead, the Supreme Court allowed the Fifth Circuit's bad-faith ploy to remain in effect—but warned the Fifth Circuit that the Supreme Court might, in the future, force the Fifth Circuit to stop playing games with the Constitution.

The debacle is an embarrassment to the Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit. The reason the Fifth Circuit acts like a lawless tribunal is because the Supreme Court has allowed the Fifth Circuit to engage in outrageous, extra-constitutional rulings without so much as a peep of protest from the reactionary majority on the Court.

John Roberts is “the Chief Justice of the United States.” He should start acting like it by reprimanding rogue judges in the Fifth Circuit by name—and referring them to the Judicial Conference for discipline. Until Roberts does that, the Fifth Circuit will do whatever it wants.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#robert b. hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #corrupt SCOTUS #Fifth Circuit #Chief Justice #legal precedent #Nick Anderson #immigration #Texas

[nodynasty4us]

I worry the ‘Biden is old’ coverage is starting to take on the same character as the 2016 But Her Emails coverage – find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the Democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.

Ian Millhiser, quoted in The Guardian

#joe biden #age #journalism

[dontfightyourwaralone]

#october 2023 #2023 #articles #vox #Ian Millhiser #supreme court #gun control

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

[palmtreepalmtree]

Twitter has caught on to my work-around for reading Ian Millhiser's tweets without signing up for Twitter and I'm bummed about that.

#this is my only social media platform #it's not loyalty #it's cause my mind is poisoned enough by you yahoos #i don't need to expose myself to the unhinged miscreants of twitter

[kp777]

By Ian Millhiser

Vox

Aug. 3, 2023

The state of Wisconsin does not choose its state legislature in free and fair elections, and it has not done so for a very long time. A new lawsuit, filed just one day after Democrats effectively gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, seeks to change that. The suit, known as Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeks to reverse gerrymanders that have all-but-guaranteed Republican control of the state legislature — no matter which party Wisconsin voters supported in the last election. In 2010, the Republican Party had its best performance in any recent federal election, gaining 63 seats in the US House of Representatives and making similar gains in many states. This election occurred right before a redistricting cycle, moreover — the Constitution requires every state to redraw its legislative maps every 10 years — so Republicans used their large majorities in many states to draw aggressive gerrymanders. Indeed, Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymander is so aggressive that it is practically impossible for Democrats to gain control of the state legislature. In 2018, for example, Democratic state assembly candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats — just three seats short of the two-thirds supermajority Republicans would need to override a gubernatorial veto. The judiciary, at both the state and federal levels, is complicit in this effort to lock Democrats out of power in Wisconsin. In Rucho v. Common Cause(2019), for example, the US Supreme Court held that no federal court may ever consider a lawsuit challenging a partisan gerrymander, overruling the Court’s previous decision in Davis v. Bandemer (1986). Three years later, Wisconsin drew new maps which were still very favorable to Republicans, but that included an additional Black-majority district — raising the number of state assembly districts with a Black majority from six to seven. These new maps did not last long, however, because the US Supreme Court struck them down in Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2022) due to concerns that these maps may have done too much to increase Black representation. In response to this US Supreme Court decision, the state Supreme Court, which was then controlled by Republicans, adopted another set of maps proposed by the state’s gerrymandered legislature — maps that had previously been vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. As Justice Jill Karofsky wrote in dissent, by implementing the new Republican maps over the governor’s veto, “this court judicially overrides the Governor’s veto, thus nullifying the will of the Wisconsin voters who elected that governor into office.”

Read more.

#wisconsin #gerrymandering #wisconsin supreme court #republicans cheat

[arcticdementor]

Two events occurred Monday night — one historic, the other rather insignificant — which placed an unflattering spotlight on the Supreme Court of the United States.

The historic event was that Politico published an unprecedented leak of a draft majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, which would overrule Roe v. Wade and permit state lawmakers to ban abortion in its entirety in the US. Alito’s draft opinion is not the Court’s final word on this case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but the leaked opinion is the latest in a long list of signs that Roe may be in its final days.

The other event that also occurred last night is that I sent two tweets. One praised whoever leaked Alito’s opinion for disrupting an institution that, as I have written about many times in many forums, including my first book, has historically been a malign force within the United States. And a second celebrated the leak for the distrust it might foster in such a malign institution.

Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said “fuck it! Let’s burn this place down.”

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) May 3, 2022

…

The fact that someone inside the Court’s very small circle of trust apparently decided to leak a draft opinion is likely to be perceived by the justices, as SCOTUSBlog tweeted out Monday night, as “the gravest, most unforgivable sin.”

