Category: Politics and American Democracy

The Shrinking of the Middle-Class Neighborhood

The New York Times

The Shrinking of the Middle-Class Neighborhood

Sophie Kasakove and Robert Gebeloff – July 7, 2022

A street with a new apartment complex under construction in in the East Nashville neighborhood of Nashville, Tenn., on May 11, 2022. (September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times)
A street with a new apartment complex under construction in in the East Nashville neighborhood of Nashville, Tenn., on May 11, 2022. (September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When Ashley Broadnax thinks of the East Nashville, Tennessee, neighborhood she grew up in during the ’90s, the images that rush in have a modest, middle-class tinge.

After school, she and other neighborhood children bought snacks at the corner store and threw balls on the street as their parents returned home, some in uniform from blue-collar work, others from jobs as teachers or office workers. Neighbors chatted on porches and lawns of unassuming single-story homes. There were some poor families and a few wealthy ones, but more than one-third of her neighbors made between $40,000 and $75,000 in today’s dollars — enough to live comfortably.

But by 2020, the income distribution had tilted so that half the families made $100,000 or more, census data shows. All across the neighborhood, the modest houses of Broadnax’s youth have been replaced by high-end townhomes known informally as “tall skinnies” that tower over the remaining older homes.

So when it was Broadnax’s turn to pay the rent, using her middle-income salary as an educator, the cost was out of reach.

Like many other Americans, Nashville residents are increasingly being buffeted by economic tides that push them into neighborhoods that are either much richer or much poorer than the regional norm, a New York Times analysis has found. A smaller share of families are living in middle-class neighborhoods, places where incomes are typically within 25% of the regional median.

In Nashville, the share of families living in middle-class neighborhoods dropped by 15 percentage points between 1990 and 2020. But the portion of families in wealthy ones jumped by 11 points, and the segment living in poor neighborhoods grew by 4 points.

In some ways, the pattern reflects how wealthy Americans are choosing to live near other wealthy people, and how poorer Americans are struggling to get by.

But the pattern also indicates a broader trend of income inequality in the economy, as the population of families making more than $100,000 has grown much faster than other groups, even after adjusting for inflation, and the number of families earning less than $40,000 has increased at twice the rate as families in the middle.

Broadnax has become part of a great chase nationally for affordable housing. High rents in the city initially sent her to the more affordable Antioch neighborhood in 2011. But home prices nearly doubled there since 2018, so buying a home meant moving farther out to a suburban community called La Vergne.

“The same people that’s working in their city can’t afford to live in their city,” Broadnax said about Nashville.

Nationally, only half of American families living in metropolitan areas can say that their neighborhood income level is within 25% of the regional median. A generation ago, 62% of families lived in these middle-income neighborhoods.

“People are getting pushed out, and that is breaking up some historically sort of working-class neighborhoods,” said Marybeth Shinn, a Vanderbilt University professor who studies homelessness and social exclusion. “You gradually convert a neighborhood from a pretty modest kind of neighborhood that a lot of people could live in to one where only people that have a little more means are able to live in.”

That evolution has mixed consequences for people seeing their neighborhoods change.

When Jim Polk bought his home in East Nashville in 1979, the community left some amenities to be desired. The park near his house was rundown, and the neighborhood had few sidewalks or streetlights.

As the firefighters, nurses and local government employees in the neighborhood were replaced by tech workers, engineers and lawyers, Polk mourned the loss of their old, familiar neighborhood where his four daughters had learned to accept people of diverse backgrounds.

“So many families have moved out over time,” said Polk, who worked for decades as a community education coordinator for the city public schools. “It didn’t remind them of the place they used to live, and it was so expensive to stay.”

But Polk and his wife were able to keep up with the property tax increases on their city pensions, and they could not ignore the improvements to the neighborhood: New sidewalks and streetlights were installed, and the long-neglected park was cleaned up. When his church was destroyed by a tornado in 2020, his new neighbors had the resources to help the congregation buy a new building.

Even more significant has been the rapid price appreciation of homes in the neighborhood.Polk bought his home for $36,000. A home just across the street sold for more than $1.5 million in February, according to Zillow.

“There have been improvements in services available to the people living in the neighborhood,” he said. “But who gets to participate?”

Experts say the changes in housing patterns represent a form of economic segregation, as Americans are less likely to live in neighborhoods with people from other socioeconomic classes. Economic segregation exacerbates the problems often associated with income inequality. There are what researchers call “neighborhood effects,” with studies finding that poor children have better odds of climbing the socioeconomic ladder if they grow up outside of concentrated poverty.

And wealthy neighborhoods tend to command a disproportionate share of resources, such as better schools, more parks and greater access to health professionals.

This economic segregation not only “concentrates low-income families in high poverty neighborhoods, but it concentrates affluent families in affluent neighborhoods, where they can engage in a kind of opportunity hoarding,” said Sean F. Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. He and another sociologist, Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University, have written several papers on economic segregation.

Consider Durham, North Carolina.

Since 1990, a surge of wealth and investment has poured into the city’s downtown. At the same time, the percentage of families living in lower-income neighborhoods has doubled.

Turquoise LeJeune Parker, an elementary school technology instructor, said the split reality of rich and poor neighborhoods did her low-income students no good. Describing what she saw as the prevailing mindset of people flocking to prosperous parts of town, she said, “We won’t push for resources for our schools, we won’t push for any of that because ‘I’ve got what I need on my side of the city, so I’m good.’ ”

To some degree, economic segregation has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of the middle class in general.

