I can assuredly say that everyone I know has been so worn down by the Trump years that I cannot imagine this election season could get any worse than the last four. But, the more Trump wannabes enter races and the likelihood that Trump will prevail in the Republican party means that Republicans will amp up the campaign rhetoric as well as the trash passed by the House. Their infighting spills into the news also. Get ready to stock up on all your comfort items! It’s not even Labor Day, and the Crazy Train has left the station.
You might think, in a two-party democracy where the man who is a dead-on bet to be the presidential nominee of one of those parties has all but pledged to wipe out said democracy and promised to use his second term to destroy all internal enemies, that the rest of the society would band together to try to prevent that from happening.
That Donald Trump has so pledged is, to everyone who is not a supporter of his, beyond dispute. He has stated many times some version of his belief that “the greatest threat to Western civilization” is “some of the horrible, USA-hating people” in our midst, by which he means the many millions who disagree with him. When he was president, his people were preparing a plan for a possible second term that involved firing thousands of government employees and replacing them with staff loyal to him. He called for the termination of the Constitution’s rules that allowed Joe Biden to win in 2020, even though those rules worked properly to elect the person who won. He led a riot against the U.S. government to overthrow the election results. He calls the press the “enemy of the people.” There’s no telling what a new Trump term would bring. Our democracy would be disfigured at best and, at worst, destroyed.
You’d think people would take that pretty seriously. If we were all watching a Star Trek episode in which a teetering democratic society faced an imminent, dangerous threat, we’d be cheering for the society to come to its senses and work in unison to defeat the threat. That’s what should be happening in real life. But instead, a lot of people have chosen this moment, when the democracy is hanging by a few tattered threads and its future depends directly on the result of next year’s election, to say, Hey, let’s have some fun!This is all a game anyway.
Well, it’s not a game. And it’s astonishing to me that people can be so blithe about it. Let’s look at four (or four and a half) examples.
First, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decided that this is the right time to run a quixotic and corrosive presidential campaign whose end result can only be to fuel cynicism not just about Biden but about the whole system. That’s the inevitable outcome when a crackpot conspiracy theorist who spouts nothing but lies is given a platform like the one Kennedy now has.
His latest WTF moment, that Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasian and Black people” and that Jewish and Chinese people were most immune, may finally have signaled to the political-media establishment that this guy should not be indulged any further. Let us hope so. He won’t come close to winning the nomination. His support has slipped since the spring—he’s been polling at single digits in some state polls.
That isn’t the threat. The threat is that his out-there beliefs and cuckoo theories and refusal to denounce expressions of support from right-wing extremists up to and including Alex Jones (in his recent interview with David Remnick) lend support to the Trumpian view of the world. If his Democratic support ends up being a disgruntled 6 or 7 percent, without him on the November ballot, won’t the bulk of that 6 or 7 percent turn to the guy who sounds most like him? And in Wisconsin, Georgia, and a few other close states, that could be the ball game.
The top contributors to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign included donors who typically give to Republicans, according to campaign finance filings — underscoring the extent to which Kennedy, running as a Democrat, is resonating with the other party.
Kennedy’s campaign committee reported raising $6.3 million since his April launch, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday. He spent $1.8 million and had $4.5 million cash on hand as of June 30.
Some of that money came from donors who have more recently supported Republicans. Kennedy’s campaign raked in at least $100,000 from donors who previously gave to committees associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former President Donald Trump, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal and state campaign finance filings. The analysis is based solely on Kennedy’s itemized donations, although he also raised more than $2 million from small-dollar donors, whose names the campaign does not have to disclose.
Such crossover giving is unusual, but Kennedy is running on a platform that includes opposition to efforts to vaccinate against Covid-19, which is increasingly resonating with the Republican base. Though there has been an uptick in vaccine skepticism in recent years, the biggest increases tend to be among voters who identify as Republican.
Kennedy has also been a frequent guest on Fox News since launching his campaign in April, criticizing President Joe Biden on issues including the war in Ukraine and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the donors who maxed out donating to Kennedy despite having recent histories of giving to Republicans is banking executive Omeed Malik, who Axios reported is hosting separate fundraisers for DeSantis and Kennedy in the Hamptons this summer.
We can always hope he drains voters from DeSantis, but DeSantis is doing a great job of that on his own.
This is from the Traister analysis. “RFK Jr.’s Inside Job. How a conspiracy-spewing literal Kennedy posing as a populist outsider jolted the Democratic Party.”
But they aren’t the only ones who took exploitative advantage of the suffering of millions: Kennedy’s vilification of Fauci as a fascist sold more than 1 million copies, and his public profile grew with his every outsize utterance, including that vaccine mandates “will make you a slave” and that “even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” a nadir so low that even his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, had to issue a statement condemning it.
