Monday Reads: Third Branch Governance

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

Ever so often, I get the calling to be a full on eccentric. It usually happens when I’m exposed to the kind’ve white bread ickiness and utter banality that I grew up around.  It’s nothing I use to have to face on a daily basis since living here in New Orleans as long as I stayed out of Jefferson Parish and away from the North Shore.  The one good thing about obvious white flight areas is that you know what will be there so you just don’t go there. One indicator is the types of churches that locate there.  These are those churches that only reach out with the offering plate and never with the offerings.

So, I always get a belly laugh when a herd of chubby, hyper ivory burbies show up in the hood and find out no one can totally sanitize their cheap ass ‘real’ New Orleans vacation experience here.  I wish I had a picture of the crowd on the porch next door I saw while walking Temple on Friday.  It was a nice chilly day and their icky fish white, sadly plump arms and legs were  on display in tanks and shorts.  I was told by the BNB dominatrix they were not happy about an early morning fight between my friend and her friend. It woke them out of their safety bubble.

I wonder if they were around for the dozen or so cop cars the evening before capturing a guy in the back yard that had just broken into the house 2 doors down from me and the apartment of the local drug druggie moments before.  Or, for that matter if they realize the abandoned  Navy Base 5 doors down holds about 100ish prime examples of the opioid “crisis”, the  reality of homelessness down here since affordable rentals have been replaced by reality tourist dens, and how this country finds its mentally ill expendable.

However, the culture vultures did get to see us send off Arthur “Mr Okra” Robinson yesterday. His funeral and second  line ended at our shared favorite dive bar which has also been appropriated for the fetishists of poverty porn.

Stuff keeps changing down here in the 9th ward but you also get glimmers of our glory. I’ve lived on the wrong side of the tracks for 20 years now and my only hope is that that’s the part that endures. All the Chads and Beckies, all the AirBnB parasites and the tourists they’ve brought like locusts cannot stomp on my memories. Mister Arthur, you brought me fresh food–after Katrina–when MacD didn’t even find enough of us to exploit. Carry on to glory and make a path and a light with your song and we will know where to go when the time comes.

Meanwhile, today, I’m little Edie of Grey Gardens.  Watch me twirl!

We’re dependent on one branch of government these days. The others have been completely stocked with toxic white men.  SCOTUS won’t hear Trump’s bid to end DACA.  Well, it’s one positive thing they’re doing.  We’ll need to worry about our right to form unions soon.

The Supreme Court said on Monday that it will stay out of the dispute concerning the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for now, meaning the Trump administration may not be able to end the program March 5 as planned.

The move will also lessen pressure on Congress to act on a permanent solution for DACA and its roughly 700,000 participants — undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children.

Lawmakers had often cited the March 5 deadline as their own deadline for action. But the Senate failed to advance any bill during a debate earlier this month, and no bipartisan measure has emerged since.
Originally, the Trump administration had terminated DACA but allowed a six-month grace period for anyone with status expiring in that window to renew. After that date, March 5, any DACA recipient whose status expired would no longer be able to receive protections.
Monday’s action by the court, submitted without comment from the justices, is not a ruling on the merits of the DACA program or the Trump administration’s effort to end it.

The case reached SCOTUS after several Federal and District courts issued injunctions.

Federal district judges in California and New York have issued nationwide injunctions against ending the program, siding with states and organizations challenging the administration’s rescission. The court orders effectively block the Trump administration from ending the program on March 5, as planned.

No appellate court has reviewed those decisions, and it would have been exceedingly rare for the Supreme Court to take up a case without that interim step. In the past, the court has granted such cases only in matters of grave national importance, such as the controversy over President Richard Nixon’s White House tapes or solving the Iranian hostage crisis.

The litigation now will take its usual course, and the issue probably won’t return to the Supreme Court before the next term. In the meantime, the White House and Congress can continue to seek a political resolution.

Trump, at a meeting with governors at the White House, reacted to the court’s decision by saying: “We’ll see what happens. That’s my attitude.”

In an official statement, the White House did not criticize the justices for declining to take up the case, but said the DACA program “is clearly unlawful.”

“The district judge’s decision unilaterally to reimpose a program that Congress had explicitly and repeatedly rejected is a usurpation of legislative authority,” said Raj Shah, a White House spokesman. “The fact that this occurs at a time when elected representatives in Congress are actively debating this policy only underscores that the district judge has unwisely intervened in the legislative process.”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), among those who challenged the way the Trump administration ended the DACA program, said the Supreme Court was right to deny the government’s “unusual and unnecessary request to bypass the appeals

The Trump administration’s move was unusual to say the least and it’s a good thing SCOTUS didn’t buy into it.

His administration has asked the Supreme Court to take the unusual step of overturning the first injunction, issued by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, now instead of letting it go through the normal appeals process.

…

Trump declared he would rescind DACA in September, claiming it was unconstitutional. The White House aimed to terminate the program in phases, allowing recipients whose work permits and deportation protections would expire by March 5 to apply for renewal during a four-week window, but barring all new applicants. The plan was that Dreamers whose permits were set to expire after March 5 would be unable to apply for renewal, creating that deadline for Congress to act before an estimated 1,000 people per day began losing protections.

Under the injunctions, however, those who have been approved for DACA are eligible to keep renewing it until the courts decide otherwise.

