North Carolina House Speaker Timothy Moore (R) is suing a voter named Rebecca Harper as part of a dispute over a federal electoral map drawn by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. According to The Carolina Journal, the case will test a legal theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine,” which asserts that “only the state legislature has the power to regulate federal elections, without interference from state courts.”
Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states that the “Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Proponents of the “independent state legislature doctrine” argue that this clause gives state legislatures the power to draw congressional districts, set rules for federal elections, and appoint presidential electors, and that state courts have no power to interfere — even if the legislature blatantly violates the state constitution.
Which, in this case, it totally did. The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in February that the proposed map, which would have guaranteed Republicans easy wins in 10 of the state’s 14 districts, was “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt under the … North Carolina Constitution.”
The situation in North Carolina is not so clear-cut, however. Robert Barnes noted in The Washington Post that the state’s General Assembly passed a law two decades ago empowering state courts to review electoral maps and even create their own “interim districting plan[s].” Moore’s lawyers must therefore prove that the legislature violated the U.S. Constitution by abdicating its own authority over redistricting.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the case in March but agreed on June 30 to hear it. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh have all signaled their openness to Moore’s argument. The Washington Post‘s editorial board suggests that Chief Justice John Roberts — who three years ago left open the possibility that state courts could override partisan gerrymanders — is now “poised” to side with Moore as well. The board considers Justice Amy Coney Barrett “a possible swing vote.” All three of the court’s liberals are expected to reject the independent state legislature doctrine.
The case will be heard during the term beginning in October 2022, with a decision expected in the summer of 2023 — just in time to upend the 2024 elections.
What about the Electoral College?
In January, Ryan Cooper wrote for The Week that the state of Wisconsin “effectively exists under one-party rule.” Democrats can still win statewide elections — say, for governor or U.S. Senate — but state legislative districts are hopelessly gerrymandered in favor of Republicans. If the Supreme Court sides with Moore, GOP-controlled legislatures in states like Wisconsin would have full authority to rig not only their own states’ legislative elections, but elections to the U.S. House of Representatives as well.
And it might not stop there. Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution empowers each state to “appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors” equal to that state’s number of senators and representatives. The clause doesn’t say anything about the popular vote. This means, in theory, that state legislators can appoint whoever they want to the Electoral College. If SCOTUS side with Moore next summer on the question of federal redistricting, they’re likely to apply the same reasoning to presidential elections. This interpretation was floated by conservative justices — including Thomas — during the Bush v. Gore (2000) case that handed George W. Bush the presidency.
The Electoral Count Act of 1887 stipulates that each state’s slate of electors must be certified by the governor of that state. In states like Wisconsin— which has a Democratic governor — this law could prevent the Republican-led legislature from handing the state’s electoral votes to a losing Republican candidate.
But wait — if the independent state legislature doctrine is correct, then the governor has no right to usurp the legislature’s constitutionally granted powers. That provision of the Electoral Count Act (ECA) would be struck down.
This idea “is quickly becoming dogma among Republican legal apparatchiks,” Cooper wrote. Convincing Republican-controlled states won by President Biden to submit alternate slates of Republican electors was a key part of Trump lawyer John Eastman’s strategy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. His plan also rested on the assumption that the ECA is “likely unconstitutional.”
What’s the worst-case scenario?
Zach Praiss of the nonprofit Accountable Tech and progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann have laid out similar nightmare scenarios that could arise if SCOTUS rules in Moore’s favor.
Hartmann imagines a 2024 presidential contest between Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in which Biden wins the popular vote in Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. The GOP-controlled legislatures of these six states then decide to disregard the will of the voters and award their 88 electoral votes to DeSantis, making him the winner and president-elect.
Republicans control both legislative houses in 29 states, plus the unicameral legislature of Nebraska, and they might soon gain the power to gerrymander themselves into a permanent majority. Those states control 306 electoral votes, more than enough to elect a president.