But however off-kilter he sounded — indeed, precisely because he was extra off-kilter in his attacks on lockdowns and vaccines and masks — Kennedy’s COVID performance became the springboard that launched his current campaign against Biden for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2024. Kennedy kicked off his bid in Boston in April, addressing a roomful of people cheering and holding signs with his name in the air. He had the look of a man getting the reception he’d been waiting for his whole life, and his extemporaneous remarks stretched to almost two hours, his expensive education and resemblance to his famous forebears covering for quite a bit of rambling. “He can look and sound so thoughtful and contemplative,” said one person who has known him a very long time. “And he’s just bursting with madness.” Kennedy soon began polling at an eye-catching nearly 20 percent in multiple surveys, and though a recent New Hampshire poll showed him at 9 percent in June, he earned higher favorability numbers in an Economist-YouGov poll than either Biden or Donald Trump.
He has spent the summer traveling to every dark-web–cancel-cultured–just-asking-questions–anti-woke whistle-stop that’ll have him, appearing on podcasts with Bari Weiss, Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, and Jordan Peterson, among others. He can count among his reply guys and fans (and, in some cases, early endorsers) a clutch of Silicon Valley CEOs and financiers, including hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman; venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks; and Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, the current and former overlords of Twitter, respectively. He has been friendly with many in the media, including Salon founder and former editor-in-chief David Talbot and Rolling Stone co-founder and longtime editor Jann Wenner. Kennedy’s campaign manager is Dennis Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor and Ohio congressman. A super-PAC called American Values 2024 has reportedly raised millions in support of Kennedy’s campaign, and Sacks held a fundraising dinner for him in June for which diners paid $10,000 a ticket. Kennedy’s drive to speak his mind has been praised by those on the far right, including Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, and some on the self-described left, like Matt Taibbi and Max Blumenthal.
Kennedy crowed to me about his horseshoe coalition gathered round a campaign he views as fundamentally populist. And it’s quite a band he has put together: crunchy Whole Foods–shopping anti-vaxxers, paunchy architects of hard-right authoritarianism looking to boost a chaos agent, Nader-Stein third-party perma-gremlins, some Kennedy-family superfans, and rich tech bros seeking a lone wolf to legitimize them. Their convening can give the impression of weightiness, but if you so much as blew on them, the alliance would shatter into a million pieces. The only thing that seems to bind them is Kennedy, the current embodiment of a warped fantasy of marginalization and martyrdom that has become ever more appealing — and thus politically significant — in an age of disinformation and distrust in government and institutions.
But nobody who covers elections (including us) seems to be taking Williamson and Kennedy particularly seriously. So I come to the FiveThirtyEight brain trust with two questions today:
There’s plainly some kind of appetite for a non-Biden candidate on the Democratic side — so why are oddball candidates like Williamson and Kennedy the only ones who have jumped in?
Are we underestimating Williamson and Kennedy’s ability to make Biden’s life difficult as we get closer to the Democratic primaries?
nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Interesting, Amelia, I’m not sure I agree with your premise there! I think a lot of people are taking Williamson and Kennedy more seriously than I’d like them to.
ameliatd: ((Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior reporter) Ooh, we’re bickering already! I love it. Please say more …
nrakich: Basically, they’re being covered like serious candidates. Reporters are going to their rallies and writing exposés on them. Even if they say they are extreme long-shot candidates, they aren’t treating them that way. Actions speak louder than words.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has started cutting campaign staff just months into his presidential bid, as he has struggled to gain traction in the Republican primary and lost ground in some public polls to former President Donald J. Trump.
The exact number of people let go by the DeSantis team was unclear, but one campaign aide said it was fewer than 10. The development was earlier reported by Politico.
The dismissals are an ominous sign for the campaign and also underscore the challenges that Mr. DeSantis faces with both his fund-raising and his spending, at a time when a number of major donors who had expressed interest in him have grown concerned about his performance.
[…]
Mr. DeSantis’s struggles appear to be not just about the numbers, but also with the campaign’s message. Late last week, two top DeSantis advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, were announced to be leaving to join an outside group supporting Mr. DeSantis.
Mr. DeSantis’s campaign finance disclosure with the Federal Election Commission shows he raised roughly $20 million but spent almost $8 million, a so-called burn rate that leaves him with just $12 million in cash on hand. Only about $9 million of that cash can be spent in the primary, with the rest counting toward the general election if he is the nominee.
The filing indicated a surprisingly large staff for a campaign so early in a candidacy, particularly for one with a super PAC that has made a show of how much of the load it is prepared to handle. More than $1 million in expenditures were listed as “payroll” and payroll processing.
