Thursday Open Thread

8 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. JD is the Caricature of the Republican Man. TPM

   What On Earth?

   JD Vance is coming into focus as a living breathing embodiment of the caricature of the Republican man as obsessed with controlling women’s bodies and eager to reduce the complexities of human relations to late-night-dorm-room-debate levels of sophistication. Heavy on bombast, light on normal. The more sweeping and reductive the assertions, the better!

   The latest example is a resurfaced podcast interview of Vance from 2020, before he ran for U.S. Senate in 2022. In fairness, it’s the host, not Vance, saying the weirdest stuff. But Vance doesn’t argue or pushback, let alone bail on the interview. He actually seems to agree with some of the more whackadoodle assertions by the interviewer and uses them to launch into a screed against neo-liberalism predicated on the “transgressiveness” of his Indian mother-in-law showing up to help with his and wife’s newborn

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2. “It’s like if you learned that your daughter’s third-grade teacher gave her cocaine.” Ian Milhiser at Vox.com

   This is essential reading. Milhiser discusses four of the worst SCOTUS decisions in depth.

   Some acts of betrayal are so profound that they shatter your ability to trust someone again and cause you to rethink every single thing they’ve done in the past — even the good things.

   How do you solve a problem like Trump v. United States?

   The Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Trump, which held that presidents have sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for any official act — even something like ordering the Justice Department to round up and arrest their political foes — is such an unimaginable betrayal of the justices’ oath to “administer justice without respect to persons” that it casts a shadow over every decision these justices have ever handed down.

   Under the Trump decision, a president who took advantage of the powers that decision grants would be the type of dictator the United States’ political structure is meant to guard against — a leader fully incompatible with the idea of constitutional democracy.

   That easily makes Trump the worst decision the Roberts Court has ever handed down, but it is only the latest in a series of decisions that weaken our democracy and our Constitution.

   In the few years since former President Donald Trump remade the Supreme Court, the Court’s new majority has allowed states to nullify entire constitutional rights. They’ve claimed so much power that they now effectively control both the judiciary and most of the executive branch — they’ve literally given themselves a veto power over any regulatory decision made by a federal agency — of the federal government. And as they’ve done so, they’ve thrown lower courts into chaos by creating nonsensical new legal standards judges across the nation have struggled to follow.

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   1. Milhiser continues:

      Roe v. Wade, for example, fell because the Republican Party unified around treating Roe as illegitimate. State lawmakers routinely passed legislation defying it, and forced the courts to strike that legislation down. These legal fights, in turn, reinforced the Republican Party’s identity as the anti-abortion party and reminded voters who oppose abortion that the way to end Roe was to vote for the GOP.

      Similar things can be said about other Supreme Court precedents which until recently were good law, including the Court’s affirmative action decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), its mostly overruled decision establishing that religious conservatives have to follow the same laws as everyone else in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), its church/state separation decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), and its decision limiting the scope of the Court’s policymaking authority in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council (1984).

      In all of these cases, the basic pattern is the same. Republicans — whether at the grassroots level or through elite groups like the Federalist Society — identified the cases they wanted to destroy. They united in opposition to them. They appointed justices who would loyally follow the GOP’s judicial agenda. And then they won.

      This is a playbook those concerned about the current Court’s anti-democratic tendencies can follow, but it also requires them to unite much like Republicans did.

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   2. Trump v. United States

      Trump v. United States (2024) is the rare Supreme Court decision that grows more alarming as you dig deeper into the nuance of the decision.

      The six Republican justices held that Trump, a man who literally tried to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States, had broad freedom to commit crimes while he was in office and that he would also be free to violate criminal laws if he returned to the White House.

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   3. Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson

      Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021) established that any state can neutralize literally any constitutional right, simply by writing a law that is enforced solely by private bounty hunters.

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   4. Biden v. Nebraska

      Biden v. Nebraska (2023) involved a significant policy dispute between the Democratic and Republican parties. The Biden administration announced a new policy that would have forgiven at least $10,000 worth of student loans for most borrowers. Republicans almost universally opposed this policy.

      Reasonable people can disagree about who was right about the wisdom of this policy. But there’s no plausible argument that the Biden administration’s policy was illegal. The loan forgiveness policy was authorized by a federal law known as the Heroes Act, which gives the US secretary of education the power to forgive student loans during a national crisis.

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   5. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen

      At least on the surface, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), a Second Amendment decision that cast a cloud of uncertainty over every single gun law in the United States, has a greater claim to legitimacy than the other cases on this list. Unlike, say, the major questions doctrine, the Second Amendment is a real thing that actually can be found somewhere in the Constitution.

      The Republican justices’ decision in Bruen, moreover, is an unworkable mess. One federal judge, a Trump appointee, complained that “the Supreme Court has created mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.” Another judge wrote that Bruen is “filled with methodological flaws.” In a 2024 opinion criticizing Bruen, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions begging the Court to tell them how Bruen is supposed to work. One of them warns that “courts, operating in good faith, are struggling at every stage of the Bruen inquiry.”

      Briefly, Bruen held that all gun laws are unconstitutional unless the government can “demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” As the lower courts’ confusion shows, no one seems to know what the hell that means.

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3. Just a thought about the proposed Harris Trump debates.

   After some back and forth the orange turd campaign has proposed a Sept 4 debate on Fox, a Sept 10 debate on ABC and a Sept 25 debate on NBC.

   The Harris campaign hasn't agreed to the Sept 4 debate on Fox, and I think for a good reason. Who wants to bet that if The Harris folks agree to this Dumpy will promise to attend all 3 debates, will show up to the Fox debate with his goon squad cheer section, then claim total victory based on that debate and then will refuse to attend the other two. 

   It's what he does. Just give me this first and I'll give you that later. No. 

    

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