At the same time, local governments across the country have done little to maintain or expand affordable housing, instead investing in attracting highly paid workers, which drives up prices and displaces lower-income residents.

And exclusionary zoning laws often prevent denser, lower-cost housing from being built in high-end enclaves — Tennessee has even barred cities from putting zoning laws into place that would protect affordability. Property taxes on many homes have spiked, pushing longtime residents to sell to investors.

But whatever the cause, similar trends can be seen across the country.

In the Boston metropolitan area, middle class neighborhoods have shifted in both directions. In the 1990s and 2000s, many fell behind economically. In the past decade, because of widespread gentrification in the city, many modest neighborhoods have been transformed into much wealthier ones.

A generation ago, Seattle’s tech industry was starting to boom, but the area also was a major manufacturing hub, and 7 out of 10 families lived in middle-class neighborhoods. Today, only 5 out of 10 do. Nearly one-third live in wealthy enclaves.

In the Midwest, the share of families living in middle-class neighborhoods fell by 13 percentage points in Columbus, Ohio, since 1990, by 12 in Chicago, and by nine in Indianapolis.

And in Orlando, nearly 70% of area residents lived in “average” neighborhoods in 1990, according to census data. In 2020, the same was true for just 46%.

That leaves a lot of people feeling like they’re on the outside looking in.

Michael Street is a union electrician who moved from Nashville to Goodlettsville, Tennessee, about 25 minutes away. He said he spent his days driving around Nashville, working on houses that have all been rehabbed, rebuilt or rendered unrecognizable in neighborhoods he can no longer afford.

“Either you’re poor, or you’re rich,” he said. “Middle class is kind of phasing out. Either you have a lot of money, or you’re just barely getting by.”

—

Methodology

To measure the growing level of economic segregation in the U.S., the Times used census data to compare the median family income of every census tract with the median for the surrounding metropolitan area for the years 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020. The analysis counted how many families lived in middle-class tracts, where the median family income was within 25% of the regional median, and how many lived in tracts where the income level was 25% or more above or below the regional median. All figures were inflation-adjusted to 2020 values.

Source data and maps were from socialexplorer.com and nhgis.org.

SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe

Rolling Stone

SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe

Kara Voght and Tim Dickinson – July 6, 2022

Reverend Rob Schenck (C) from Faith and - Credit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Reverend Rob Schenck (C) from Faith and – Credit: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.

This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.

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In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.

Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”

Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.

The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. Liberty Counsel’s founder, Mat Staver, strenuously denied that the in-person ministering to justices that Nienaber bragged about exists. “It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”

But the founder of the ministry, who surrendered its operations to Liberty Counsel in 2018, tells Rolling Stone that he hosted prayer sessions with conservative justices in their chambers from the late-1990s through when he left the group in the mid-2010s. Rob Schenck, who launched the ministry under the name Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, described how the organization forged ministry relationships with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia, saying he would pray with them inside the high court. Nienaber was Schenk’s close associate in that era, and continued with the ministry after it came under the umbrella of Liberty Counsel.

Louis Virelli is a professor at Stetson University College of Law who wrote a book about Supreme Court recusals. He’s blunt in his assessment: “Praying with a group that filed an amicus brief with a court,” he says, “is a problem.”

Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012. - Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images
Peggy Nienaber, right, at an event outside the Supreme Court led by Christian faith organizations on the eve of the Supreme Court arguments on President Obama’s health care legislation in 2012. – Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images

In the shadow of the high court, across the street from its chambers, sits a cluster of unassuming row houses known only to the initiated as “Ministry Row.” The strip is host to evangelical political groups that have spent the past several decades pushing Beltway conservatives to embrace the religious right’s political causes — and, most of all, reverse Roe v. Wade. The street view offers few clues as to what transpires behind the painted brick facades, save for a granite slab inscribed with the Ten Commandments planted in the grassy patch before a modest cream-colored Victorian with maroon trim.

The home serves as Faith & Liberty’s headquarters. The Ten Commandments statue had been placed there by Schenck, an evangelical minister famous for orchestrating high-profile anti-abortion stunts, such as shoving an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. Schenck had opened the ministry in the 1990s as Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, a nonprofit dedicated to ending federal abortion rights. The organization operated on a “utopian ‘trickle-up’ theory” of influence: building access “higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target — members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices — even presidents,” Schenck wrote in his 2018 autobiography.

The group established a strong foothold in both chambers of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But Faith and Action ultimately directed its energies toward the judicial branch. “There were no pro-life groups directly approaching the judges and justices, who shaped abortion law simply by their precedent-setting decisions,” Schenck wrote. “We knew we were stuck with members of the federal bench — they were appointed for life — so why not convert them while in office?” (Schenck has since reversed course: He is now a fierce critic of evangelical politicking and says Liberty Counsel assumed Faith and Action’s operations in 2018. He says he has no knowledge of the group’s inner workings after he left.)

At first, the high court regarded Faith and Action and its peer organizations as nuisances, according to Schenck. “Justice Thomas would say to me, ‘You know those groups outside? Are they crazy or are they good people?’” Schenck recalls in an interview with Rolling Stone. When Schenck first began his approach in 1994, prayer activities on the Supreme Court’s property was considered an act of demonstration, and therefore illegal. Eventually, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas would embrace Schenck, he says, and pray with him in various corners of the high court’s grounds — including, occasionally, in their chambers. (Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, remained more guarded and skeptical of such groups’ influence.)