Ah, the “burning tons of cash to go backward” trajectory. To be fair, there is no precedent for a Florida Republican becoming an establishment darling, raising lots of money, and having his presidential campaign become a pathetic joke.
Former President Trump’s campaign described Iowa state Sen. Jeff Reichman (R) as “lily-livered” for flipping his endorsement to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) following Trump’s attack on Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) earlier this week.
In a statement to The Hill, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung stated, “There is no room for weak-kneed and lily-livered people on Team Trump.”
Reichman, an Iraq veteran, announced Thursday he would be flipping his endorsement of Trump, and backing DeSantis instead. The state senator, who is serving his first term in Iowa’s upper chamber, was included on a list of around a dozen Iowa officials who the Trump campaign considered early endorsers of the former president.
In his statement, Cheung goes on to claim DeSantis is “so desperate that he’s willing to offer buyouts in the form of fundraisers for endorsements.”
“The truth is that those who have been promised financial support are now regretting their deal with the devil because none of them have been able to schedule fundraisers with DeSantis,” the statement continued.
Reichman’s decision to flip support comes days after Trump lashed out at Reynolds on Truth Social on Monday for not endorsing a presidential candidate in the 2024 election. The social media post followed a New York Times report describing the Trump campaign’s frustration with Reynolds’s multiple appearances with DeSantis during his stops in Iowa.
Crow’s lawyer argues that Congress has no authority to probe the GOP donor’s generosity and that doing so violates a constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the Supreme Court.
Members of Congress say there are federal tax laws underlying their interest and a known propensity by the ultrarich to use their yachts to skirt those laws.
Tax data obtained by ProPublica provides a glimpse of what congressional investigators would find if Crow were to open his books to them. Crow’s voyages with Thomas, the data shows, contributed to a nice side benefit: They helped reduce Crow’s tax bill.
The rich, as we’ve reported, often deduct millions of dollars from their taxes related to buying and operating their jets and yachts. Crow followed that formula through a company that purported to charter his superyacht. But a closer examination of how Crow used the yacht raises questions about his compliance with the tax code, experts said. Despite Crow’s representations to the IRS, ProPublica reporters could find no evidence that his yacht company was actually a profit-seeking business, as the law requires.
“Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,” said Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “These new details only raise more questions about Mr. Crow’s tax practices, which could begin to explain why he’s been stonewalling the Finance Committee’s investigation for months.”
Crow, through a spokesperson, declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions.
So, ‘Ain’t That Pretty at All.’
Well, I’ve seen all there is to see And I’ve heard all they have to say I’ve done everything I wanted to do . . . I’ve done that too And it ain’t that pretty at all Ain’t that pretty at all So I’m going to hurl myself against the wall ‘Cause I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
Warren Zevon
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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There’s quite a bit happening in politics news today, even though it is kind of a long holiday weekend with a Monday in between. I’ll bet plenty of working people are taking Monday off. I’m retired now; but whenever there’s a holiday weekend, I get the same feelings I used to when I was working. It feels like a time to goof off–maybe laze around reading a good book or binge watching something on TV. It’s a time to relax in the peaceful knowledge that you’re not required to be anywhere or do anything in particular.
Here in Boston, the Fourth of July weekend means lots of folks will be headed for Cape Cod or New Hampshire, and the city will be eerily quiet in the daytime. When I first moved to Boston from Indiana, I dutifully got a Massachusetts driver’s license; but I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t have to brave the insane Boston traffic. Eventually, I decided I wanted to learn to handle Boston driving even though I was terrified. I waited until the Fourth of July weekend, and drove all over downtown on empty streets to practice and build my confidence.
Yesterday, I started getting that holiday weekend feeling again. I can’t explain it any more than I can explain how I get that back to school feeling in the fall. I guess repeated experiences have formed pathways in my brain that are triggered by certain times of the year.
I feels like there should be a dearth of political news, too, but that’s not the case. It’s another very busy news day. There’s news of another “perfect” phone call by Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election. And of course, there are plenty of reactions to the most recent Supreme Court decisions.
In a phone call in late 2020,President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’spresidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the call.
Trump also repeatedly asked Vice President Mike Pence to call Ducey and prod him to find the evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, according to two of these people. Pence called Ducey several times to discuss the election, they said, though he did not follow Trump’s directions to pressure the governor.
The extent of Trump’s efforts to cajole Ducey into helping him stay in power have not before been reported, even as other efforts by Trump’s lawyer and allies to pressure Arizona officials have been made public….