“It is difficult … to see the desire to put sole control of election rules in the hands of a partisan legislative body as anything more than a power grab,” argued Christine Adams in The Washington Post. Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut were even blunter in the Los Angeles Times: “Adopting the independent state legislature theory would amount to right-wing justices making up law to create an outcome of one-party rule.”
Brett Kavanaugh’s Right to Dine Shall Not Be Infringed
Jack Holmes – July 8, 2022
Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to become a member of our nine-person SuperCongress by a president who took office despite earning the votes of millions fewer Americans than his opponent did. That president never enjoyed the support of a majority of citizens and got spanked in the popular vote by an even larger margin—7 million—in the next election. He then tried to overthrow the government to stay in power. Only one of the five other right-wing justices was nominated by a president who took office having secured the support of a majority of actual Americans.
Photo credit: Pool – Getty Images
Brett Kavanaugh was then confirmed by 50 senators who represented just 44 percent of the American population. The 48 senators who voted “nay” represented tens of millions more citizens. Kavanaugh secured the crucial 50th vote of Senator Susan Collins based on her publicly stated belief that he considered Roe v. Wade to be “settled legal precedent.” In the public hearings into the question of his confirmation, where he testified under oath, Kavanaugh said this:
Senator, I said that it is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis. And one of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years, as you know, and most prominently, most importantly, reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
And as you well recall, senator, I know when that case came up, the Supreme Court did not just reaffirm it in passing. The court specifically went through all the factors of stare decisis in considering whether to overrule it, and the joint opinion of Justice Kennedy, Justice O’Connor and Justice Souter, at great length went through those factors.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, Kavanaugh voted with the five other Republicans on the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
If you have a problem with any of this—unelected judges selected by presidents who got fewer votes and confirmed by senators who represent a minority of citizens making policy without regard for legal precedent or their own previous statements under oath—you don’t seem to have much recourse.
You can’t vote the superlegislators out. It is unreasonable to expect any will be impeached thanks to the entrenched advantages that allow Republicans outsize control of the Senate. Even the House of Representatives is dangerously skewed, thanks to gerrymandered redistricting maps and the hyperpolarization they help to generate. The reason Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and others worked so hard to seize control of the judiciary was precisely because so many other institutions have ceased to function properly. Even if you do succeed in electing representatives to make policy through the legislature—after this same Court savaged the Voting Rights Act and unleashed an avalanche of money in our elections—the courts can throw out whatever they choose.
Photo credit: Bill Clark – Getty Images
You cannot protest at the steps of the Supreme Court, as they’ve walled that shit off. You can’t protest at the justices’ houses, and there’s some merit to the idea that private residences—where spouses and children are in the mix—should be off-limits. (Of course, in the case of Clarence Thomas, his spouse has very much been in the mix.) But you can’t protest in neutral public venues, either, even if you’re on a city street outside a restaurant. We learned that this weekend, when Mr. Kavanaugh was disturbed during a meal at a Washington, D.C. steakhouse, as reported by the Beltway encyclical known as Politico Playbook:
On Wednesday night, D.C. protesters targeting the conservative Supreme Court justices who signed onto the Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion got a tip that Justice BRETT KAVANAUGH was dining at Morton’s downtown D.C. location. Protesters soon showed up out front, called the manager to tell him to kick Kavanaugh out and later tweeted that the justice was forced to exit through the rear of the restaurant.
We have returned, inevitably, to Red-Henghazi. Do public figures who make the rules we all have to live by get to do whatever they want at all times without any social repercussions? Do they have some right to privacy in public spaces, despite choosing to wield huge power over others in a democratic republic? Morton’s seems to think so.
“Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant. Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”
The right to eat dinner shall not be infringed. (Particularly by the Unduly Unruly.) Which, according to Politico‘s Daniel Lippman, it was not.
While the court had no official comment on Kavanaugh’s behalf and a person familiar with the situation said he did not hear or see the protesters and ate a full meal but left before dessert, Morton’s was outraged about the incident.
