John Oliver discusses Donald Trump’s plans for a second term, why it could be much worse than his first term, and what Trump has in common with a hamster.
June 20, 2024
Category: Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr
Stories of injustice and justice
Putin Has Tainted Russian Greatness
The New York Times – Opinion
Putin Has Tainted Russian Greatness
By Serge Schemann – June 20, 2024
Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board and the author of a book about Russia, “Echoes of a Native Land.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Many years ago, in the 1980s, I went to Brighton Beach, then in its heyday as a district of newly arrived Soviet Jews, to celebrate the first year (there would not be many more) of the lively local Russian-language weekly, The New American. It was a grand event, rich in humor and tinged with nostalgia. I asked a middle-aged partygoer for his thoughts on his lost homeland, and his reply has stayed with me: “I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”
It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.
Most probably will not.
It’s hard to say precisely where Russian exiles stand, politically or in their sense of attachment to Russia. The waves of emigrants differ widely one from another, and in the United States, they have not behaved like immigrants from Italy, China or Poland who formed hyphenated-American communities and organizations that have persisted over generations. Russian immigrants to America have, by comparison, melded quickly into the general population. Brighton Beach is one of the few places with any Russian flavor in the United States.
Still, the prevailing attitude I’ve encountered among Russian émigrés is the love-hate expressed by my interlocutor in Brighton Beach. It’s the love of an extraordinary culture, a deep attachment to the expanse of steppes and taiga, along with contempt for the chronic misrule, adventurism, imperial illusions and corruption of the leaders.
At least, that was the attitude before Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, I more often encounter, and feel, a new attitude: shame.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
The émigrés I grew up with, and those I came to know in America and as a reporter in Israel, rarely felt troubled by the sins of their motherland. Why would they? There were no politics in the usual sense in the Russia they came from, no sense among the vast majority of the population that they had any say in what their self-perpetuating leaders did for them or to them from behind the Kremlin ramparts. The Gulag was not their doing; their Russia was the culture, the scramble for scarce goods, the anecdotes told around vodka in steamy kitchens, the shashlik by a lazy river. Most Russians concentrated on protecting their lives from “them,” as people in the Soviet Union would refer to the leadership and its secret police, a finger pointed to the ceiling, and to survive. Or leave.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine — so cruel, so pointless, so devastating — has changed all this, at least for those not mesmerized by Mr. Putin’s recidivist claptrap. It’s hard not to feel shame at the evidence of Russians killing and raping people who did them no wrong, people who share so much of their history and culture.
And it has become difficult to feel pride in all the things that Russians can genuinely boast about — the great books, the Bolshoi, the hockey stars, the spirituality — when Mr. Putin is dispatching waves of boys to kill and die for his false version of Russia’s manifest destiny and his personal grievances against the West.
This is not necessarily a logical reaction. Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky are not to blame for Mariupol. And most Russians are not directly complicit in Mr. Putin’s malice. But Mr. Putin rose to power pledging to restore greatness to Russia, and the key to that is the desire among ordinary Russians to feel, again, a sense of belonging to a globally respected power. Russians may have been too caught up in Mr. Putin’s chimera to recognize that the seizure of Crimea or the incursions into Donetsk and Luhansk were a precursor of much worse.
When the Russian tanks began their grim parade toward Kyiv on Feb. 24, 2022, Russians, too, were in shock. “We, the Russians living inside and outside of the country, will have to bear the shame of this situation for years to come,” wrote Anastasia Piatakhina Giré, a psychotherapist in Paris, shortly after the invasion. She grew up in the Soviet Union, and many of her patients are displaced Russians. “We can do very little to turn down the volume of this feeling, no matter how many Ukrainian flags we display on our social media feeds or either publicly or privately in our daily lives.”
A year later, another expatriate, Anastasia Edel, the author of “Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution and the New Tsar,” wrote a syndicated column about trying to come to grips with the shame and confusion: “As someone who was shaped by Russian and Soviet literature, I have been made to feel like an unwilling partner to Russian crimes. That is why, since last February, I have abandoned any pretense of being a cultural envoy. I have been an envoy of nothing — just another immigrant who came to America in search of a better life.”