Little Edie applying make-up at Grey Gardens, 1976

Public Unions may not be quite so blessed. Of course, all eyes are on the judge put there by KKKremlin Caligula.

The Supreme Court grappled Monday with a reprise of a case that could significantly weaken public employee unions, but Justice Neil Gorsuch added mystery to the proceedings by remaining silent throughout the arguments and offering no hint of how he might vote.

Last year, the high court was widely expected to rule that states could no longer force public employees to pay fees for union representation — a ruling that could have significantly undercut the power of unions in one of the few sectors where they are still relatively common.

However, the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia offered unions a reprieve of sorts, with the court issuing a brief, 4-4, ruling that left in place a 40-year-old precedent allowing such ‘fair share’ fees to cover matters like collective bargaining and grievance processes. The addition of Gorsuch was widely seen as likely to give plaintiffs the fifth vote they need to outlaw the non-member fees.

Aside from Gorsuch’s silence, the most striking aspect of Monday’s argument was Justice Anthony Kennedy’s hostility to the unions’ position. He repeatedly tore into lawyers for the State of California and for a major union as they defended the ‘fair share’ practice.

Sam Baker–writing for AXIOS–believes SCOTUS will “kneecap” them.

Summer 1939, Edie at a tea party for the L.V.I.S.

I’m never quite sure why there seem to be so many white people that seem to want life sanitized, bubblized, and whitified for them.  Any one that wants diversity and civil rights for minorities is demonized. But, let’s look at discourse on one university campus–Penn–and what’s turning into opportunities to spread the current rampage of white supremicism. This is Lucy Hu begging for a “liberal bubble”.

Let’s be clear: I’m not trying to advocate for the stifling of dichotomous voices in a healthy debate on tax reform. I’d hate for the left to exclude the right in immigration policy or marijuana legalization debates. I don’t want to end heated discussion on how to reach bipartisan consensus on facing the national debt.

But, I will refuse to dignify “discourse” on my inferiority, especially in an environment where conservative ideas perpetuate minority discrimination. Open debate cannot be a chance for politics to rebut my identity. The liberal push-back defends intolerance of ideas that society agrees are fundamentally injurious.

While Wax claims to be supporting academic discourse, her words can — albeit unintentionally — fuel hate on campuses. Exhibit A: the result of the 2016 presidential election, while not directly racist, validated hate and allowed it to flourish. White-supremacist propaganda increased at colleges by 258 percent from fall 2016 to fall 2017. Hate crimes on campuses increased by 25 percent from 2015 to 2016, with a spike in November 2016. Many of these incidents made references to the then-president-elect.

Wax may not be a white supremacist, but if her words substantiate an argument of racial superiority, she carries a great responsibility. While she may consider her writing from a purely academic standpoint, the truth is that, for the marginalized, politics and daily life are inseparable. This “civil discourse” is workplace wordplay for some. For others, it’s daily insecurity. For yet others, it’s constant fear of police brutality.

Eighty percent of Republicans do not support the Black Lives Matter movement. After his nomination by the Republican Party, Donald Trump told the Associated Press that the movement was “inherently racist.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) prefers “All Lives Matter.” Rather than offering meaningful discourse, some of these conservative voices seek to mute those that have already been historically unable to speak.

Conservatism, by definition, perpetuates the status quo. When that status quo is the preservation of an imbalance in power, the left’s lack of malleability in its opinions is a lack of tolerance for being silenced.

Indeed, the charter school movement and the school choice movement seem to spring in places where white people still want to place their children in bubbles.  There are many places where integration doesn’t occur because the alternatives are preferred to the idea of exposing white bubble children to more than just their parents’ ideas of the way things should be (e.g. white culture).

In an interview with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg last month, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones talked about how liberal-leaning white Americans may claim to believe in racial equality and integration, but they act in ways that maintain inequality and segregation. Case in point: where they send their kids to school.

In many U.S. cities, enrollment in urban public schools is dominated by kids from lower-income households, often black and Latino. More affluent white urbanites who’ve moved to gentrifying city neighborhoods often send their children to private or charter schools, because of fears about underperforming local public schools—and the predominantly non-white kids who attend them. “If you could just get white liberals to live their values,” Hannah-Jones said, “you could have a significant amount of integration.”

So, there are connections in my thoughts here watching culture vultures come to my neighborhood, soak in the “color”, and then retreat to the white bubbles of the North Shore or Metarie.  No white person who hates that kind of sterility should have to wear the label of “staunch character” to be seen as comfortable in place filled with diversity nor should we have to sanitize our lives to make others feel comfortable.

But most of all–in this country–the civil rights of minorities should never be under attack by Congress and the President.  There’s rule of law which is still upheld by those in the Judicial Branch but I feel like it’s a fine rope between the true promise of the American Dream and the melodramatic and hateful panic of so many white burbie snowflakes.  Too many constitutional rights these days seem to be viewed as arguable and based on a double standard of who is on the receiving end of them. Donald TRump is the president of White Grievance and Fragility. He also tells these folks that being polite and civilized in the presence of things that are none of your damned business is your personal crusade against some imagined long suffering white identity,

“‘White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. Racial stress results from an interruption to what is racially familiar. These interruptions can take a variety of forms and come from a range of sources”

Is there anything worse than a “staunch woman”?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?  Remember, “we all march together”.