The right to tiramisu shall not be infringed. Seriously, though, at this point we’re talking about what appears to be a complete non-incident. He went out the back because he heard secondhand there were some folks out front?
But even if the honorable justice had to hear the urban rabble outside—described by Politico as “D.C. protestors”—tell him to fuck himself while he chowed down on a ribeye, what exactly is the problem here? The protesters are exercising their rights to speech and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Kavanaugh and the others may fashion themselves as blind arbiters of the law, but in reality they are agents of state power, representing the Government. And they have generated some grievances.
Meanwhile, we’re hearing about Brett the Honorable’s right to dine, what we can only assume is an unenumerated one under the Ninth Amendment. It also sounds more than somewhat related to the right to privacy—also rooted in the Ninth—which undergirded Roe and Casey before these six luminaries threw those decisions out. Justice Clarence Thomas has signaled they’re interested in going after the right to privacy itself with a so-called reconsiderationof Griswold v. Connecticut, a move that would go way beyond contraception. Although the prospect of this Republican Court empowering states controlled by their ideological allies to restrict women’s access to the pill in the Year of Our Lord 2022 does have a particular resonance.
And if that happens, you can expect the same bullshit routine from these same people. The work of working the refs is never done, and the self-victimization will never stop. This is the same impulse undergirding much of the Cancel Culture debate: while social-media mobs and a lack of due process are real problems, many of the fiercest Free Speech Warriors actually see free speech as their right to say whatever they want without getting criticized or made fun of. Similarly, these right-wing superlegislators believe they should be able to nakedly advance the policy priorities of the conservative movement by reverse-engineering decisions to meet preordained conclusions, all the while battering the lives of powerless people, without ever getting called an asshole while they drink a $300 bottle of wine. There are consequences for behaving badly in public office, at least until these people are finished savaging the foundations of this democratic republic. Or until the Democratic Party finds the stones to nix the Senate filibuster, expand the Supreme Court, reform the judiciary, and restore the people’s means of translating their will into the law we all are bound to live by.
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)
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.”
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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
Kara Voght and Tim Dickinson – July6, 2022
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.
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
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.”
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
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
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.”
Can Phoenix, the hottest city in America, survive climate change?
David Knowles, Senior Editor – July 2, 2022
PHOENIX — On the downtown streets in America’s hottest city the temperature has hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s 1 o’clock in the afternoon in late June and the sidewalks are mostly empty, but an elderly woman carrying an umbrella passes by walking her terrier, the dog’s tiny feet fitted with leather moccasins to protect them from the scorching concrete.
Inside an air-conditioned conference room on the 11th floor of the building that houses city hall, Mayor Kate Gallego is recounting the story of her parents abandoning Chicago for the Southwest following the blizzard of 1979. “Cars buried in snow. Trying to navigate the city was a real challenge,” she told Yahoo News.
A Democrat who was appointed to her first mayoral term in 2019 at the age of 37 after her predecessor was elected to Congress, Gallego was raised in Albuquerque. Like many in her generation, she suffers from asthma, a condition made worse by the air pollution causing climate change, and which she credits for her early interest in the environment. As she grew up, temperatures across the Southwest grew noticeably hotter during her childhood, she said, until global warming was all but impossible to ignore.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego at City Hall on June 23. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
“There was a radio station whose number was 97.3, and they would give away money every time we hit 97 degrees,” she said. “It did feel like when they started the promotion it was unlikely to happen, and then it became more and more frequent.”
In Phoenix, where summer can feel a bit like living through a science experiment or a dystopian dare, the average summertime temperature has risen by 3.8 degrees since 1970, according to data compiled by Climate Central, a nonprofit composed of scientists and journalists. The city now averages 111 annual days of triple-digit heat, and experiences 12 more days above 110 degrees Fahrenheit each year than it did in 1970.