That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come, just as his attempt to quash Ukrainian nationhood has steeled its foundations. We know from the Germans’ postwar history that restoring a battered national identity is a project of decades, maybe more.
In the end, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky will survive, as did Goethe and Bach, and Ukraine will be rebuilt and incorporated more closely in the West. But for Russians and those of us who identify even a little bit as Russian, something elemental has been destroyed, and a lot of painful soul-searching lies ahead.
More on Putin’s Russia:
Paula Erizanu: My Country Knows What Happens When You Do a Deal With Russia – April 23, 2024
Serge Schmemann: In Death, Navalny Is Even More Dangerous to Putin’s Lies – Feb. 17, 2024
Serge Schmemann joined The Times in 1980 and worked as the bureau chief in Moscow, Bonn and Jerusalem and at the United Nations. He was editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris from 2003 to 2013.
What Donald Trump Talks About When He Talks About ‘Donald Trump’
The New York Times – Opinion
What Donald Trump Talks About When He Talks About ‘Donald Trump’
John McWhorter – June 20, 2024
The first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, scheduled to take place next week, offers voters a chance to scrutinize the candidates’ political views and personal demeanor. For linguists, however, it also offers a rare side-by-side comparison of the way the candidates speak. You don’t have to follow politics to know that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have extraordinarily different verbal styles. Of the two, Biden’s is the less interesting, linguistically speaking, because it’s the more conventional. Trump’s, on the other hand — no matter what you think of his ideas — is fascinating. It’s sui generis.
Still, it’s possible to draw connections between Trump’s verbal mannerisms and other speech patterns in the world at large. The one that’s been on my mind this week is his habit of referring to himself by name, such as, “You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for Donald Trump.” In reference to making Barack Obama present his birth certificate: “Trump was able to get them to give something.” Also, “Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump” and “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate President Trump, they hate him with a passion.”
This may seem to suggest, variously, a Tarzanian linguistic tendency, a desire to market himself as a brand or just a plain old inflated ego. But the truth is more interesting because there is more to first-person pronouns — i.e., the “I” and “me” that we normally use instead of our own names — than simply ways of referring to the self. And there are many reasons that a person might seek to avoid these words, even in informal speech. There’s even a name for that tendency: illeism.
Sidestepping these pronouns can be a way to deflect attention from one’s self, to avoid seeming self-absorbed. In Mandarin, one might use the term “little person” rather than “I,” as if humbling oneself both linguistically and physically. The Anglophone version of this is the colloquial way we can refer to ourselves in the third person: “Who just got a raise? This guy!,” while pointing to oneself, is perhaps a little less blunt than simply saying, “I just got a raise!” “This girl needs to get home” can feel like a more gracious way of taking one’s leave than “I need to get home.” Creating an exterior third-person perspective frames the departure as a scene someone else is acting out.
Swapping in one’s own name can be trickier. People mocked LeBron James for using the third person to explain why he joined the Miami Heat: “One thing I didn’t want to do was make an emotional decision,” he said. “I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James and what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy.” This sounded obnoxiously regal to many, but it’s just as possible to see it as the opposite. Referring to himself from afar encouraged us to imagine a scene that he was in, to foster some kind of understanding of his decision.
Psychologists even encourage us to try thinking of ourselves as “you” or “he/she/they” in order to imagine how others see us. It’s another way of reminding yourself, “It’s not all about me.”
None of which explains Trump. When it comes to the former president, it is always, of course, all about him. To understand Trump’s aversion to first-person singular pronouns, we need to look to their other — and in some ways opposite — resonance.
In his research on pronouns, the psychologist James Pennebaker has demonstrated that Anglophones say (and write) “I” or “me” with starkly different frequencies depending on the speakers’ intentions and mental states, so much so that one can use the pronouns’ frequency to deduce a person’s truthfulness, contentment and certainty. Specifically, using “I” and “me” entails a certain self-exposure, and thus vulnerability. People who are depressed use those pronouns more than those who are happy. People who are proclaiming their innocence use them a lot, too, as do people who are engaging in deception. At George W. Bush’s press conferences, for example, he used “I” more when publicly claiming that the U.S. government was avoiding war while the administration was actually making plans to initiate what became the Iraq war. On the other hand, while Obama has been accused of fondness for “I,” in actuality he used it less than most presidents in modern history — a reflection, perhaps, of his cooler emotional temperature.