By Indira Baldano
Trump phoned the governor’s cellphone on Nov. 30,2020, as Ducey was in the middle of signing documents certifying President Biden’s win in the state during a live-streamed video ceremony. Trump’s outreach was immediately clear to those watching. They heard “Hail to the Chief” play on the governor’s ringtone. Ducey pulled his phone from out of his suit jacket, muted the incoming call and put his phone aside. On Dec. 2,he told reporters he spoke to the president after the ceremony,buthe declined to fully detail the nature of the conversation. Ducey said the president had “an inquisitive mind”but did not ask the governor to withhold his signature certifying the election results.
But four people familiar with the call said Trump spoke specifically about his shortfall of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona and then espoused a range of false claims that would show he overwhelmingly won the election in the state and encouraged Ducey to study them. At the time, Trump’s attorneys and allies spread false claims to explain his loss, including that voters who had died and noncitizens had cast ballots.
After Trump’s call to Ducey, Trump directed Pence, a former governor who had known Ducey for years, to frequently check in with the governor for any progress on uncovering claims of voting improprieties, according to two people with knowledge of the effort.
Pence was expected to report back his findings and was peppered with conspiracy theories from Trump and his team,the person said. Pence did not pressure Ducey, but told him to please call if he found anything because Trump was looking for evidence, according to those familiar with the calls.
Like officials in Georgia, Ducey told Trump there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in his state. Trump then began attacking Ducey publicly and shifted his efforts to using Rudy Giuliani to convince the Arizona legislature to find the “fraud” for him.
The article says that Ducey has not been contacted by the Special Counsel’s team, but he has interviewed other Arizona officials.
More than half a dozen past and current officials in Arizona contacted by Trump or his allies after his defeat have either been interviewed by Smith’s team or have received grand jury subpoenas seeking records,according to four people familiar with the interviews.Those interviewed include Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, and three current members of the governing board of Maricopa County, the largest voting jurisdiction in the state that affirmed that Biden won.
Spokespeople for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D), told The Post this week that their offices have not received correspondence from Smith’s team seeking records about the 2020 election. The Arizona Secretary of State’s office received a grand jury subpoena dated Nov. 22, 2022, that sought information about communications with Trump, his campaign and his representatives, according to an official familiar with the document but not authorized to publicly speak about it.
Reactions to Recent SCOTUS Rulings
There is a massive amount of discussion of the garbage rulings the Supreme Court issued this week. The student loan forgiveness case is getting a great deal of attention, as is the case of the web designer who used a fake customer and a non-existent wedding website to get the court to decide she could discriminate against gay couples. Dakinikat wrote a terrific post yesterday about several of the latest decisions, so I’m just going to follow that with some of the latest reactions from Court observers. If you haven’t read Dakinikat’s post, I highly recommend it.
When five conservative justices on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the right to an abortion in 2022, it signaled a new era for the court’s conservatism, one in which none of the rights and policies that emerged from the 20th century appeared safe.
By Valentin Gubarev
It also spawned a debate over the internal dynamics of that conservative supermajority. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join his fellow conservatives in overturning Roe. Had Roberts lost control of the court to the conservative ultras like Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito? Would he regain control in the next term?
The decisions released at the close of the court’s most recent term in June ― ending affirmative action in higher education, declaring a new right to discriminate against gay couples and voiding President Joe Biden’s plan for student loan debt relief ― present a different question: Does it even matter if Roberts is in the driver’s seat?
The conservative movement that built this court has long sought to roll back the legal and policy advances meant to blunt historic bigotries and discrimination, as well as the ability of the federal government to aid people harmed by the power of private capital. And they are continuing on that path whether Roberts or the ultra cohort runs the court.
At first, the conservative movement hoped that Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 would allow them to sweep away the policies of both the New Deal and the 1960s and 1970s, but they could not consolidate political power to do so through the legislative and executive branches. Instead, they launched a legal movement to win control of the judiciary and enact their policies outside of the political process.
That is what they have done over the last decade. They gutted the Voting Rights Act, first in 2013 and again in 2021. They blew a hole in restrictions on religious prayer in schools in 2022. And, of course, ended protections for reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Their progress continued this term.
Blumenthal addresses how each of the recent decisions of this illegitimate court have continued the work of erasing the gains of the last century. Read the rest of his arguments at HuffPo.
On Thursday, Justice Neil Gorsuch released a 26-page opinion venting outrage about a legal dispute that does not exist, involving websites that do not exist. Yet this case, built on imaginary grounds, will have very real consequences for LGBTQ consumers, and for anti-discrimination laws more broadly. All of the Court’s Republican appointees joined Gorsuch’s opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis.
That said, the fake dispute that Gorsuch imagines in his 303 Creative opinion involves a reasonably narrow legal question….
