In this far-flung Arizona neighborhood, residents dream of the arrival of a gas station or grocery store
Alexandra Hardle, Arizona Republic – May 28, 2024
Terrell Hannah and his family enjoy living in Tartesso, a master-planned community in northwest Buckeye. But when he needs to fill up his car or get a gallon of milk, he does wish that it came with basic city amenities.
Like a gas station or a grocery store. The nearest gas station is 15 minutes away; the nearest Walmart, 15 minutes away; the nearest Costco, 20 minutes away.
Hannah and his wife also have two young children and drive them about 25 minutes to school near downtown Buckeye. On top of that, Hannah has a 35- to 45-minute commute to Luke Air Force, where he works.
Hannah, who moved into the community in 2022, said he likes the residential feel.
“One of the attractive features of that neighborhood is that it’s away from all of the heavy industry that is really coming up at every corner in Phoenix,” Hannah said.
Realtor Martin Partida has been a Tartesso resident since 2020. He and his family moved from Phoenix because they wanted to live somewhere quieter, and Tartesso fit the bill. Partida said he also needs to drive about 15 minutes to get to the nearest grocery store or gas station.
A big frustration among Tartesso residents has been the pace of development. The community now has about 10,000 residents and 3,400 houses but so few amenities, they say.
Many residents feel Tartesso has been left out as other areas of the city develop more quickly.
“When we compare what we have to other communities that have been developed like Verrado, it just seems unbalanced. We’re not sure why it’s taking so long to get things moving out here,” Partida said.
Partida said he also hopes for a high school to be built. Currently, Tartesso’s schools only go to the fifth grade. It also would be nice to have a recreational center in Tartesso, Partida said.
Residents also hope for coffee shops, jobs
Cameron James has lived in Tartesso since 2009. At this point, James said he and other residents are used to commuting for work and stopping at places like Costco on the way home.
“You get used to it after about a year. I mean, we feel spoiled now because we have food trucks,” James said.
James said he understands why the community needs more rooftops before commercial development follows.
Paige Stein, who works in the hospitality industry in Goodyear, has lived in Tartesso for about four years after moving from from Festival Foothills neighborhood, also in Buckeye. Stein said she and her family always have preferred to live in places that are more isolated.
Stein said the most important thing to her is that more jobs come to Tartesso for the people who live there, particularly young people still at home with their parents who don’t have the option to move. Stein currently commutes about 30 minutes to her job in Goodyear.
“I don’t see that as something that someone just getting out of school should have to do,” Stein said.
After a gas station, she would like Tartesso to get a coffee shop.
“Something where the students that get out of school can go hang out, so they don’t have to go straight home or hang out in the heat,” Stein said.
Stein said she currently spends a lot of her free time in Tempe to go to new shops and favorite places.
Residents hope for less industrial development
Chris Barr, principal of Buckeye Tartesso LLC, said he hears the complaints. A controversial new rezoning of land to industrial from residential is part of a potential solution, he said. The change axed some 6,000 planned homes.
While some residents are skeptical and hope the plan shifts away from industrial zoning, adding jobs is necessary for creating both rooftops and the commercial and retail development Tartesso residents are asking for, Barr said.
Accelerating economic growth will in turn accelerate the growth of community amenities, including grocery stores and gas stations, he said.
Tartesso, along the southwestern part of the Sun Valley Parkway, is projected to have about 100,000 residents at build-out.
Hundreds of thousands of residents eventually will live along Sun Valley Parkway, Barr said. It once was known as the “Road to Nowhere,” with not much around it. But communities are slowly growing, including Festival Ranch along the northern part of the parkway.
A vast majority of Buckeye’s residents commute east for work. Barr hopes to change that by adding more employment opportunities along the parkway.
The Tartesso community development borders the desert in Buckeye. It’s one of the last noticeable developments on the way out of the Phoenix area.
Obtaining the necessary certificates for industrial development is easier than getting approval for residential from a water standpoint. But Barr said that’s not the reason the land was rezoned.
“We just wanted to create some employment opportunities and really good-paying jobs for people in that region that don’t want to hop on the freeway and potentially have to leave the city of Buckeye to drive to and from their job every day,” Barr said.
Tartesso LLC bought the development in 2016. When Barr came in, the community was still recovering from the Great Recession, which had greatly slowed down growth, Barr said. Right now, Barr said the focus is on housing, which will later bring in retail amenities.