Compared with the vulnerability of “I” and “me,” Trump’s self-reference sounds like a kind of verbal armor. “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate President Trump, they hate him with a passion” has a mic-drop feel, in contrast to “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate me, they hate me with a passion,” which sounds wounded. “You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for me” sounds like someone struggling to get the recognition that is deserved, compared with the more defiant “You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for Donald Trump.”
Thus Trump’s tic is, of all things, a rhetorical technique, of a piece with his incontinent use of adjectives of praise — as in the “beautiful” wall he was going to build (how pretty was it really going to be?) and the “perfect” phone call he had with the president of Ukraine — as well as his habit of idly intensifying adjectives with a “very” or two, and his trademark manual gesture of pushing his hands apart as if sidelining objections.
If you watch the debates, it might be useful to perform a bit of on-the-fly translation. Every time he refers to himself as “Donald Trump,” recast it for yourself as “I” or “me.” Notice the difference? Translating his words into their essence, stripping Trumpese of its charismatic distractions, is a useful window into what — or in this case, who — he actually is.
John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
Thou Shalt Not Post the Ten Commandments in the Classroom
The New York Times – Opinion
Thou Shalt Not Post the Ten Commandments in the Classroom
David French – June 20, 2024
There is a certain irony in the bravado about the Ten Commandments from Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana. On Saturday he told attendees at a Republican fund-raiser, “I can’t wait to be sued.” Clearly, he knows that the Supreme Court previously ruled against mandatory displays of the Ten Commandments in the classroom. In a 1980 case, Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments, purchased through private donations, in every public school classroom in the state.
A Louisiana law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in the state defies this precedent, so, yes, the state will be sued.
But Landry’s comments didn’t stop with bravado. He also said something else. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” he told the guests, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” To teach respect for the rule of law, he’s defying the Supreme Court? That’s an interesting message to send to students.
It’s consistent with an emerging Republican approach to constitutional law. Just as many Republicans view their constituency as composed of the “real” Americans, they tend to believe their interpretation of the Constitution represents the “real” Constitution. So we’re seeing a flurry of culture-war-motivated state laws, many of them aimed at the First Amendment, that confront precedent.
The Dobbs decision gave some Republicans hope for radical change, but reversing Roe has not signaled open season on the court’s rulings. Republicans’ challenges to the Voting Rights Act failed, the independent state legislature theory foundered, and efforts to expand the standing doctrine to limit access to the abortion pill faltered. Even so, it’s premature to declare that the Supreme Court is frustrating the MAGA right.
Altering constitutional law is not the only motivation here; a version of Christian mysticism is also in play. There is a real belief that the Ten Commandments have a form of spiritual power over the hearts and minds of students and that posting the displays can change their lives.
I’m an evangelical Christian who believes in God and the divine inspiration of Scripture, but I do not believe that documents radiate powers of personal virtue. I happened to grow up in Kentucky and went to classes before the Ten Commandments were ordered removed, and I can testify that the displays had no impact on our lives. My classmates and I were not better people because of the faded posters on the walls.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
What a foolish psycho’: Trump’s Father’s Day rant slammed by critics — Biden among them
What a foolish psycho’: Trump’s Father’s Day rant slammed by critics — Biden among them
Kathleen Culliton – June 16, 2024
Washington, D.C.
D.C. for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Julie Bennett/Getty Images
It’s not an American holiday until former President Donald Trump issues his all-caps complaint and is immediately, and ruthlessly, mocked.
On Father’s Day, Trump decided to celebrate his status as family patriarch with a lengthy tirade against “radical left degenerates” the former president, recently convicted on criminal charges, accused of “trying to influence” the judicial system against him.