The case centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who wishes to expand her business into designing wedding websites — something she has never done before. She says she’s reluctant to do so, however, because she fears that if she designs such a website for an opposite-sex couple, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law will compel her to also design wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Smith objects to same-sex marriages.
As Gorsuch summarizes her claim, Smith “worries that, if she [starts designing wedding websites,] Colorado will force her to express views with which she disagrees.”
This is not a religious liberty claim, it is a free speech claim, rooted in well-established law, which says that the First Amendment forbids the government from compelling people to say something that they would rather not say. In ruling in Smith’s favor, the Court does not say that any religious conservative can defy any anti-discrimination law. It simply holds that someone like Smith, who publishes words for a living, may refuse to say something they don’t want to say.
The problem is that Smith brought her case using a fake customer who never requested a service she never offered. Back to the Millhiser piece:
Before this case was argued, I wrote that if Lorie Smith had been approached by a same-sex couple and refused to design a wedding website for them, and if she had then been sued for refusing to do so, then she would have a very strong First Amendment defense against such a suit. As the Supreme Court said in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And that includes the right of a web designer to refuse to write words on a website that they do not wish to write.
But none of these events have actually happened. And, for that reason, the Supreme Court should have dismissed the case.
The frustrating thing about this case is that it involves an entirely fabricated legal dispute. Again, Lorie Smith has never actually made a wedding website for a paying customer. Nor has Colorado ever attempted to enforce its civil rights law against Ms. Smith. Indeed, in its brief to the Supreme Court, Colorado expressed doubt that its anti-discrimination law would even apply to Smith.
Is this Gorsuch’s effort to set up a precedent for allowing businesses to discriminate against protected classes? And isn’t this decision based on fraud, since we now know that the customer Smith identified never contacted her and is already married and not gay?
Consequences for fabricating a court case: DOJ: It’s a crime to lie to a court. Roberts: litigants who file false filings can be removed from SCT bar and disbarred. https://t.co/TueVHfD9fM
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) July 1, 2023
Approximately 43 million Americans were made between $10,000 and $20,000 poorer today (plus interest) thanks to six Republican lawyers from Harvard and Yale. They decided that a program based on a statute intended to modify student loan balances in the event of an emergency could not modify student loan balances in the event of the COVID-19 emergency. And they did it by claiming that a plaintiff was injured by this program, when that plaintiff did not petition the Court over its injury, had no involvement in the case, and would likely not be injured by the program.
This is the upside-down world in which the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program. Advocates and members of Congress are now calling for a Plan B, to enact debt relief by some other means; for various reasons, I doubt that the administration will take that opportunity. But what should not be ignored is the way in which the nation’s highest court relies on dodgy theories and facts not in evidence to make the pronouncements it wants….
By Susan Visser
The plaintiffs in the two student loan cases, one of which was so preposterous that it was thrown out unanimously for lack of standing (that was the one where two borrowers said they didn’t have a chance to make public comment to get more debt relief, and that the remedy should be that nobody gets debt relief), simply didn’t like that borrowers would have some debt canceled, on ideological grounds. Nobody seriously contests this as their aim. But in American law, at least in theory, you have to have standing to sue: A party would have to be harmed by 43 million people getting debt relief, and eliminating the debt relief would have to redress this harm.
The Roberts Court, with the chief justice writing for the majority, believes they found one in the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a student loan servicer that stands to lose $44 million in servicing fees from debts that would be wholly canceled, according to the state of Missouri’s calculations. There’s one problem: MOHELA is not a plaintiff in the case. MOHELA in fact didn’t know about the case until hearing news reports, played no role in the case, opposed the case from being brought, and would not give the state of Missouri evidence for the case until required by state sunshine laws. We know all this from internal documents and public statements by MOHELA.
Even if MOHELA went ahead and sued, the contract they signed to accept federal student loans for servicing stipulates explicitly that the government has “sole discretion” to remove contracts from servicers, that the contractor cannot “object or protest,” and that the contractor “waives and releases all current or future claims” related to this. Perhaps this is why MOHELA did not sue in this case. Moreover, MOHELA stood to gain from debt cancellation on net, because it would get an estimated $61 million in fees to process forgiveness (more than Missouri said they would lose), and it would eliminate legal liability from botching Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) claims, and many of those loans would have been extinguished in debt cancellation.
The Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan in a 6–3 decision on Friday that rewrites federal law to create a bespoke, extra-textual prohibition on the large-scale cancellation of student debt. Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision in Biden v. Nebraska blazed past a clearly insurmountable standing problem to scold the president for even trying to use the law according to its own plain terms in order to offer mass debt relief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also chastised Justice Elena Kagan for her “disturbing” suggestion, in dissent, that the majority had gone “beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” The decision boils down to the chief justice’s obvious disdain for student debt relief—which is perhaps why he interpreted Kagan’s criticism as, in his words, a “personal” affront….