To pray with the justices was to perform a sort of “spiritual conditioning,” Schenck explains. “The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support — to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them.” Prayer is a powerful communication tool in the evangelical tradition: The speaker assumes the mantle of the divine, and to disagree with an offered prayer is akin to sin. “It’s just not common to interrupt or challenge a prayer,” Schenck explains. “That’s not something a devout Supreme Court justice would ever consider doing.” That was true even for the devout Catholic justices, such as Scalia, who joined the evangelical Faith and Action members in prayer, Schenck says.

Sometimes the prayers would be general; other times, on specific subjects, such as ending abortion, according to Schenck. He says Faith and Action took assiduous care to avoid speaking blatantly about cases in the Supreme Court’s pipeline, discussing the political agenda only in broad strokes. Even so, under the time period Schenck describes, prayers with the justices occurred as Faith and Action signed onto several amicus briefs for landmark SCOTUS cases such as Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, which ultimately upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

Schenck walked away from his life on the Hill after receiving a late-career doctorate on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who questioned the collaborative relationship between Adolf Hitler and 1930s German evangelicals. He drew parallels between the Republican Party and American evangelicalism, concerned that he’d weaponized worship to fuel a hate-filled agenda. No longer an anti-abortion activist, Schenck views his past efforts with regret. “Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.

“I was sure, while we were doing it, it would be a positive contribution to our public life,” Schenck says. “It didn’t have the effect I thought it would. In some ways, it set the stage for the reversal of Roe, which I now think of as a social catastrophe.

When Liberty Counsel absorbed Faith and Action in 2018, Peggy Nienaber, who had worked alongside Schenck since at least 2005, continued with the group. In a July 2021 conversation with Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder, Nienaber described the group’s new incarnation as similar to Faith and Action’s mission. It’s “the ministry right here on Capitol Hill,” she said, devoted to “changing the hearts and minds of not only our elected officials, but the staffers all the way down.” Nienaber highlighted Faith & Liberty’s proximity to the court by pointing to the window of the conference room where the justices decide their cases. ”When you’re sitting in that conference room, you cannot miss those Ten Commandments,” she said. (Faith & Liberty sits so close to the Supreme Court, in fact, that it has been included in the “buffer zone” surrounding the high court, shut off to protesters and the public. There’s irony here, given that Liberty Counsel has for decades  litigated to abolish buffer zones near abortion clinics.)

“There’s a lot of things that Faith & Liberty does — and that you do — that obviously we can’t put in an email, can’t put in a newsletter, can’t put in a press release,” Staver said to Nienaber during their chat, “because it’s private relationships that are spiritually transformative.” Nienaber’s social media accounts show her hobnobbing with high-profile Republicans such as Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and former Vice President Mike Pence. She hung close to the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018: She posted photographs from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing room, as well as a screenshot of her invitation to Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony.

Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”

In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”

Nienaber was recorded telling the livestreamer that she prayed with Supreme Court justices on June 27, the Monday after the high court issued the Dobbs ruling. She was at a celebration she helped organize with Sean Feucht, a prominent Christian-worship musician. Nienaber identifies herself only as “Peggy” in the footage, but she references the ministry she runs behind the court and its 850-pound replica of the Ten Commandments. For most of the interview, Nienaber is not on camera. But when the video pans on her briefly, she can be seen wearing the same dress and necklace she has on in a selfie with Feucht posted to Faith & Liberty’s website.

Last week, Rolling Stone spoke to Patty Bills, the director of constituency affairs at Faith & Liberty. Bills did not want to discuss Faith & Liberty’s ministry practices, citing privacy concerns. Bills would not, however, deny that Faith & Liberty ministers to Supreme Court justices. “I never said we didn’t — I just said we provide privacy,” she said.

Staver, in denying that members of Faith & Liberty prayed with Supreme Court justices, says that such prayers would have been inappropriate, especially given Liberty Counsel’s litigation efforts. “That’s why we wouldn’t do that,” he says. “And especially on cases that are pending before the Supreme Court, we would make a very clear firewall. We just would never do something like that.”

In a written statement to Rolling Stone, Nienaber says of her hot-mic comments: “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” She adds that Covid restrictions have limited public access to the Supreme Court: “The public has not been allowed access, and I am no different.” When she has had access to public areas of the court, she says, “I will generally silently pray for the justices, their staff, and the Court.”

But after this story was published, Nienaber acknowledged her remarks and conceded she has prayed personally with Supreme Court justices. Despite speaking in the present tense on the livestream, Nienaber asserted, “My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years.” Nienaber added: “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer. Since early 2020, access to the Supreme Court has been restricted due to COVID. It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”

Liberty Counsel was founded in 1989 by Staver. The organization is an uncommon hybrid of religious ministry and legal practice, dedicated to “advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the family through strategic litigation.” Staver is the organization’s senior pastor as well as its top litigator. This mix of law and religion is central to Staver’s career; he previously served as dean of the law school at Liberty University, founded by the televangelist Jerry Falwell.

Staver has argued numerous cases in front of the Supreme Court. He started in 1994 in a case that struck a blow against protest-limiting buffer zones near abortion clinics. In the court’s most recent term, Staver argued and won a 9-0 judgment in Shurtleff v. Boston, a case in which the court ruled a Christian flag couldn’t be excluded from a public flagpole that displayed a rotating assortment of secular flags.

Staver also wrote an amicus brief in the Dobbs case that purports to tie abortion and birth control to eugenics. Calling Roe “the low watermark in this Court’s history,” it argued that Dobbs was ”an ideal vehicle for the Court to finally overrule Roe v. Wade and its progeny, which have constitutionalized eugenic abortions as a fundamental right.”

