Politics - Something I Just Cannot Escape

Times being what they are - Trump raging about pools and interior decorating while Iran plays us like a conman plays a mark (hopefully not like a toreador plays a bull); the clown car of misanthropes, fascists, and syncophants drive us closer to the end of the Republic - I am not sure there is an escape from politics.

The question for us is do we stand with those who want to wreck representative government or with those who think power belongs to the people? 

My notes from the past few days follow. 

 Turkey's Tayyip Erdoğan cashes in on Trump relationship  (The Hill) raises one big question for me, and one not even questioned in the article: did Trump truly think Turkey would side with Iran? It seems to me our President is more of an idiot than we knew.

I watched some of Bill Maher last, but life is too short for listening to J.D. Vance. Here are the highpoints: Bill Maher challenges JD Vance, GOP on 'cheated' election claims. How stupid does Trump think we are? He never found evidence to back up his claims when he had the tools of the government and the Republican Party at hand. Anyone who is not a billionaire would be in a rubber room for talking like this. He does have a problem with reality; lately it even has a name: the Straights of Hormuz.

Complacency will get us in prison or jail. You might think this is not so bad, but sooner or later a political movement that adopts a theological purity test kills its own. Just ask the Old Bolsheviks and Robespierre. 

The Prairieland Sentences Are a National Emergency (The New Republic)

Now, just shy of one year after the demonstration, we are witnessing the part of the government’s narrative in which the administration thinks it has won. Its position is clear, Menchaca said: “Not allowing the government to abuse people will cost you most of your natural life. Not allowing the police to murder an unarmed protester fleeing means your life is now forfeit to the state.”

But since the Prairieland defendants were indicted and as their trials wound on, we’ve seen many of the government’s attempts to charge people for disrupting ICE operations fall apart, some in now high-profile scandals such as that involving the former Broadview Six, a group of demonstrators at an ICE facility near Chicago, who were indicted on charges of conspiracy to impede a federal agent. (The charges were dropped after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.) Still, such failures have not slowed the government down. Last week, 15 people in Minnesota were indicted on federal conspiracy charges related to allegedly impeding federal officers.

The lesson here is not that the Prairieland defendants did something uniquely dangerous, but that they faced the same political repression any number of us could. The government, Menchaca said, is “trying to set the stage to criminalize every person who doesn’t agree to their atrocities. And our loved ones are suffering for their compassion.”

The Supreme Court’s War on Congress (The New Republic): masquerading as conservatives we've got 6 Supreme Justices who are radically altering the government into an authoritarian state.

It would be hard to find a more clear-cut violation of the free exercise clause than Damon Landor’s treatment by Louisiana correctional officials in 2020. Landor, a Rastafarian, grew out his hair into lengthy dreadlocks in keeping with the practices of his faith. Long hair is generally disallowed in prison systems for safety and hygiene reasons, but Landor had previously obtained exemptions on religious grounds.

When he was transferred to a new facility, Landor told the prison personnel that his hair was kept long for religious reasons. He also provided them with a copy of a 2017 ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Louisiana, that held that it would be a RLUIPA violation for state prison officials to cut a Rastafarian’s hair. Nonetheless, prison officials threw the ruling in the trash and shaved Landor’s head.

***

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, declined to do so. He framed the dispute not as a question of religious freedom but of Congress’s power to impose conditions on federal funds. The decision is an unusually muddled one for Gorsuch. He insisted that Congress’s choice to provide federal funds to Louisiana so long as the state abides by certain conditions is a contract of sorts. While Congress can impose conditions on those funds for the states, Gorsuch argued, it cannot contractually bind people—in this case, the prison officials—who didn’t consent to the agreement in the first place.

This reasoning is too clever by half. The Louisiana Department of Corrections is not some sort of cosmic entity or demiurge. It does not independently exist in a metaphysical sense, despite its legal personality. It is, at its root, a group of people in buildings who sit behind desks and walk down hallways and occasionally violate people’s constitutional rights. Gorsuch nonetheless hypothesized about ways that Congress could, in theory, rewrite the law to properly bind those employees in a private capacity.

***

For most of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court confined itself to interpreting federal law instead of rewriting it. Thanks to the conservative legal movement, that posture has changed. The court’s Republican appointees have developed a wide array of tools to second-guess Congress, sometimes even under the cynical guise of defending its prerogatives. 

 The Supreme Court’s Era of Meaningless Rights (The Atlantic) comments on the cases discussed above: (The Atlantic has a paywall)

That rule will undermine protections in the many public-benefits programs that are structured as spending-clause statutes, such as Medicaid and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. If people can’t sue for damages when officials violate the rules that Congress has established for those programs, then those rules aren’t really rules at all.

Back to  The Supreme Court’s Era of Meaningless Rights (The Atlantic) and two more cases:

Two other decisions—one also issued Tuesday, the other yesterday—transformed a swath of federal immigration protections into unenforceable guidelines that the Trump administration need not comply with.

In Blanche v. Lau, the legal protections at issue were for lawful permanent residents—green-card holders—who are entitled to the greatest legal protections of all noncitizens. The six Republican appointees said those protections were effectively useless and not binding. Although federal law has long said that a legal permanent resident can be denied reentry into the United States if clear and convincing evidence exists that the resident committed a crime of moral turpitude, Lau says that border officials can deny admission even without such evidence. This allows officers to strip green-card holders’ lawful immigration status without the degree of proof required by federal law—and, perhaps, without any meaningful proof at all. The Republican appointees said the legal protections apply only in formal immigration proceedings, and would be too impracticable and burdensome to apply at the border.

We need to impeach a few Supreme Court Justices and remind them who they work for. 

Then let's start picking off the nutjobs the incompetent, weak-willed Senate put in office: 

 Too long for me to have made much headway, but it seems we no longer want a plurlaistic society. What we want is our own little club, sending everyone else to perdition. Faith, Freedom, Family, Place — An Ethnographic Study

Indiana's new prison already equipped for firing squads as death penalty debate continues (Indiana Capital Chronicle) - why the federal government feels the need to meddle in our state law.

Federal executions are carried out at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, and federal law generally ties execution methods to those authorized by the state where a death sentence is imposed or carried out.

Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and South Carolina — currently authorize the use of firing squads. Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee additionally have laws allowing firing squads if other methods are found unconstitutional.

“In a state like Indiana … the federal government is more limited because of this state’s statute on allowed methods of the death penalty,” said Zachary Cormier, an assistant professor at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law. “But even if Indiana would authorize the execution by firing squad … I don’t think it’s going anywhere fast because there are so many procedural hiccups yet that I think court questions would tie this up.”

Mixed reaction to Supreme Court ruling impacting thousands of Haitians living in Indiana (Indiana Capital Chronicle ) disappointed by quoting Indiana politicians and when is Todd Rokita anything but disappointing? Well, when he is embarrassing.

Trump Blurts Out Plot to Rig Midterms So Vile It Even Shocks GOPers 

Allow Me To Repeat Myself (Sheila Kennedy)

You would think Republicans– who fancy themselves protectors of private property and capital– would understand that the rule of law protects private property from seizure or infringement, and that investors–foreign or domestic– are highly unlikely to put money into an economy where assets can be seized or destroyed without due process.

When the GOP was a party, and not a cult, it understood that.

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