By Indira Baldano
The biggest question in the case was whether anyone could establish standing to challenge the program in the first place. After all, the federal government itself holds this debt, and no one is obviously “injured” by the government helping somebody else by erasing their debt. (In a separate case decided on Friday, the court unanimously held that two people who oppose the plan had no standing to sue.) Missouri tried to get around this problem by fixating on MOHELA, a corporation created by the state that services student loans. The Missouri attorney general asserted that MOHELA would suffer financially because of Biden’s plan—which turns out to be false—and that the state itself could represent its interests in court. A key flaw in this reasoning is that MOHELA is an independent entity from Missouri that could have sued to defend its own interests, but refused to do so, and even refused to help Missouri “represent” it in court. (State officials had to file public records requests to obtain key information because MOHELA did not want to participate in this case at all.)
Roberts didn’t care about any of that. MOHELA is “an instrumentality of Missouri,” he wrote, and Biden’s plan “will cut MOHELA’s revenues.” (Again: provably false!) So, according to Roberts and the court’s five other hard-line conservatives, the state had established standing.
This is so similar to what Gorsuch did in the fake marriage website case! The right wing justices can’t wait for legitimate cases to be brought; they have to search for fake ones, because they are desperate to return our country to the bad old days of Jim Crow and white male dominance.
Elena Kagan wasn’t having it.
Kagan pulled no punches in response. “From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” she wrote. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.” She skewered the idea that Missouri and MOHELA are interchangeable, citing the Missouri Supreme Court’s own declaration that they are not. And she eviscerated the majority for “wielding the major-questions sword” to overrule “legislative judgments” that belong to the political branches.
Congress had better watch out, because the Court is working to displace them. Just wait until they get control of the power of the purse!
The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.
Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit. “We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.
By Tara Dougans
It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen per cent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.
Challengers to the law argued that the policy was unconstitutional because it bore the “discriminatory taint” from the 1890 constitution. One of the plaintiffs was Roy Harness, a social worker in his late 60s who is permanently barred from voting because he was convicted of forgery decades ago. Forgery was one of the original crimes included in the list of disenfranchising offenses.
“It makes me feel bad. I’ve served my country, nation … got a degree and [I] still can’t vote, no matter what you do to prove yourself,” Harness told the Guardian in 2022.
Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back. To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications, and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.
Read more details at The Guardian.
I’ll end there and share a few more stories in the comments. Have a great Fourth of July sort of weekend!
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Before women could Vote. On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was passed. It took more legal effort to enfranchise indigenous women and women of color.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
My daughters say “Oh Boomer” to me a lot. It used to be “Oh, Mutherrrr.” Their perpetual disappointment in me has morphed as much as their Grandfather’s Republican party and its adherents have morphed into something quite monstrous. I tell them not to blame me for this mess.
In utero and baby Jean attended ERA rallies all around the Midwest. In utero, developing fetus Jean was blessed by Maya Angelou, Kate Millett, and Bette Friedan. I worked hard in high school and college to change the sexual assault laws in my state and also tried to find ways to bring women of color together with the primarily white feminist movement to ensure we supported all women. (1982-83).
I’ve demonstrated against caging babies, shock and awing Iraq, and for Black Lives Matter. I quit the Republican Party in the 90s, having seen the racist/sexist Pats turn me into a talking point in their culture war. That 1992 Pat Buchanan speech at the Republican convention caused me to register Independent even as I was running as a Republican to stop the future we now have.
Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
This is Jim Crow segregation on Independence Day. Free to be you and me separately. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 overturned the remaining Jim Crow laws.
By the time I met Hillary in Minneapolis in 1994, and ever since then, I can say proudly that Hillary speaks for me. Nothing about this Republican Party speaks for most Americans in this country; all you have to do is check any poll on any topic. And yet, they persist by rewriting the laws that used to make us a democratic Republic.
Guys like Robertson and Buchanan also led me to Buddhism, where I could practice compassion. I’m a proud footsoldier in the backlash against the theocratic fascism the Republican party stands for. Communism never has been confirmed or real. Fascism has. “My dad bombed them back to Germany in World War 2. Remember, the last guy in the White House said they were the “very good people” on both sides. He still aspires to be the American Putin.
I listened to an interview with President Biden conducted by Nicole Wallace yesterday on MSNBC. The institutionalist Biden was full of lowkey descriptions of how the Republican Party today is “not the Republican Party of your father.” Today’s Republicans include Congressional inquisitors and corrupt law inventors in the Roberts’ Court. They’re a cult of a wannabe dictator.