In the Dobbs majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he cited this brief to impugn the motives of pro-abortion-rights advocates, arguing that “some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population,” adding, “it is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” because “a highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are Black.”

When Roe v. Wade was reversed, Staver was triumphant: “I have dedicated my life to defend life and overturn the bloody decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” he wrote. “This global earthquake will impact the world.”

Prayer unto itself in no way presents a conflict of interest for the justices, says Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, not even with a group like Faith & Liberty that has business before the court. Justices are allowed to visit there with whomever they’d like in their private chambers, and have socialized with interested parties throughout the court’s history. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, routinely played cards with the high court’s magistrates, and Scalia went duck hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney. What would amount to an ethical concern would be if they’re discussing those cases as they pray — “or if the prayer sessions would influence how justices rule in a particular case,” says Adam Winkler, a Supreme Court expert at the University of California Los Angeles.

But even among legal experts troubled by the court’s ties, they acknowledge there are few remedies to address ethical conflicts. A federal statute governs when judges and justices should step away from cases, but the Constitution leaves questions of partiality to the justices themselves. Their general unwillingness to step aside isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Virelli, the Stetson law professor, says: When justices recuse themselves from a case, no one replaces them, a scenario that can create more problems than it solves. “The court changes shape,” he explains. “That makes the decision to recuse difficult.”

That the justices are their own keepers in regard to those rules creates complications, however, says Steve Vladeck, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Texas Law School. The relationship between Faith & Liberty and Liberty Counsel, as described by Rolling Stone, “could make a reasonable observer worry about the appearance of partiality,” he says. But the concerns the scenario raised shouldn’t be about recusal. “What that really reveals is how problematic it is that there isn’t an objective mechanism to resolve these sorts of questions.”

For Winkler, the greater concern is not prayers, but the “religious-themed” decisions he’s seen come down from the high court this term, pointing to not only the Roe reversal but also opinions that permit unchecked free exercise of First Amendment rights. “The problematic aspect isn’t whether they’re praying,” Winkler says, “but that several justices seem committed to reading their religion into the Constitution.”

Petition calling for Clarence Thomas removal from Supreme Court gets 1M signatures

THe Hill

Petition calling for Clarence Thomas removal from Supreme Court gets 1M signatures

Olafimihan Oshin – July 6, 2022

An online petition that calls for the removal of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has attracted more than 1 million signatures.

The petition, titled “Impeach Justice Clarence Thomas,” was created on the public advocacy organization website MoveOn in May.

The petition description cited Thomas’s vote to overturn Roe v. Wade as reasoning for his removal.

“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—who sided with the majority on overturning Roe—made it clear what’s next: to overturn high court rulings that establish gay rights and contraception rights,” the petition read.

The description also mentioned Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, and her role in encouraging members of the Trump administration to continue to challenge the 2020 election results.

The Supreme Court earlier this year rejected a request by former President Trump to prevent the release of documents related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Thomas was the only justice to dissent on the matter.

“He has shown he cannot be an impartial justice and is more concerned with covering up his wife’s coup attempts than the health of the Supreme Court.”

“He must resign — or Congress must immediately investigate and impeach,” the petition concluded.

The petition garnered more than 1.1 million signatures and urges Congress to either investigate or impeach Thomas for his actions.

The MoveOn petition follows a similar one created by George Washington University students last week in an effort to remove Thomas from his teaching position with the Washington, D.C., university.

The student-led petition came after the high court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 ruling that determined a woman’s right to abortion was constitutional.

In a school-wide letter, GWU officials said they don’t have plans to remove Thomas as an adjunct instructor in their law school, stating that he did not violate the school’s policy on academic freedom.

“Just as we affirm our commitment to academic freedom, we affirm the right of all members of our community to voice their opinions and contribute to the critical discussion that is foundational to our academic mission,” school officials wrote in their letter.

Adam Kinzinger and his family are getting so many death threats over his Trump criticism that his office put together a 3-minute audio clip

Insider

Adam Kinzinger and his family are getting so many death threats over his Trump criticism that his office put together a 3-minute audio clip

Camila DeChalus – July 5, 2022

  • Rep. Adam Kinzinger says he’s been getting threatening calls to his office in Washington, DC.
  • People have also threatened to go after him and his family.
  • Kinzinger is a member of the House committee investigating the insurrection.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Tuesday released a three-minute audio clip of recent threatening calls his office has received, highlighting the increased harassment he and his family have faced in light of his participation in the House committee investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

“Threats of violence over politics has increased heavily in the last few years. But the darkness has reached new lows,” Kinzinger tweeted. “My new interns made this compilation of recent calls they’ve received while serving in my DC office.”

In one call, a person threatened to come to Kinzinger’s house and go after his wife and his newborn baby.

“I’m going to come to protest in front of your house this weekend,” the caller said. “We know where your family is, and we’re going to get you … We’re going to get your wife, going to get your kids.”

Another caller said, “I hope you naturally die as quickly as fucking possible.”

Some of the callers alluded to Kinzinger’s involvement in the House committee, accusing him of lying and going against former President Donald Trump during recent hearings.

Last month, Kinzinger said he and his family had received a death threat over his sitting on the committee. He shared the letter, which was addressed to his wife, Sofia, on Twitter. “That pimp you married not only broke his oath, he sold his soul,” it said, adding, “Therefore, although it might take time, he will be executed.”

Citing data from the US Capitol Police, Axios reported late last month that threats against lawmakers had significantly increased in the past five years. The report said that in the first three months of the year, the Capitol Police opened cases into more than 1,800 threats.

Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming are the only two Republicans sitting on the House select committee investigating the insurrection and Trump’s involvement in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Following the recent testimony from the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Kinzinger, who’s been highly critical of the former president, said Trump and his allies including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy were “scared.”

Adam Kinzinger and his family are getting so many death threats over his Trump criticism that his office put together a 3-minute audio clip

Insider

Adam Kinzinger and his family are getting so many death threats over his Trump criticism that his office put together a 3-minute audio clip

Camila DeChalus – July 5, 2022

  • Rep. Adam Kinzinger says he’s been getting threatening calls to his office in Washington, DC.
  • People have also threatened to go after him and his family.
  • Kinzinger is a member of the House committee investigating the insurrection.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Tuesday released a three-minute audio clip of recent threatening calls his office has received, highlighting the increased harassment he and his family have faced in light of his participation in the House committee investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

“Threats of violence over politics has increased heavily in the last few years. But the darkness has reached new lows,” Kinzinger tweeted. “My new interns made this compilation of recent calls they’ve received while serving in my DC office.”

In one call, a person threatened to come to Kinzinger’s house and go after his wife and his newborn baby.

“I’m going to come to protest in front of your house this weekend,” the caller said. “We know where your family is, and we’re going to get you … We’re going to get your wife, going to get your kids.”

Another caller said, “I hope you naturally die as quickly as fucking possible.”

Some of the callers alluded to Kinzinger’s involvement in the House committee, accusing him of lying and going against former President Donald Trump during recent hearings.

Last month, Kinzinger said he and his family had received a death threat over his sitting on the committee. He shared the letter, which was addressed to his wife, Sofia, on Twitter. “That pimp you married not only broke his oath, he sold his soul,” it said, adding, “Therefore, although it might take time, he will be executed.”

Citing data from the US Capitol Police, Axios reported late last month that threats against lawmakers had significantly increased in the past five years. The report said that in the first three months of the year, the Capitol Police opened cases into more than 1,800 threats.

Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming are the only two Republicans sitting on the House select committee investigating the insurrection and Trump’s involvement in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Following the recent testimony from the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Kinzinger, who’s been highly critical of the former president, said Trump and his allies including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy were “scared.”

Nearly 850,000 people signed a petition demanding that Justice Clarence Thomas should be booted from the Supreme Court following Roe v. Wade ruling

Insider

Nearly 850,000 people signed a petition demanding that Justice Clarence Thomas should be booted from the Supreme Court following Roe v. Wade ruling

Taylor Ardrey – July 2, 2022

Justice Clarence Thomas
Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissenting opinion to Supreme Court decision on Thursday repeated a misleading claim about COVID-19 vaccines.Erin Schaff/Associated Press
  • Thousands of people have signed a petition to impeach Justice Clarence Thomas.
  • About 841,016 people have signed the Move On petition as of Saturday.
  • The calls to remove Thomas were heightened after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition demanding the removal of Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, The Hill reported.

Last week, the highest court’s conservative justices repealed the landmark ruling that legalized abortion across the United States, prompting protests nationwide. Now the petition created by Move On, an advocacy group, has nearly 850,000 signatures calling for Thomas to be impeached.

“The right-wing rigged Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, effectively taking away the right to privacy and bodily autonomy that’s been considered legal precedent for the past 50 years,” the petition said.

“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—who sided with the majority on overturning Roe—made it clear what’s next: to overturn high court rulings that establish gay rights and contraception rights.”

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Thomas said that the court should also “reconsider” rulings that protect contraception access, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage, Insider previously reported. Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have also advocated for Thomas to be booted from his seat.

The petition also called out Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, who was accused of being involved in challenging the 2020 presidential election results.

“Thomas’ failure to recuse himself warrants immediate investigation and heightened alarm. And it’s only the latest in a long history of conflicts of interest in the service of a right-wing agenda and mixing his powerful role with his conservative political activism,” the petition continued. “He has shown he cannot be an impartial justice and is more concerned with covering up his wife’s coup attempts than the health of the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court Isn’t Done Carrying Water for Right-Wing Activists

Rolling Stone

The Supreme Court Isn’t Done Carrying Water for Right-Wing Activists

The conservative court just finished issuing a string of devastating decisions made with little regard for precedent. It’s just getting started

By David S. Cohen – July 1, 2022

The US Supreme Court is reflected in a puddle of water in Washington, DC, on April 5, 2022. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP) (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

Law is supposed to be an objective discipline. We praise the “rule of law” as an immutable hallmark of the American legal system, and take solace in the ideal that justice should be dispensed fairly and evenly regardless of who is dispensing it. Our judges wear black robes because they are meant to be indistinguishable. It theoretically shouldn’t matter which one hears a case because the law, not the individual, determines the outcome.

But here’s the spoiler: This is all hogwash. At least when it comes to the Supreme Court, who the judge is matters immensely, while what the law is matters very little. In fact, as the cases decided in the past few weeks make clear, the current justices are going to take almost every chance they get to issue the most politically conservative decision possible.

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Let’s review what the court has done just in the past week or so. First, last Thursday, it gutted one of the key protections from the Miranda rights everyone knows (“You have the right to remain silent…”). Now, when police don’t give the required warning, defendants can still have their statements suppressed in court, and they can’t sue the police for the violation. Overturning Miranda v. Arizona has been one of the conservative legal movement’s goals ever since the case was decided in 1966. Its whittling last Thursday happened not because the Constitution changed, but solely because the court’s personnel changed. When Miranda was decided over 50 years ago, the court was at its most liberal. A more conservative court reconsidered the case in 2000, but refused to overturn it. In 2022, however, with the court now packed with conservative justices, the case has been partially rebuked, and the groundwork laid for a more complete rejection later.