While some land is zoned for commercial use and was purchased years ago, Barr said many projects were halted by the recession.
“They had a lot of rooftop projections that took a long time to materialize because the market got effectively shut down for a couple of years,” Barr said.
Ultimately, it is up to the purchasers of the land to decide what to do with it and when. Additional amenities like a recreation center also would come with additional HOA fees, and not everyone would be happy to pay those.
“The demand is, we need affordable housing in the Valley. And we’ve got a big problem staring us down if we don’t come to some solutions that allow for building on Sun Valley Parkway, which is going to be a great place for affordable housing,” Barr said.
In a statement to The Arizona Republic, a Buckeye spokesperson said the city’s development teams were actively collaborating with brokers, developers and service providers to attract growth in Buckeye, including in Tartesso and Festival Ranch.
“While commercial development is currently thriving in the eastern parts of Buckeye, our growth trajectory is set to extend westward along Sun Valley Parkway. This will foster expansion and development in those areas,” the city statement said. “This growth trajectory is already attracting new investment, including a recent commitment from QT (QuikTrip) to develop a new location south of Tartesso.”
What’s still to come at Tartesso?
The QuikTrip announcement means Tartesso residents’ wishes for a gas station soon will come true, although a timeline for the opening was not set.
The gas station will be located about a mile from the community’s main entrance. The nearest gas station is currently a Love’s Travel Shop located nearly 10 miles away from Tartesso on Miller Road.
As for what’s next aside from industrial development, Barr said Tartesso currently has applications for certificates of assured water supply pending with the Department of Water Resources for about 5,700 homes.
Those certificates are necessary for the next phase of construction to begin.
Barr said Tartesso has begun discussions with major builders for those homes. Once the development figures out its water certificates, Barr said the launch would be relatively quick.
And those homes, combined with new jobs to the area, should make way for the amenities that Tartesso residents have been asking for, such as grocery stores, more gas stations, movie theaters and hospitals, most of which look to have a certain number of rooftops within a certain radius.
“I don’t think we’re quite there,” Barr said. “But I believe activity breeds more activity.”
Temperatures in Pakistan cross 52 degrees Celsius — that’s more than 125°F
Reuters – May 28, 2024
Temperatures rose above 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh, the highest reading of the summer and close to the country’s record high amid an ongoing heat wave, the met office said on Monday.
Extreme temperatures throughout Asia over the past month were made worse most likely as a result of human-driven climate change, a team of international scientists have said.
In Mohenjo Daro, a town in Sindh known for archaeological sites that date back to the Indus Valley Civilization built in 2500 BC, temperatures rose as high as 52.2 C (126 F) over the last 24 hours, a senior official of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, Shahid Abbas told Reuters.
The reading is the highest of the summer so far, and approached the town’s and country’s record highs of 53.5 C (128.3 F) and 54 C (129.2 F) respectively.
Mohenjo Daro is a small town that experiences extremely hot summers and mild winters, and low rainfall, but its limited markets, including bakeries, tea shops, mechanics, electronic repair shops, and fruit and vegetable sellers, are usually bustling with customers.
But with the current heat wave, shops are seeing almost no footfall.
A vendor selling ice, slices a piece from an ice block for a customer at his shop on a hot summer noon in in Karachi on May 27, 2024. – Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images
“The customers are not coming to the restaurant because of extreme heat. I sit idle at the restaurant with these tables and chairs and without any customers,” Wajid Ali, 32, who owns a tea stall in the town.
“I take baths several times a day which gives me a little relief. Also there is no power. The heat has made us very uneasy.”
Close to Ali’s shop is an electronic repairs shop run by Abdul Khaliq, 30, who was sat working with the shop’s shutter half down to shield him from the sun. Khaliq also complained about the heat affecting business.
Local doctor Mushtaq Ahmed added that the locals have adjusted to living in the extreme weather conditions and prefer staying indoors or near water.
“Pakistan is the fifth most vulnerable country to the impact of climate change. We have witnessed above normal rains, floods,” Rubina Khursheed Alam, the prime minister’s coordinator on climate, said at a news conference on Friday adding that the government is running awareness campaigns due to the heat waves.