— John (repeat1968) Buss (@repeat1968) June 29, 2023
We’re watching a rollback of America’s 20th century. We finally get to celebrate both of our Independence Days, and I’m starting to think the Supreme Court will let the South have its Jim Crow laws back by next year. Last year gave women the status of state chattel, and they’re working on making us federal chattel. The states are working hard on erasing the GLBT community. Obergefell is likely on the SCOTUS agenda too. They’re coming for birth control, also.
Much of this backward motion is based on obliterating stare decisis and wrongly interpreting post-Civil War American Constitutional amendments. These amendments, you might remember, were penned by the nascent Republican Party. This isn’t your great-great-grandfather’s Republican Party, either. Having served in the Dubya administration, Nicole Wallace probably knew most of this better than anyone. She reinforced the Biden interpretation of our “not normal” Supreme Court and the Maga Republicans who are into performative running amok but never actually govern.
Alaska wasn’t a state until 1959. The U.S. government actively removed Indigenous children from their tribes until the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. SCOTUS barely saved the ICWA this year. One of the nine flipped.
For decades, conservatives have railed against judicial activism, but Thursday’s decision striking down affirmative action by colleges and universities in admissions was the height of conservative judicial activism. The court rejected almost half a century of precedents, overturned decisions made by public and private universities across the country, and ignored the history of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.The experience of California — where affirmative action was eliminated by Proposition 209 in 1996 — shows that it still will be possible to have diversity in higher education, but it will take sustained effort and it will be difficult.
In 1978, in University of California vs. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell wrote the pivotal opinion and explained that colleges and universities have a compelling interest in having a diverse student body and may use race as one of many factors in admissions decisions to benefit minorities and enhance diversity. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in 2003 in Grutter vs. Bollinger and again, most recently, in 2016, in Fisher vs. University of Texas, Austin. For decades, universities across the country have based their admissions policies on these holdings.
What changed in a mere seven years? Donald Trump appointed three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They joined the three conservative dissenters in the Fisher case — John G. Roberts Jr., Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — to overturn 45 years of precedents allowing affirmative action. As they did last year in overruling Roe vs. Wade, the conservatives on the court paid no attention to the principle of stare decisis and following precedent.
Nor did the conservatives on the court pay attention to the judgment of university educators that diversity in the classroom matters in education. I have been a law professor for 43 years and have taught classes that are overwhelmingly white and those with a significant number of minority students. The discussions in the classrooms are vastly different and the educational experience for all students is enhanced when there is diversity.
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor explained in the Grutter decision, preparing students for our diverse society requires that they experience diversity. But the six conservative justices have now substituted their views and flatly rejected decades of experience of those in higher education.
In 1965, Women got the right to access Birth Control. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973 when I was in high school. However, it took a while longer to wrest my personal credit score back after I got married. I lost mine in 1975, and it would not be restored to me until 1976. Women’s Sports were put on the map with Title 9 in 1972. This enabled me to play on the university men’s soccer team because they had no women’s equivalent at the time. Yup, I played Triple-A men’s soccer in 1975. It was that, or my university lost its funding, and football is a religion in Nebraska.
Women got many civil liberties and rights in the 1970s. My mother got her form of birth control from my aunt, taking her to her doctor while saying you’re not going to get pregnant on your Honeymoon like me. Since Mother was about to be married, she got her first diaphragm. It was a process to make family planning inaccessible to most women. All I had to do was walk into the Student Health building at my University, where birth control pills were readily available to any woman. Will that be the case in 5 years? Justice Thomas is eager to revisit Griswold v Connecticut (1965).
We’re also on our way to removing hard-fought civil liberties for the GLBT Community. We just celebrated Pride Week. The anniversary of Stonewall was also this week. On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall riots started the movement to bring civil liberties and rights to the GLBT community.
Today’s two SCOTUS decision show just how far back in time and how poor six justices are prepared to make us by not letting the President forgive some Student Loans. Today we also saw the rollback of the strides made by the GLBT community and its allies. It’s why polls show people think there’s something wrong with them. There is something very wrong with 6 of them, and I feel for the other 3.
There are live breaking updates today on CNN “SCOTUS blocks Biden’s student loan plan and limits LGBTQ protections in major rulings.” Chief Justice Roberts is on the defensive. He should quit whining.
Recent rulings by the newly composed Roberts court have sent a resounding message about its role and the separation of powers. This comes at a time when the Supreme Court has been under intense scrutiny by critics who argue that it is moving the law to the right and overturning precedent simply because of the addition of three justices nominated by a Republican president.