Nighttime temperatures have risen even faster, climbing 5.7 degrees since 1970. The average summertime low now stands at 84 degrees Fahrenheit, depriving those without adequate air-conditioning the chance for the body to cool down before the mercury begins rising each morning with the sun.
Downtown Phoenix in 2019. (Caitlin O’Hara)
“In about a decade, we have seen a sea change in the attitudes” among residents formerly skeptical that humans are causing climate change, said Gallego, who earned an undergraduate degree in environmental studies from Harvard University before getting a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Now, she adds, they “would like elected officials to do something.”
Because of the undeniable rise in temperatures, it has become a cliché to say that Phoenix’s climate change future is already here. That way of looking at the problem, however, risks downplaying what’s still to come. By the year 2100, climate models predict, summer highs are expected to rise on average by as much as 10 degrees in the city, which means daily temperature readings of 114 degrees Fahrenheit, which will almost certainly lead to more heat-related deaths.
A sign at the Pima Canyon Trailhead in Phoenix warns hikers to bring sufficient water and beware of extreme heat. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Since 2014, deaths attributed to heat in Maricopa County — which includes Phoenix and adjacent cities like Mesa, Scottsdale and Tempe — have spiked by 454%, KPNX News reported. For the past two years, the county has set new heat death records, with 323 people killed in 2020 and 331 in 2021, the bulk of those occurring in Phoenix.
Yet people continue to flock to the so-called Valley of the Sun. Between 2010 and 2020, Phoenix grew faster than any other big American city, according to Census Bureau data, adding 163,000 residents.
“Across the United States we are seeing a migration toward sun,” Gallego said. “People are moving toward Sunbelt states. That means having a conversation about how we allocate resources.”
To help lead that conversation, Gallego hired Arizona State University professor David Hondula to head up the city’s newly created Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, the first of its kind in the U.S.
David Hondula, director of Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
In his first eight months on the job, Hondula, who at37 bears a passing resemblance to former Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, has put forth a “heat response” strategy. It focuses on reducing heat-related death and illness through measures such as opening air-conditioned cooling centers across the city where people can escape the oven-like summer conditions, launching a hotline residents can call to arrange transportation to get them to one, and sending out volunteers to pass out reusable water bottles.
It’s intuitive that climate change disproportionately impacts those who don’t have the resources to afford rent, let alone air-conditioning or private means of transportation. In his new role, Hondula has spent a lot of time confirming that fact, meeting with poor and unsheltered residents and seeing firsthand how direct intervention can help save lives.
“I might have had more education in the past eight months about the heat problem than I’ve had for eight years working on the problem from an academic standpoint,” he said. “There are folks for whom heat is an inconvenience. Folks for whom heat is a manageable problem, and folks for whom heat is a catastrophe.”
Life and death in ‘the zone’
Tents line a street in one of Phoenix’s biggest encampments for unsheltered people, known as “the zone,” where the pavement can reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
In Phoenix, catastrophe is a fixture of daily life in “the zone,” a grim homeless encampment near downtown that spans several treeless blocks. With a by-now-familiar mixture of desperation, drug and alcohol abuse, violence and mental illness, the zone resembles similar tent outposts that have popped up in cities across the West, but the Phoenix heat adds another layer of misery. Roughly two-thirds of heat-related deaths in the city over the last two years were among the homeless, and Hondula is keenly aware that if the city continues to break heat-death records, his job may be in jeopardy.
“We better be doing something that moves those numbers in the other direction as soon as possible,” he said.
That may prove easier said than done given that Phoenix has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, apartment and home rental prices continue to soar, and homelessness has risen by 35% in Maricopa County over the last two years. Hondula is realistic about the challenges but remains optimistic that the city can address the problem, noting that heat-related calls to the Phoenix fire department are running 5% lower than the volume experienced at this time last year.