The highest temperature recorded in Pakistan was in 2017 when temperatures rose to 54 C (129.2 F) in the city of Turbat, located in the Southwestern province of Balochistan. This was the second hottest in Asia and fourth highest in the world, said Sardar Sarfaraz, Chief Meteorologist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department
The heat wave will subside in Mohenjo Daro and surrounding areas, but another spell is expected to hit other areas in Sindh, including the capital, Karachi — Pakistan’s largest city.
Miami-Dade man recorded rape of a Palm Beach schoolgirl. He had her sell the videos
David J. Neal – May 29, 2024
ERIC PAUL ZAMORA/THE FRESNO BEE/Fresno Bee Staff Photo
Using social media, an Opa-locka man coerced Palm Beach and Broward 15-year-olds into letting him commit statutory rape, got one of the two girls to let him record it on video and sell the videos for him.
The above violations were chronicled in 26-year-old Malik Atkinson’s guilty plea to two counts of online solicitation of a minor to commit a sexual act, crimes for which Atkinson was sentenced to 30 years in Miami federal court Friday. After Atkinson’s release, which will be at least 25 years and six months in the future, he’ll be subject to a lifetime of supervised release.
Federal public defender Scott Berry, anticipating the prosecution would ask for life under the statutes involved, argued for mercy based on Atkinson being “a 26-year-old child in a man’s body,” who lived with his father, had no previous criminal record and “was acting out sexually through pornography, multiple sexual partners, underage sexual partners, and videotaping his sexual exploits.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Schiller rejected Berry’s argument for a 10-year sentence and the testimony of forensic psychologist Dr. Sheila Rapa as to Atkinson’s possibilities in treatment. “Despite Dr. Rapa’s analysis and [Atkinson’s] youth, the minimum sentence of 10 years is wholly insensitive to the crimes purported in this case: [Atkinson] sexually assaulted two girls, produced child pornography of them, and solicited countless others,” Schiller said.
Atkinson actually thought the first girl he lured into his van was 13, not 15. They electronically talked across several social media platforms, but virtually met on Twitter in 2022.
What follows comes from Atkinson’s guilty plea, which includes what the Palm Beach Gardens girl — referred to as “Minor Victim 1” or “MV1” — told investigators.
MV1 called him “Bearie” after they met on X back when it was still Twitter. She never knew him as “Malik Atkinson.” On the Discord app, Atkinson/”Bearie” was “unknown_ value#5871.”
Atkinson’s guilty plea includes a Discord conversation from May 4, 2022, during which MV1 tells him she’s 13 and in high school, and Atkinson tries to figure out how they can meet. Her band practice was an impediment as well as her family’s sleeping habits (“Can you sneak out at nights or do they stay up for too long?” “They stay up too long…”).
On May 9, MV1 told Atkinson they can meet at “a small church in the middle of the town that people get picked up a lot so it won’t be super sus plus it doesn’t really matter. It’s like a 5 min walk” from her house.
Atkinson told her, “Now ironically Ima be in a suspicious van lol…”
He also asked, “Wanna try making this a weekly thing? And food wise what do you want. Cus I am nice. I’m not just gonna rape you and make you a — dumpster without like feeding you. That’s horrible lol.”
They met in Atkinson’s 1997 white Chevrolet van with a small red and white logo the next day for the first of four or five times. Before they met, Atkinson agreed to pay MV1 $40. She didn’t collect, then told him not to worry about it.
“Atkinson admitted he recorded the sexual encounters with his cellphone, which he sent to Minor Victim 1,” the guilty plea said. “Atkinson said he and Minor Victim 1 exchanged payments to one another for sexually explicit images and videos that Minor Victim 1 sold of herself. Atkinson gave Minor Victim I access to his CashApp account, including his usermame and password. He said that Minor Victim 1 sold sexually explicit images and videos of herself and directed purchasers of said images and videos to send CashApp payments to Atkinson’s CashApp account.”
La Niña, which means “little girl” in Spanish, is a climate phenomenon characterized by the cooling of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. La Niña and its opposite, El Niño, as well as a neutral phase, are part of a larger climate pattern known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The tropical Pacific can be in either one of those three states.
According to scientists, El Niño years tend to bring cold, wet winters to California and the southern U.S. but warm, dry conditions to the Pacific Northwest and the Ohio Valley. La Niña tends to bring the opposite: dry conditions for the whole southern half of the country but colder, wetter weather for the Pacific Northwest.
La Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern.
How does La Niña affect Texas weather?
La Niña has a notable impact on Texas weather, primarily influencing temperature and precipitation patterns. Here’s how La Niña typically affects Texas, according to NOAA:
Temperature: La Niña often brings warmer-than-average temperatures to Texas during the winter months. The warmer conditions are a result of the jet stream shifting northward, reducing the frequency of cold air masses moving into the region. Summers during La Niña years can also be hotter than normal, with higher heatwaves and increasing demand for water and energy.
Precipitation: La Niña is usually associated with drier-than-normal conditions across Texas, particularly in the fall and winter months. The northward shift of the jet stream tends to divert storm systems away from the state, reducing the overall rainfall. The reduced precipitation can lead to an increased risk of drought. Texas may experience significant water shortages, affecting agriculture and water supply and increasing the likelihood of wildfires.
Severe weather: Due to warmer temperatures during La Niña winters, the likelihood of severe weather, such as snow and ice storms, is generally lower. However, La Niña can increase severe weather events like tornadoes in Texas due to enhanced instability and favorable atmospheric conditions.
Hurricane season: La Niña can contribute to a more active Atlantic hurricane season. This means Texas might face a higher risk of hurricanes and tropical storms making landfall, bringing heavy rainfall and potential flooding. The NOAA predicts between 17 and 25 named storms this season, with 4 to 7 becoming major hurricanes classified as category 3, 4, or 5.
2 Yale researchers are pulling back the curtain on Russia’s sanctions-stricken economy — and it’s landed them on a list of Putin’s enemies
Jennifer Sor – May 25, 2024
Jeffery Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian have landed themselves on a list of sanctioned individuals for their work shining a light on Russia’s economic situation.Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik AFP
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two Yale researchers, have issued dire predictions for Russia’s economy.
Their work has landed them on a list of sanctioned individuals in Russia.
In their view, the country’s economy is in shambles, and Putin could end up losing support of the people.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two researchers at the Yale School of Management, have been targeted for their views on Russia’s economy since the war in Ukraine began.
Over the last few years, they’ve found themselves on Vladimir Putin’s watch list for stating what they see as a simple truth: the Russian economy is in trouble, and there’s only so much cherry-picking of the data that can obscure that fact.
Moscow has fiercely defended its vision of a prospering economy, but the evidence speaks for itself, Sonnenfeld and Tian say. Soaring prices and ailing consumer sentiment have hit key sectors in Russia’s economy, and Moscow is paying a huge cost to keep its war machine running.
The nation is in such dire straits that citizens could even start turning on Putin later this year, they predicted, assuming the West continues to supply military and financial aid to Ukraine.
“We can list for you what Putin has concealed – suddenly – the past three years. If his economy was performing at the level he claims, he’d provide the data ad not hide those facts,” Sonnenfeld told Business Insider in an interview. “Putin survives only by cannibalizing Russian businesses – throwing the living room furniture into the furnace to keep the fire burning.”
Jeffrey SonnenfeldCourtesy of Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
The researchers, who met as a professor-student pair at Yale, have received a lot of criticism for their work on Russia, much of it in the form of hate mail and threatening phone calls.
“I’ve had a lot of threats on the phone, and my home has been vandalized,” Sonnenfeld told BI last summer. “Now we have so many security cameras I can’t even have my shirt tails untucked, let alone walk around in my shorts at home.”
Both are barred from entering Russia and were put on the nation’s sanctioned US citizens list in 2022.
Still, neither of them regrets their work.
“We’re pretty excited about it,” they said of their research. “Any of the threats only motivate us to work down much harder.”
Putin’s top critics
Sonnenfeld, 70, and Tian, 25, didn’t plan on getting their names added to a list of Putin’s critics.
Neither are technically economists, but they began researching Russia’s economy while compiling a list of companies that exited or scaled back their operations in Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
That list went viral online, and was instrumental in getting more than 1,000 companies to scale back their business in the country, the Yale School of Management says on its website.