President Joe Biden’s campaign was quick to respond Sunday evening with a succinct synopsis.
“Convicted felon Trump posts a deranged, all caps ‘Father’s Day’ message attacking the judicial system and promising revenge and retribution against those who don’t support him,” his campaign tweet reads.
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Hours earlier, Trump — who has a history of marking holidays by posting angry rants against his foes — issued the following screed on Truth Social:
“HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE RADICAL LEFT DEGENERATES THAT ARE RAPIDLY BRINGING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA INTO THIRD WORLD NATION STATUS WITH THEIR MANY ATTEMPTS AT TRYING TO INFLUENCE OUR SACRED COURT SYSTEM INTO BREAKING TO THEIR VERY SICK AND DANGEROUS WILL,” he wrote.
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“WE NEED STRENGTH AND LOYALTY TO OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS WONDERFUL CONSTITUTION. EVERYTHING WILL BE ON FULL DISPLAY COME NOVEMBER 5TH, 2024 – THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
The Biden-Harris campaign was not the only voice raising a sly eyebrow at Trump’s comment, quickly flooded with dozens of messages of frustration, amusement and rage.
“He always has the worst holiday greetings of anyone I know,” wrote X user Franklin.
“Such a narcissistic, small man,” added Dawn Young-McDaniel.
“Yep, he is consistent in only one manner,” replied Trish Davis, “Telling us what a foolish psycho he aspires to be.”
The EPA Grossly Underestimated How Many Carcinogens are Polluting This Louisiana Region’s Air, Study Says
Futurism
The EPA Grossly Underestimated How Many Carcinogens are Polluting This Louisiana Region’s Air, Study Says
Maggie Harrison Dupré – June 15, 2024
A chemical plant-smattered stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is already known as “Cancer Alley” due to disproportionately high levels of illnesses related to chemicals released by the area’s many manufacturing facilities. Now, according to a new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University, the stretch of land — which, again, is already called Cancer Alley — is even worse off than scientists already thought.
The study, published this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, examined the rates of a toxic gas called ethylene oxide in the air covering the Louisiana region. Ethylene oxide is a known and potent carcinogen linked to lymphomas, breast cancer, and other health and life-threatening illnesses, and was banned in the European Union back in the early 1990s. But ethylene oxide is used to manufacture other chemicals, and though the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognizes its toxicity, chemical plants in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley stretch continue to use the poisonous gas in their production processes — and as a result, leak ethylene oxide into the air.
And yet, though it’s long been known that the plants leak the poisonous gas, this new Johns Hopkins research finds that the EPA has been grossly underestimating exactly how much ethylene oxide is actually in Cancer Alley’s air. According to these new findings, the area’s average ethylene oxide level is double what previous EPA models suggested — and well beyond levels considered safe for area inhabitants.
“We expected to see ethylene oxide in this area,” said study senior author Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor at the university’s Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, in a statement. “But we didn’t expect the levels that we saw, and they certainly were much, much higher than EPA’s estimated levels.”
As explained in the study, any level of airborne ethylene oxide above 11 parts per trillion (PPT) is considered dangerous for long-term exposure (which, we should note, isn’t really that much, and speaks to how toxic the gas is.) Horrifyingly, the researchers found ethylene oxide levels above 11 PPT in three-quarters of the overall area they studied, with average levels for affected areas hovering around 31 PPT.
“We saw concentrations hitting 40 parts per billion,” said DeCarlo, “which is more a thousand times higher than the accepted risk for lifetime exposure.”
The findings are staggering. And as the researchers note, those who live and work in the area have never — until now — had access to this kind of detailed, accurate data about ethylene oxide figures. And it’s important to note that Cancer Alley’s Black residents are disproportionately likely to develop petrochemical industry-related illness, and that the EPA has openly accused Louisiana lawmakers of engaging in environmental racism.
“There is just no available data, no actual measurements of ethylene oxide in air, to inform [plant] workers and people who live nearby what their actual risk is based on their exposure to this chemical,” DeCarlo added.