Something similar happened with guns. In 2008, a conservative Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller that an individual has the right to own a handgun. It was signal enough that court decisions are all about personnel, but what happened Thursday drove the point home. Ever since that 2008 decision, gun rights advocates have pushed the court to expand the ruling to get rid of even more gun laws. But the court never had enough votes to do it, refusing to hear subsequent gun cases as its most conservative members complained that liberal justices were avoiding important issues. That was until former President Trump appointed three new conservative justices to the court, which subsequently took up New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, ruling last week that there is a constitutional right to concealed carry. There’s now little doubt this motivated group of conservative jurists will soon expand gun rights even further.

The same personnel change animated Friday’s abortion ruling. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health involved a ban on abortion at 15 weeks pregnancy, starting its journey before the court with the state of Mississippi asking only that the court approve this particular ban, not that it also overturn Roe v. Wade. But when Mississippi fully briefed the case, it asked the court not only to uphold the Mississippi law but also to strike down the landmark 1977 case guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion access. What changed? Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett. Because of that personnel change alone, Mississippi changed what it asked of the court. It got its wish on Friday, with the court’s conservative majority overturning Roe. Without Barrett and with Ginsburg, this would not have happened. That it did is a reflection not of law but of the people wearing the robes.

Then came Monday’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton. In that case, the court ruled that a public school football coach can pray after a game on the 50-yard line and not be disciplined for doing so, with the court’s conservative majority saying the coach has a free speech and freedom of religion right to pray right after games. In ruling this way, the court put the nail in the coffin of a 50-year-old precedent that determined what constitutes crossing the line separating church and state. In fact, the court’s ruling this week almost reads that protection out of the First Amendment entirely, which, again, has been a long-standing project of legal conservatives.

The past two days showed much of the same. On Wednesday, the court ruled that states have authority over tribal land, and earlier today, the court rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plant emissions. Both of these cases, like the others, map perfectly onto the conservative movement’s wish list. The Court also approved President Biden’s rescission of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” plan, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s three liberals, but this kind of cross-ideological decision is growing increasingly rare on this conservative court.

Unfortunately, the decisions the court handed down this term are just the beginning. The new right-wing majority on the court is showing everyone that it is not shy about flexing its conservative muscle. The justices are not doing anything piecemeal and are using every opportunity to rule in the most expansive way possible on some of the country’s most divisive political issues. There’s more in the pipeline for next year, such as matters related to affirmative action, religious exemptions to anti-discrimination law, and the ability of state legislatures to control elections. It’s a conservative activist’s wish list of issues for the court to tackle, and these justices are complying.

In dissent in the abortion case last week, liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan wrote: “The American public … should never conclude that its constitutional protections hung by a thread — that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school, could by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights. It is hard — no, it is impossible — to conclude that anything else has happened here.

They are right. The group of justices committed to enshrining the conservative legal agenda into law means the outcomes of almost all coming cases are very unlikely to surprise. Ask what the conservative policy position is, and that’s how these politicians in robes will rule.

New recycling method could eliminate the climate impact of plastic

The Hill

New recycling method could eliminate the climate impact of plastic

Gianna Melillo – July 1, 2022

Story at a glance

  • Plastic pollution is one of the more pressing issues for conservationists and environmentalists alike.
  • Researchers in Sweden harvested a byproduct of plastic disposal and used it to create a new sustainable plastic.
  • By incentivizing collection of this byproduct, experts hope to scale the process and create a more sustainable plastic recycling process.

Declining plastic recycling rates coupled with increased plastic pollution on the Earth’s surface and within its oceans spell concern for the planet’s health.

In an effort to combat these trends, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden developed a recycling method that replaces all fossil raw materials used in new plastic production with carbon atoms from mixed waste. The technique has the potential to eliminate the climate impact of plastic and may rid the air of carbon dioxide.

“While fossil fuel use is the main cause of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and a transition away from the use of such fuels is essential to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 [degrees celsius], the production and use of materials such as plastics, cement and steel entail significant GHG emissions,” researchers explained in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

They hypothesized carbon atoms in plastic waste serve as an important untapped resource. These existing resources are currently incinerated or find their way to landfills. Thermochemical technologies can target this wasted carbon and use it as a raw material to produce plastics of similar quality to those created with fossil fuels.

According to investigators, enough of these atoms already exist to meet the needs of all global plastic production. The atoms can be harvested from waste with or without food residue.

“If the process is powered by renewable energy, we also get plastic products with more than 95 percent lower climate impact than those produced today, which effectively means negative emissions for the entire system,” said co-author Henrik Thunman in a press release.

To complete the process, the carbon atoms would need to be heated to 600 to 800 degrees celsius, converting the material to gas. Adding hydrogen to this gas can replace the building blocks of plastics and researchers are working to ensure the gas can be used and converted in the same factories currently used to manufacture plastic.

This process can also be powered by renewable sources like solar, wind or hydro power, making them more energy efficient than current systems in use. Experts would also be able to harvest excess heat produced in the process to offset heat production from waste incineration, thereby eliminating carbon dioxide emissions resulting from energy recovery, they explained.

Creating an economic structure to collect and use these carbon atoms can help incentivize this new form of recycling.

The process has already proven successful in one Swedish plant in collaboration with Borealis, a plastic manufacturer.