Community advocate Stacey Champion asks a worker to let an unsheltered person in to a cooling center in June. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
“When we showed up at Cortez Park the other day,” Hondula recounted about a recent outing, “and within a minute of pulling in the parking lot, we’re getting our water bottles set up, the homelessness case manager noticed a bunch of folks crowded around this old Suburban — a family of 10 living out of their car. By the time we had finished our outreach shift, they were on their way to a shelter that night. So, any question about if this is a good use of our time evaporates right there.”
Just a block from the zone, self-described “feisty” activist Stacey Champion stands in the shade of a tree outside Carnegie Library. Bordered by a fenced-in, football-field-size manicured lawn dotted with trees that is off limits to the public, the former library, which opened in 1898, now serves as an administrative space for the Arizona State Library, but the grounds are always vacant.
“I think this is the ultimate picture of inequity. This is public space that has the potential to save people’s lives,” said Champion, a public relations consultant who advocates on behalf of Phoenix’s unsheltered community. “We had temp guns out here, and in the zone one day it was 168 degrees. Then we came over and measured the grass, which was like 90. Just being on the grass could potentially save people’s lives.”
Shady and with lush grass, the Carnegie Library, now a City of Phoenix archives building, is locked to the public but is located just across the street from one of the city’s biggest encampments for unsheltered people. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Champion has been pressuring Hondula, city council members, elected officials, state lawmakers and anyone else who will listen, to open the park to the homeless from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., but so far, no one is budging.
“I’ve known David for years. I think David is very smart. I think David really cares,” she said of Hondula. “I think that David’s hands are going to be tied with politics and with a lot of bureaucratic red tape.”
While she has praised the heat response portions of Hondula’s plans, she also believes that the city isn’t acting quickly enough to implement them.
“Having tracked the heat deaths for all these years — these are preventable deaths,” she said. “I’m fairly certain we’re going to break the record this year.”
Champion walks into the Justa Center, a day shelter for older adults, on June 24. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
While saving lives is Hondula’s immediate focus this summer, his overall plan also includes “heat mitigation actions,” long-term strategies to cool the city over the coming years to make it more livable as climate change tightens its grip. The plan includes planting tree canopies to create shade corridors for pedestrians, expanding a new light-rail system, and painting roadways white so as to reduce surface temperatures and diminish the “heat island effect” that makes cities hotter than their rural surroundings.
In some ways, heat mitigation can be seen as a footrace between climate change and the many steps required to retrofit a place so that it is still worth living there in the coming decades. The decision to spend money insulating communities for the climate change future is still a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, perhaps because so many lawmakers refuse to admit what more than 99.9 percent of scientific research proves:That mankind’s burning of fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is what is causing temperatures to rise.
People’s tents line a street in the area known as the zone. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
But in the West, where researchers have linked the ongoing extreme drought to climate change, dwindling water from the Colorado River will soon be rationed for the 44 million people who depend on it, wildfires worsened by rising temperatures have become an all-too-common fixture of life and extreme heat waves blur into one another, inaction isn’t a viable option.
In May, the Phoenix city council voted to allocate $13 million of the $90 million it received from the American Rescue Act toward heat-related programs that Hondula’s office will help administer.
One of the local nonprofits pressing the city on how and where to spend that money is Chispa AZ, a League of Conservation Voters offshoot that seeks to mobilize Hispanic voters and politicians on environmental issues.
“We’ve been working with the city on a climate action plan,” Dulce Juarez, Chispa’s state co-director, told Yahoo News. “It’s a start. It’s not the perfect plan, but they are talking about investments in cool corridors and cooling the streets. It’s in the small ways that the city is hoping to create an impact.”
Dulce Juarez, co-director at Latinx environmental justice organization Chispa AZ. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Juarez says she and her staff have impressed upon Hondula that while richer neighborhoods in Phoenix are mostly tree-lined, offering a respite from the blaring sun, poorer ones remain barren and continue to bake.
“Our team members have met with him to try and talk about what we do about trees. That’s a big issue for us,” she said. “We also have to keep in mind maintenance and water, making sure that we have long-term care for these trees.”