During the last week of the term, the conservative court — bolstered by three nominees of President Donald Trump — issued sweeping 6-3 decisions defining how the country lives its daily life.
In striking down affirmative action, the court overturned another decades-old precedent a year after reversing Roe v. Wade — without explicitly saying so.
In the very last opinion of the term, Chief Justice John Roberts discussed the student loan case at hand, but seemed to be sending a broader message to address recent criticism of the court as going beyond “the proper role of the judiciary.”
He noted that “reasonable minds,” including the three liberals on the bench, could disagree with the analysis of the student loan decision, but he cautioned that “plainly heartfelt disagreement” should not be mistaken as “disparagement.”
“Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he said.
This Supreme Court terms has re-consolidated power into the white, Christian, and monied interests more than it has been since at least the 1940s. If you include last SCOTUS term, you can add male. It's retrograde in the worst possible sense.
— eugenefreedman.bsky.social (@EugeneFreedman) June 30, 2023
Those of you writing up 303 Creative will want to be sure to note that the alleged request was made up.
Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)
“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allows homophobic web designer not to do business with gay customers.
For Homophobic Web Designer Gorsuch Roberts Thomas Alito Kavanaugh Barrett
I’m giving two Justices and their dissents the last word for this very long post. You can see Justice Sotomayer’s response to the broadening of protecting Christians from being civil and polite human beings up top.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, one of two cases decided Thursday that centered on affirmative action.
Jackson recused herself from the other, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, because of her ties to Harvard. Both cases were decided on ideological lines, with the court’s six conservative justices voting in the majority. But Jackson’s dissent received particular attention Thursday for its blistering paragraphs and for its sharp rebuttals from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s other Black justice.
It is important to say this. Three women stand between us and the past we do not want to repeat. There needs to be a change because there are not enough of them. An African-American woman. A Jewish Woman, An Hispanic Woman. They are on team justice and democracy. They need backup.
“Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and the lives of LGBT people. SCOTUS declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class." SOTOMAYOR DISSENThttps://t.co/n1yAXj77Dkpic.twitter.com/NssdscOzat
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday bolstered the ability of employees to obtain accommodations at work for their religious practices, reviving a lawsuit by an evangelical Christian former mail carrier accusing the Postal Service of discrimination after being disciplined for refusing to show up for work on Sundays.
The 9-0 ruling threw out a lower court’s decision rejecting a claim by Gerald Groff, a former mail carrier in Pennsylvania, that the Postal Service’s actions refusing to exempt him from working on Sundays, when he observes the Sabbath, violated federal anti-discrimination law.
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has a track record of expanding religious rights, often siding with Christian plaintiffs.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had found that Groff’s absences placed too much of a hardship on his co-workers and employer. The Supreme Court ordered the 3rd Circuit to reconsider the matter.
Groff’s case centered on a federal anti-discrimination law called Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on religion and other factors including race, sex and national origin.
If we have to endure blue laws again because of these folks, I am absolutely going to have a hissy fit. Well, it looks like I’m having one now, so it will have to be a much bigger one. One of these days, the ACLU will have a case on its hands, and I will be the complainant.
I’m not sure if celebrating Independence Day is in order this year. Maybe we need a Remembrance Day for democracy. I sometimes see this social media question about which band you’d love to go on the road with. There’s my answer. Parliament. I’d love to sit in front of the Supreme Court Building or, better yet, in a few justices’ neighborhoods and sing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” with Bootsy and George.
“bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. education & free discussion are the antidotes of both.”
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
RFK, Jr. belongs in the Loony Tunes universe right next to the QAnon creeps. Think of what Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner could do to them! That’s why Junior is managing to get Republican support. I also believe that he’ll drive the narratives in the press of the BothSiderists. You know who they are. This article from Politico is a depressing look at political funding by billionaire Republicans. 
Que Susan Sarandon, or does she only hate Hillary? 
The Republicans are just vile. 
Speaking of Pathetic Jokes … “The Standoff Between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert Is Worse Than You Think” from 
My final offering today is from ProPublica, which is still investigating the roles of Billionaires in Political and SCOTUS decisions. 
The case centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who wishes to expand her business into designing wedding websites — something she has never done before. She says she’s reluctant to do so, however, because she fears that if she designs such a website for an opposite-sex couple, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law will compel her to also design wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Smith objects to same-sex marriages.
I’m not sure if celebrating Independence Day is in order this year. Maybe we need a Remembrance Day for democracy. I sometimes see this social media question about which band you’d love to go on the road with. There’s my answer. Parliament. I’d love to sit in front of the Supreme Court Building or, better yet, in a few justices’ neighborhoods and sing “Tear the Roof off the Sucker” with Bootsy and George.
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