As Grist reports, the EPA — which very much needs to update its modeling data — moved this year to install heavier regulations on ethylene oxide use and emissions. And though that’s certainly a necessary step, experts have continued to warn that the agency and other regulating bodies have been very slow to take it.
“The fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has created a ‘sacrifice zone’ in Louisiana,” Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, said earlier this year after the global nonprofit released a devastating report about the health consequences of Cancer Alley’s rampant chemical and fossil fuel pollution. “The failure of state and federal authorities to properly regulate the industry has dire consequences for residents of Cancer Alley.”
Indeed, mitigating future exposure through strict regulations is essential. But so, too, is supporting the people and communities currently living ethylene oxide’s harms.
“These monitors are good,” Rise St. James founder Sharon Lavigne, whose community action group opposes petrochemical expansion, told Grist of the Johns Hopkins report. “But in the meantime, people are dying.”
California Republican pushes back on far-right calls to ‘burn it down’
The Hill
California Republican pushes back on far-right calls to ‘burn it down’
Sarah Fortinsky – June 16, 2024
Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) on Sunday criticized the tactics of far-right lawmakers who say their Republican colleagues, rather than working within the confines of Congress, should be willing to “burn it down” to fight for conservative principles.
“The tactics that they’re using aren’t advancing those principles. They’re an impediment to those principles,” McClintock said on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday,” when asked about those who would “burn it down” instead of working within the system.
“We saw that with the ousting of [former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)]. He had produced, with a very slender majority, some absolutely remarkable accomplishments, including the Fiscal Responsibility Act that bent federal spending back by $2.6 trillion over a 10-year period of time — not nearly enough, but a tremendous accomplishment,” McClintock said, also pointing to some GOP messaging bills that failed in the Senate.
“All of those things with a majority of just five members,” McClintock said. “He was able to accomplish all that and was then destroyed, not by the Republicans, but by all of the Democrats joined by eight Republican malcontents.”
Before a small handful of Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against keeping McCarthy as House Speaker, McClintock wrote a letter to his colleagues urging them to “have the wisdom to see the damage you have done to our country and the courage to set things right before it’s too late.”
McClintock was also one of three Republicans to vote against impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was blamed for the handling of rising migration at the southern border.
The two other Republicans, Reps. Ken Buck (Colo.) and Mike Gallagher (Wis.), have since retired from Congress. Asked why he’s still around, McClintock quoted Winston Churchill.
“Well, Churchill put it best. He said, ‘I fight for my corner, and I leave when the pub closes,’” McClintock said.
“I think our country is at a pivotal moment in its history. And I think it’s going to prevail through the difficulties we’re in, but it’s going to require all of us doing whatever we can to bring our country through,” he continued. “So I’m just very privileged to have a seat in the House of Representatives on behalf of all my neighbors in California.
NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill.
How the US supreme court could be a key election issue: ‘They’ve grown too powerful’
The Guardian
How the US supreme court could be a key election issue: ‘They’ve grown too powerful’
David Smith in Washington – June 15, 2024
“Look at me, look at me,” said Martha-Ann Alito. “I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you.”
It was a bizarre outburst from the wife of a justice on America’s highest court. Secretly recorded by a liberal activist, Martha-Ann Alito complained about a neighbour’s gay pride flag and expressed a desire to fly a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag in protest.
This, along with audio clips of Justice Samuel Alito himself and a stream of ethics violations, have deepened public concerns that the supreme court is playing by its own rules. The Democratic representative Jamie Raskin has described a “national clamour over this crisis of legitimacy” at the court.
A poll last month for the progressive advocacy organisation Stand Up America suggests that the supreme court will now play a crucial role in voters’ choices in the 2024 election. Nearly three in four voters said the selection and confirmation of justices will be an important consideration for them in voting for both president and senator in November.
Reed Galen, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group, said: “The idea that these guys act as if they are kings ruling from above, to me, should absolutely be an issue. It was always Republicans who said we hate unelected judges legislating from the bench and we hate judicial activism. That’s all this stuff is.”