Like Champion, Juarez sees the state as lagging when it comes to addressing its heat problem.
“Unfortunately here in the state of Arizona, we don’t have a very progressive Legislature,” she said. “I think a lot of people don’t even believe in climate change, which is why we have a lot of the problems we do. We’re kind of behind on this issue of climate change and climate action.”
Chispa AZ planning and brainstorming notes fill a whiteboard. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
With the rate of climate change speeding up in recent decades as the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues unabated, and mitigation measures slow to take shape, Juarez, like many local residents, wonders how long living in Phoenix will make sense. That question, she said, hit home in 2020 when the city recorded 53 consecutive days of 110-degree temperatures or higher.
“I love it here. The desert is a very magical and beautiful place, but when you stop and think about it, you wonder ‘Is it really the best option to live in the middle of the desert if our utility companies or our grid goes out? How are we going to survive in this heat without electricity?’” she said.
Without a trace
Located on the northeast border of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport, the unassuming Pueblo Grande Museum is set on the archeological ruins left behind by a Native American civilization known as the Hohokam. At around A.D. 300, the Hohokam became the first people to settle on the banks of the Salt and Gila rivers and lay claim to the Valley of the Sun.
A diagram of waterways used by Indigenous groups, including the Hohokam. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
The grounds to the three-room museum are home to a platform mound believed to have housed tribal leaders, ball courts similar to those found farther south in Mesoamerica and the remnants of an elaborate series of irrigation canals that allowed the Hohokam to thrive in the Sonoran Desert.
The precursor to the irrigation system still used today on the lower Colorado River, the network of canals and irrigation grew to become the most advanced in all of America’s precolonial history, and helped the Hohokam grow 12 different crop species in an otherwise inhospitable environment. Over the next millennium, the population swelled to a few thousand people, who made ornate pottery and erected adobe dwellings. And then, suddenly, the Hohokam civilization nose-dived.
“From 1350 to 1450 the population plunges and traces of the Hohokam disappear from the archaeological record,” the museum’s website states.
The predominant theory explaining the society’s collapse is that a Southwestern drought led to widespread crop failure, forcing the population to relocate.
A modern canal near the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
While other Native American tribes would later settle in the region, the modern city of Phoenix wasn’t founded here until 1881. By that time, the industrial revolution was underway, burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate.
From the ashes
When it comes to heat death, Hondula is clear-eyed that the problem may get worse before his proposed solutions can make it better.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we are in worse shape from a heat-associated-death standpoint than we were last year because there are so many more unsheltered folks that are at 200-300 times the risk of heat-associated death,” he said.
With its negative impacts on infrastructure, weather patterns, migration and death, climate change has a knack for taking existing problems and making them worse. While scientists are tasked with demonstrating such a dynamic using data points, politicians must decide what to do about it.
Park steward Ron Cordova, pictured near the Pima Canyon Trailhead on June 25, has brought back children and adult hikers on horseback who were experiencing heat exhaustion or other injuries. (Caitlin O’Hara for Yahoo News)
Gallego may be the first U.S. mayor to hire a taxpayer-funded position to deal with the effects of heat made worse by climate change, but, like all elected officials, she must offer a hopeful spin on how her administration will make life better for residents.
“We get our name from the mythical bird that rose from ashes. Hopefully we take heat and make something that makes the world a better place,” she said. “I hope we also take challenges around climate change and are at the forefront of the solution. The people of Phoenix have a lot at stake addressing climate change and heat, so we’re motivated to find those solutions.”
After leaving city hall, a dust storm alert from the National Weather Service lands on cellphones all over Phoenix. “Infants, the elderly and those with respiratory issues urged to take precautions,” it reads, and right on cue the sky quickly turns a brownish orange, reducing visibility to a hundred yards or so.
What few residents who had ventured out into the afternoon heat head back inside. And while the dust dissipates after about an hour, it once more reveals an unforgiving sun.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