“Global application of advanced thermochemical recycling technologies has great potential: less energy than used in today’s material system may likely be required, and carbon emissions can be reduced using different energy sources, leading to near-zero carbon emissions with renewable energy,” authors concluded.

More research is needed to better understand best deployment strategies and determine their economic and energy implications.

Court Decision Leaves Biden With Few Tools to Combat Climate Change

The New York Times

Court Decision Leaves Biden With Few Tools to Combat Climate Change

Coral Davenport – July 1, 2022

U.S. President Joe Biden holds up a wind turbine size comparison chart while attending a meeting with governors, labor leaders, and private companies launching the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership, at the White House in Washington, U.S., June 23, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (Kevin Lamarque / reuters)

WASHINGTON — One by one, the tools available to President Joe Biden to fight climate change are being stripped away.

After a Supreme Court decision Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency will have less authority to limit carbon dioxide from power plants, a major source in this country of the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.

It is one in a series of setbacks for Biden, who came into office with the most ambitious climate agenda of any president, pledging to the rest of the world that the United States, the world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, would cut that pollution in half by the end of the decade.

In a statement, Biden called the ruling “another devastating decision that aims to take our country backwards” and said the conservative majority on the court was siding “with special interests that have waged a long-term campaign to strip away our right to breathe clean air.”

“The science confirms what we all see with our own eyes — the wildfires, droughts, extreme heat, and intense storms are endangering our lives and livelihoods,” Biden said. “I will take action. My administration will continue using lawful executive authority, including the EPA’s legally upheld authorities, to keep our air clean, protect public health and tackle the climate crisis.”

Some experts say that after the Supreme Court’s decision in the case, West Virginia v. EPA., it will soon be mathematically impossible for Biden to meet his goals.

“At this point, I don’t see any way to hit the kind of targets they laid out,” said David G. Victor, an expert in climate policy at the University of California, San Diego.

The consequences could be severe. Scientists say the United States must hit Biden’s target if it is to do its part to limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with temperatures before the Industrial Revolution. That is the threshold beyond which the likelihood significantly increases of catastrophic impacts such as deadly heat waves, drought, wildfire and storms. The planet has already warmed an average of about 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Biden has faced obstacle after obstacle in his push for climate action, ranging from conflicts within his own party to a worldwide energy crunch triggered by the war in Ukraine to well-funded legal challenges from Republicans and the fossil fuel industry.

Patrick Morrisey, the Republican attorney general of West Virginia and the lead plaintiff in the case, called the decision a “great win for West Virginia and her residents,” adding, “We are pleased this case returned the power to decide one of the major environmental issues of the day to the right place to decide it: the U.S. Congress, comprised of those elected by the people to serve the people.”

The problem for Biden is that Congress has so far failed to act on climate change. The centerpiece of the president’s climate plan, legislation to replace coal and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy, was deleted from a major domestic policy bill last fall after objections from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. Manchin, who has personal financial ties to the coal industry, has been able to single-handedly set the limits of Biden’s legislative ambitions as the key swing vote in an evenly divided Senate.

The domestic policy bill in limbo on Capitol Hill still includes what would be a historic increase in tax credits to spur the wind and solar industries. But it is unclear if Manchin will support the plan and the legislation could die if Republicans, who have shown little interest in climate action, retake one or both chambers in the midterm elections.

Biden has focused on the nation’s top source of greenhouse gas pollution — transportation — by directing the EPA to craft tough new limits on tailpipe emissions to speed up adoption of electric vehicles. But those rules are already under legal assault in lower courts by many of the same plaintiffs who were victorious in this week’s Supreme Court case.

As a candidate, Biden promised to end drilling on public lands — oil, gas and coal extraction from federal land and waters generates 25% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. But when he tried to pause new drilling, it was overturned by a legal challenge from Republican attorneys general from states that produce fossil fuels. The administration held its first onshore drilling lease sale this week in seven Western states.

“The judicial branch and the legislative branch are seriously hindering Joe Biden’s ability to get the job done on climate,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard, who served on Biden’s EPA transition team. “A lot of the optimism that everyone had a year ago is being replaced by pessimism. They’re running out of options right now.”

The Biden administration contends that it remains possible for the United States to meet its climate targets, by cobbling together a mix of executive actions.

“Ambitious climate action presents a singular opportunity to ensure U.S. global competitiveness, create jobs, lower costs for families, and protect people’s health and well-being, especially those who’ve long suffered the burden of inaction,” Michael S. Regan, the EPA administrator, said in a statement. “EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.”

The Supreme Court ruling left intact the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions but blocked any attempt by the agency to write regulations so broad that they force the closure of coal-fired plants, which generate the most carbon dioxide, or compel utilities to switch from fossil fuels to wind, solar and other clean sources.

The EPA still plans to issue tougher regulations to control methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells. And it plans stricter limits on other types of pollution generated by power plants, such as mercury, smog and soot. The idea is that cracking down on those pollutants could force electric utilities to clean up or shut down the dirtiest facilities, such as coal-burning power plants, which produce more carbon dioxide than gas-fired plants.

“Those air pollution rules will have co-benefits — as they are being enforced, they will squeeze out some CO2 pollution,” said Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Santa Barbara, California, who has advised congressional Democrats on climate legislation. “It wouldn’t be the same amount. Every time we take a tool off the table we’re in a worse position.”

Meanwhile, the private sector has already been shifting away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources.

Electric vehicle sales have doubled over the past year, making up about 5% of new vehicle sales in the United States in the first quarter of 2022, compared with about 2.5% in the first quarter of 2021. General Motors has pledged to stop producing gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, with other carmakers setting similar goals. Ford Motor is producing an electric version of the F-150 pickup truck, the country’s best-selling vehicle, and has taken customer reservations for more than 200,000 of them.