Public trust in the court is at an all-time low amid concerns over bias and corruption. Alito has rejected demands that he recuse himself from a case considering presidential immunity after flags similar to those carried by 6 January 2021 rioters flew over his homes in Virginia and New Jersey. Justice Clarence Thomas has ignored calls to step aside because of the role his wife, Ginni, played in supporting efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020.
Ethical standards have been under scrutiny following revelations that some justices failed to report luxury trips, including on private jets, and property deals. Last week Thomas, who has come under criticism for failing to disclose gifts from the businessman and Republican donor Harlan Crow, revised his 2019 form to acknowledge he accepted “food and lodging” at a Bali hotel and at a California club.
These controversies have been compounded by historic and hugely divisive decisions. The fall of Roe v Wade, ending the nationwide right to abortion after half a century, was seen by many Democrats as a gamechanger in terms of people making a connection between the court and their everyday lives.
Even though debate among members of Congress would lead you to believe that court reform is a polarising issue, it really isn’t
Maggie Jo Buchanan, managing director of Demand Justice
There are further signs of the debate moving beyond the Washington bubble. Last week, the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper argued that, since the court’s own ethics code proved toothless, Congress should enact legislation that holds supreme court justices to higher ethical standards. The paper called for the local senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is chair of the Senate judiciary committee, to hold a hearing on the issue.
Maggie Jo Buchanan, managing director of the pressure group Demand Justice, said: “It’s important to keep in mind that, even though debate among members of Congress would lead you to believe that court reform is a polarising issue, it really isn’t. For years we have seen broad bipartisan support for basic supreme court reforms such as ethics.
“A broad bipartisan consensus exists that they’ve grown too powerful, that they have too much power over laws and regulations. That’s shared among nearly three-fourths of Americans, including 80% of independents, so the demand is there and this isn’t something where it’s Democrats versus Republicans in the sense of real people. The American people want change and want to check the judiciary.”
Congressional Democrats have introduced various bills including one to create an independent ethics office and internal investigations counsel within the supreme court. Broader progressive ideas include expanding the number of seats on the court or limiting the justices to 18-year terms rather than lifetime appointments.
But such efforts have been repeatedly thwarted by Republicans, who over decades impressed on their base the importance of the court, ultimately leading to a 6-3 conservative majority including three Trump appointees.
This week Senate Republicans blocked the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, legislation that would require the court to adopt a binding code of conduct for all justices, establish procedures to investigate complaints of judicial misconduct and adopt rules to disclose gifts, travel and income received by them that are at least as rigorous as congressional disclosure rules.
In response, Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America, said its “nearly 2 million members are fired up and ready to continue advocating for supreme court reform – in Congress and at the ballot box”.
But Galen of the Lincoln Project worries that Democrats lack the necessary aggression to capitalise on the issue. “[Senate majority leader Chuck] Schumer and Durbin are not change agents. They consider themselves institutionalists and they continue to call themselves that. They’re in a place where they can’t possibly conceive of something like that. Democrats are just afraid of their own shadow.”
That principle might apply to the US president himself. The 81-year-old, who served in the Senate for 36 years, is reluctant to call out justices by name or call for sweeping reforms of the court, although he is making its decision to end the constitutional right to abortion a centrepiece of his campaign.
Ed Fallone, an associate law professor at Marquette University Law School said: “I don’t know that Joe Biden is the politician to try and benefit from this issue. Biden has always presented himself as an institutionalist and more of a centrist than many segments of the Democratic party.
“There’s a real risk here for Biden because, if he does try to get political advantage from the public’s growing concern about the supreme court, it seems to conflict with his message that we should all respect the court system and the judicial system and the Trump prosecutions and the various legal problems of former Trump advisers. It seems difficult to reconcile telling the public to respect the judicial system with also embracing the idea that the very top of the system is flawed and needs reform.”
Fallone added: “You will see other Democrats seize on this issue and start to push it, in particular those who are are going to try to energise the left side of the base, maybe not necessarily for this election, but maybe anticipating Biden might lose and starting already to look ahead to the following election.”