Steven Tian headshot
Steven TianCourtesy of Steven Tian
At that time, Tian and Sonnenfeld began noticing cracks forming in Russia’s economy. Putin has claimed Russia is becoming the new “growth hub” of the world, and the IMF says Russia’s economy is on track to grow over 3% this year, more than any other OECD economy, including the US. But that doesn’t square with data Sonnenfeld and Tian are seeing, with some pockets of the country’s economy in dire shape.
Among their biggest predictions is that the situation in Russia is so bad that the country could eventually turn on Putin, with a shift in the domestic temperament coming as soon as the November US presidential election this year.
That’s because if Biden is re-elected, the US will likely continue supplying aid to Ukraine, forcing Russia to continue spending money and lives to keep waging war on Ukraine.
“Putin has no grand strategy other than to hope Trump wins and cuts a favorable deal with Russia,” Tian said. “Russia is in for a world of economic pain for a long time to come.”
Positive forecasts on Russia’s economy are based on a lack of visibility, Sonnenfeld and Tian say.
The pair began working together when Tian was an undergraduate at Yale, chasing Sonnenfeld around lecture halls. Eventually, Sonnenfeld became Tian’s advisor and has mentored Tian for over eight years.
The two researchers are still working on ways to urge the West to tighten and enforce sanctions on Russia. They also continue to update their list of companies that have exited the country in the hope that it will encourage more firms to do the same.
Colleagues describe Sonnenfeld as opinionated but generous and charismatic. Tian, meanwhile, has a near-photographic memory and is a highly analytical thinker, colleagues mentioned.
“Steven does a lot of the analytic heavy lifting, and I do the flamboyant color,” Sonnenfeld said of their work together.
People who have worked with them also say the pair is extremely passionate about their work, and both are often known to answer emails at all hours of the night and early morning.
“We don’t believe in regular sleep patterns,” Sonnenfeld added. “Actually, we know it’s very important, but sometimes when there’s a sense of urgency, we do seriously dive into the crisis du jour. We just don’t like bullies, whether or not it’s Putin or some other bravado.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Crotona Park in the Bronx on Thursday, May 23, 2024. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
NEW YORK — When his criminal trial finishes for the day, Donald Trump typically returns to the marble-and-gold triplex atop Trump Tower, the high rise he built in the early 1980s and used to establish a public image as a master builder.
It is the silver lining for Trump, as he spends his first sustained period of time in Manhattan since he moved to Washington in 2017. He passes the days in a dingy courtroom downtown, where he faces 34 felonies, listening to people from his old life describe him as a depraved liar who sullied the White House. At the end of it all, he could be sent to prison.
But in the evenings, people who have spoken to him say, he has been enjoying being back in the penthouse apartment that he moved into four decades ago. He still considers it home — and a permanent reminder of the easiest period of his life.
That period was the greed-is-good era in which Trump sold himself nationally as a titan of industry, despite a relatively small, and local, real estate portfolio. He had just built a glittering tower on Fifth Avenue, infuriating elites and demanding a tax break from the city. And it is the era he alludes to constantly, referring to 1980s cultural touchstones, including the news show “60 Minutes,” Time magazine and celebrities like boxer Mike Tyson.
It is also the last time Trump’s preferred public image was intact, and it soon came crashing down. The decade ended with a monthslong tabloid war in which people around the city chose sides between him and his first wife, Ivana. At the same time, the image-obsessed Trump was the subject of one investigative story after another, making clear he had far less money than it had seemed, had relied on his father for help and had managed his empire into something close to ruin.
It was in the ’80s that he was in a public dance over whether he wanted to be accepted by elites or throw stones at them, marked most visibly by his decision to smash art deco friezes that had been atop the building he razed to construct Trump Tower.
Yet despite the claims that the city’s power brokers all sneered at him, Trump was humored, indulged and even accepted by some of them. The ’80s were a time when, his path having been helped by his father’s connections in the corrupt Brooklyn political machine, he was developing relationships with publishing titans such as S.I. Newhouse and hanging out in the stadium box held for George Steinbrenner, the New York Yankees owner.
Trump had begun a budding and durable association with one of the city’s power brokers, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, a man whose proximity gave Trump a sense of comfort, according to former Trump Organization employees, and who Trump has said would never have stood for the charges against him.
“It’s absolutely true — that was his golden time, no question,” said Andrew Stein, who was the City Council president in the 1980s and still supports Trump after having briefly suggested he should bypass his third presidential campaign.