With the cost of solar and wind energy dropping below the price of coal and natural gas in many parts of the United States, renewable sources of electricity now make up 20% of the nation’s energy mix, up from 15% a decade ago.

But the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, combined with the war in Ukraine and the related ban on Russian oil have scrambled global energy supplies, and prompted Biden to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserves and urge producers to pump more oil, at least in the short term. Clean energy producers in the United States also face significant obstacles from an outdated electricity transmission system.

And the private sector is not moving quickly enough to cut emissions to the level that scientists say is needed to avert climate catastrophe. Biden wants half of new cars sold in the United States to be electric by 2030, and all electricity to come from wind, solar and other zero-carbon sources by 2035.

“We do see a powerful trend emerging in the private sector both driven by consumers who are demanding cleaner options, that is driving a shift in our energy mix, and toward electric vehicles, but that pace of change is really not sufficient to meet the long-term targets,” said Sasha Mackler, an energy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research organization. “For that, you still need policy. The administration doesn’t have the right tools to get us all there. Success in the time that we need it, according to the scientific community — that requires Congress.”

Congress in the coming weeks could still pass a scaled-back version of the spending bill that has been stalled on Capitol Hill for months. A version of the bill that passed the House last year includes $300 billion in clean energy tax incentives for producers and purchasers of clean electricity and electric vehicles.

But its current status is uncertain: Manchin blocked the larger spending bill that includes the tax credits last December, although he has recently restarted talks with the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., about the prospects for a less ambitious version. Under Senate rules, that bill must be passed by Sept. 30. The Senate is in recess through the second week of July, and will break again for the month of August, leaving Democrats limited time to reach agreement on a package that has eluded consensus for the past year.

Democrats say the Supreme Court decision lends urgency to the push to pass that bill. Schumer said the decision will “put American lives at risk, making it all the more imperative that Democrats soon pass meaningful legislation to address the climate crisis.”

Stalled action on the federal level puts a spotlight on dozens of states that are moving ahead with their own climate plans. “If the state actions are put on steroids as the federal government realizes its impotence, the effects of that will be significant,” Victor said.

Just under half the states have already enacted significant climate policies. Their leader is California, which in the coming weeks is expected to finalize a first-in-the-nation regulation requiring that all new cars sold in the state must be electric or zero-emission by 2035. Seventeen other states are in line to adopt the same rule when it passes in Sacramento.

California also requires that 100% of its electricity be generated from zero-carbon sources by 2045. Twenty-one other states have some version of that clean electricity standard, and several are advancing legislation for even more stringent versions.

“Today’s ruling makes it even more imperative that California and other states succeed in our efforts to combat the climate crisis,” said Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California. “While the court has once again turned back the clock, California refuses to go backward — we’re just getting started.”

But those state-level tools are also in the sights of many of the same Republican attorneys general who brought the power plant case to the Supreme Court. They have already filed a suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — considered the second-most powerful court in the country — seeking to block state authority to mandate a transition to all- electric vehicle sales. Oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.

“It’s a knife fight,” said Stokes. “We have to fight with every single tool we have on every level and it’s going to get harder.”

Thomas Quotes False Vaccine Conspiracy Theory In Dissent

The Root

Clarence Thomas Quotes False Vaccine Conspiracy Theory In Dissent

Keith Reed – July 1, 2022

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits during a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits during a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021.

Until yesterday, it was hard to imagine how Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas could have made the Court’s term any worse. Thomas is considered the ideological godfather of an emboldened, far-right majority on the Court that in the past week alone weakened Miranda rights for people detained by cops, removed the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to actually protect the environment and obliterated the national right to an abortion for women.

In that last instance, Thomas didn’t write the majority opinion but he did pen an inflammatory concurrence inviting challenges to the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception, but notably not interracial marriage, something that’s obviously very dear to his heart.

Then Thomas hit us all with a “hold my beer”, squeezing a reference to the debunked conspiracy theory that Covid-19 vaccines are made of cells from aborted fetuses into his dissent in the Court’s decision to decline a challenge to New York’s vaccine mandate for medical workers.

A group of healthcare workers sued to challenge the mandate, arguing they should be allowed to continue working, unvaccinated, in medical settings, during a pandemic, under a religious exception. Lower courts kicked their challenge to the curb but they appealed to the Supreme Court, where a 6-3 majority, including three Conservative justices, agreed that the case wouldn’t be heard.

Thomas, joined by fellow conservatives Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, went in his bag, writing that the Court should have taken the opportunity to sort out whether or not a religious exemption should have been granted. He noted that there was a “broad exception” to the mandate—that exception being that you didn’t need a vaccine if it might endanger your life—but noted that the plaintiffs’ argued there was no such consideration for their religious beliefs.

What, exactly, were those beliefs that should make them exempt from vaccination? “They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.”

That. Is. Not. A. Thing, as NBC News explains.

Pfizer and Moderna used fetal cell lines early in their Covid vaccine development to test the efficacy of their formulas, as other vaccines have in the past. The fetal tissue used in these processes came from elective abortions that happened decades ago. But the cells have since replicated many times, so none of the original tissue is involved in the making of modern vaccines.

So it is not true that Covid vaccines are manufactured using fetal cell lines, nor do they contain any aborted cells.

The good thing is the Supreme Court’s term ended yesterday and given his history of sitting on the bench for years without saying anything, it’ll probably be awhile before we hear from Clarence Thomas again.