To this I say, “good.” If the Court does what Alito proposed in his draft opinion, and overrules Roe v. Wade, that decision will be the culmination of a decades-long effort by Republicans to capture the institution and use it, not just to undercut abortion rights but also to implement an unpopular agenda they cannot implement through the democratic process.

…

This behavior, moreover, is consistent with the history of an institution that once blessed slavery and described Black people as “beings of an inferior order.” It is consistent with the Court’s history of union-busting, of supporting racial segregation, and of upholding concentration camps.

Moreover, while the present Court is unusually conservative, the judiciary as an institution has an inherent conservative bias. Courts have a great deal of power to strike down programs created by elected officials, but little ability to build such programs from the ground up. Thus, when an anti-governmental political movement controls the judiciary, it will likely be able to exploit that control to great effect. But when a more left-leaning movement controls the courts, it is likely to find judicial power to be an ineffective tool.

The Court, in other words, simply does not deserve the reverence it still enjoys in much of American society, and especially from the legal profession. For nearly all of its history, it’s been a reactionary institution, a political one that serves the interests of the already powerful at the expense of the most vulnerable. And it currently appears to be reverting to that historic mean.

…

In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Supreme Court held that it has the power to strike down federal laws. But the actual issue at stake in Marbury — whether a single individual named to a low-ranking federal job was entitled to that appointment — was insignificant. And, after Marbury, the Court’s power to strike down federal laws lay dormant until the 1850s.

Then came Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the pro-slavery decision describing Black people as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Dred Scott, the Court’s very first opinion striking down a significant federal law, went after the Missouri Compromise’s provisions limiting the scope of slavery.

It’s not surprising that an institution made up entirely of elite lawyers, who are immune from political accountability and cannot be fired, tends to protect people who are already powerful and cast a much more skeptical eye on people who are marginalized because of their race, gender, or class. Dred Scott is widely recognized as the worst decision in the Court’s history, but it began a nearly century-long trend of Supreme Court decisions preserving white supremacy and relegating workers into destitution — a history that is glossed over in most American civics classes.

…

The culmination of this age of white supremacist jurisprudence was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which blessed the idea of “separate but equal.” Plessy remained good law for nearly six decades after it was decided.

After decisions like Plessy effectively dismantled the Reconstruction Amendments’ promise of racial equality, the Court spent the next 40 years transforming the 14th Amendment into a bludgeon to be used against labor. This was the age of decisions like Lochner v. New York (1905), which struck down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking their workers. It was also the age of decisions like Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), which struck down minimum wage laws, and Adair v. United States (1908), which prohibited lawmakers from protecting the right to unionize.

The logic of decisions like Lochner is that the 14th Amendment’s language providing that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” created a “right to contract.” And that this supposed right prohibited the government from invalidating exploitative labor contracts that forced workers to labor for long hours with little pay.

As Alito notes in his draft opinion overruling Roe, the Roe opinion did rely on a similar methodology to Lochner. It found the right to an abortion to also be implicit in the 14th Amendment’s due process clause.

For what it’s worth, I actually find this portion of Alito’s opinion persuasive. I’ve argued that the Roe opinion should have been rooted in the constitutional right to gender equality — what the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once described as the “opportunity women will have to participate as men’s full partners in the nation’s social, political, and economic life” — and not the extraordinarily vague and easily manipulated language of the due process clause.

…

The Court also did not exactly cover itself in glory after President Franklin Roosevelt filled it with New Dealers who rejected decisions like Lochner and Hammer. One of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the Roosevelt era, for example, was Korematsu v. United States (1944), the decision holding that Japanese Americans could be forced into concentration camps during World War II, for the sin of having the wrong ancestors.

The point is that decisions like Alito’s draft Dobbs opinion, which would commandeer the bodies of millions of Americans — or decisions dismantling the Voting Rights Act — are entirely consistent with the Court’s history as defender of traditional hierarchies. Alito is not an outlier in the Court’s history. He is quite representative of the justices who came before him.

…

So, to summarize my argument, the judiciary, for reasons laid out by Rosenberg and others, structurally favors conservatives. People who want to dismantle government programs can accomplish far more, when they control the courts, than people who want to build up those programs. And, as the Court’s history shows, when conservatives do control the Court, they use their power to devastating effect.

This alone is a reason for liberals, small-d democrats, large-D Democrats, and marginalized groups more broadly, to take a more critical eye to the courts. And the judiciary’s structural conservatism is augmented by the fact that, in the United States, institutions like the Electoral College and Senate malapportionment give Republicans a huge leg up in the battle for control of the judiciary.

Of course I do not believe that we should literally light the Supreme Court of the United States on fire, but I do believe that diminished public trust in the Court is a good thing. This institution has not served the American people well, and it’s time to start treating it that way.

#ian millhiser #vox.com #scotus