Other argue that, competing for voter attention with the cost of living, immigration and other issues, the supreme court will ultimately fade into background noise.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center think-tank in Washington DC, said: “The middle of the country, the independents and the swing voters do not care about the supreme court, and I don’t think any effort by Democrats or the media bringing up these things about Alito or Thomas is going to register or motivate those people. It motivates partisans. It doesn’t motivate swing voters on either side.”
SOTUS takes another swipe at our Democratic Administrative State, while handing the NRA another weapon of mass destruction: Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks, gun accessories used in 2017 Vegas massacre
Associated Press
Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks, gun accessories used in 2017 Vegas massacre
Lindsay Whitehurst – June 14, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns and was used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The high court’s conservative majority found that the Trump administration did not follow federal law when it reversed course and banned bump stocks after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country music festival with assault rifles in 2017. The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 people dead and injuring hundreds more.
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.
“A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate functions of the trigger,” Thomas wrote in an opinion that contained multiple drawings of guns’ firing mechanisms.
He was joined by fellow conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito wrote a short separate opinion to stress that Congress can change the law to equate bump stocks with machine guns.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the Las Vegas gunman. “In murdering so many people so quickly, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he relied on bump stocks,” she said, reading a summary of her dissent aloud in the courtroom.
Sotomayor said that it’s “deeply regrettable” Congress has to act but that she hopes it does.
The ruling came after a Texas gun shop owner challenged the ban, arguing the Justice Department wrongly classified the accessories as illegal machine guns.
The Biden administration said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the right choice for the gun accessories, which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.
It marked the latest gun case to come before the high court. A conservative supermajority handed down a landmark decision expanding gun rights in 2022 and is weighing another gun case challenging a federal law intended to keep guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders.
The arguments in the bump stock case, though, were more about whether the ATF had overstepped its authority than the Second Amendment.
Justices from the court’s liberal wing suggested it was “common sense” that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a machine gun under federal law. Conservative justices, though, raised questions about why Congress had not acted to ban bump stocks, as well as the effects of the ATF changing its mind a decade after declaring the accessories legal.
The high court took up the case after a split among lower courts over bump stocks, which were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that bump stocks didn’t transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging after the shooting in Las Vegas and another mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead.
Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that rests against the shoulder. They harness the gun’s recoil energy so that the trigger bumps against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing the gun to fire at a rate comparable to a traditional machine gun. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks.
The plaintiff, Texas gun shop owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors like the Koch network. His attorneys acknowledged that bump stocks allow for rapid fire but argued that they are different because the shooter has to put in more effort to keep the gun firing.
Government lawyers countered the effort required from the shooter is small and doesn’t make a legal difference. The Justice Department said the ATF changed its mind on bump stocks after doing a more in-depth examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting and came to the right conclusion.
There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went into effect in 2019, requiring people to either surrender or destroy them, at a combined estimated loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said in court documents.
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Supreme Court Overturns Ban On Gun-Enhancing Bump Stock Devices
HuffPost
Supreme Court Overturns Ban On Gun-Enhancing Bump Stock Devices
Roque Planas – June 14, 2024
The Supreme Court Fridayoverturned a federal agency’s rule banning bump stocks, the devices used in some of America’s deadliest mass killings carried out by lone shooters.
Plaintiff Michael Cargill, an Austin, Texas, gun store owner, did not claim that the Second Amendment protected his right to own a bump stock. The case focused narrowly on the administrative process by which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) banned bump stocks, which harness a firearm’s recoil to achieve rates of firing that approach those of automatic weapons.
But the ruling in Garland v. Cargill deals a heavy blow to gun reformers, who viewed a ban on bump stocks as a commonsense response to the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017, when a single shooter fired more than 1,000 rounds into a concert crowd, killing 60 people and injuring 850 more.
After the shooting, a broad consensus formed that bump stocks, a small segment of the overall firearms industry, should be banned.
Congress, however, did not move swiftly to ban bump stocks in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. Instead, then-President Donald Trump directed the ATF to restrict the devices.
The bureau issued a rule in 2018 reclassifying bump stocks as machine guns, making them illegal for civilians to own under federal law.