Even being president — moving to a city and a world where the rules and laws were foreign and uninteresting to him, and where the establishment rejected him before he arrived — rarely seemed to delight Trump the way that holding court at the 21 Club in midtown Manhattan did.
The trial has highlighted the parts of Trump’s makeup that became clear in the decade that followed, in the 1990s, the ones less immediately apparent after the fame afforded him by his ghostwritten 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.” The courtroom days have repeatedly touched on his penchant for payback, his love of fixers to defend him, his obsession with being seen as a playboy, his business practices at what is essentially a mom-and-pop company.
But they have also underscored the reality that a man who spent years building an artifice about himself in the press and on TV managed to capture the presidency, when suddenly the question of what parts of him were real or fake was obscured by the power of the Oval Office, a giant government infrastructure and tens of millions of people who had cast ballots for him.
The era that shaped Trump was perhaps best encapsulated by author Tom Wolfe in “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which a wealthy investment banker strikes a young Black man in a hit-and-run in the Bronx amid widespread racial tensions, and is ultimately tried in the borough’s beaten-down criminal courthouse as the tabloids devour the story.
It was a building not unlike the one in which Trump has sat most days each week for six weeks, the fluorescent lighting beaming down on the decrepit benches and the letters reading “In God We Trust” over Justice Juan M. Merchan’s head.
Some days, Trump has eviscerated his lawyers and complained privately that he has no Roy Cohn, his original fixer and mentor and lawyer. Like Trump, Cohn was born into outer-borough privilege and then alternately reviled and accepted by powerful people. Cohn, a closeted gay man who tried to purge the federal government of gay people, died in 1986; he had AIDS but told people it was liver cancer.
Cohn, whose connections included President Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch and mobsters, had introduced the Queens-bred Trump to a new world and had taught him to always deny wrongdoing, to attack his attackers and to seek lawyers willing to do anything. But at the start of the ’80s, as he was gaining respectability himself, Trump already seemed ready to put some distance between himself and Cohn.
“All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Trump told journalist Marie Brenner a few years before Cohn’s death. “He’s a genius. He’s a lousy lawyer, but he’s a genius.”
Trump essentially dropped Cohn, who had been indicted repeatedly, when he fell ill. It was later that Trump lionized Cohn, despite his own criticism of his mentor, as the ideal that his other lawyers, including the new ones he dealt with in Washington, should strive to live up to.
Trump never spent much time back at Trump Tower while he was president. Most weekends, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, or to Bedminster, New Jersey. He said he was avoiding Manhattan because his motorcade would snarl traffic. But Manhattan had rejected him at the ballot box. Residents had even laughed in his face as he went to vote on Election Day in 2016; one told him, “You’re gonna lose!”
And so in September 2019, after consulting his tax lawyers, Trump rejected Manhattan right back, switching his residence to Florida. By the time he left office, 14 days after an attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, he was close to done trying to appease anyone but himself.
This month, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee has sought to troll the city he left, to show he can still dominate a place that, in the post-pandemic period, has continued to feel off-kilter.
On Thursday evening, he held a rally of thousands of people not in Manhattan but in the Bronx. The event was in a heavily Black and Latino neighborhood, in a borough where Trump went to college at Fordham University for two years, and where Cohn’s former law partner was once a Democratic Party leader. Trump had suggested to donors at a Manhattan fundraiser days earlier that he might get hurt in the neighborhood, although he seemed quite pleased once he was there.
He denounced transgender girls and women competing in women’s sports, to cheers. He attacked immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally, whose growing use of city services has been a flashpoint.
But the theme of his stories was the past. He talked about building Trump Tower, declaring, “Wherever I go, I know that if I could build a skyscraper in Manhattan, I could do anything.”
He lingered for several minutes describing how he rebuilt the defunct Wollman Rink in Central Park in 1986, a relatively small job that he nonetheless milked for intense media coverage. He detailed the copper pipes that had been stolen and the concrete wasted, and then he said he had found a way to turn the rink into something different.
“The biggest cost was demolition,” Trump said of his work. “Taking it down and then starting all over.”
Schools that never needed AC are now overheating. Fixes will cost billions.
Anna Phillips and Veronica Penney – May 24, 2024
Nearly 40 percent of schools in the United States were built before the 1970s, when temperatures were cooler and fewer buildings needed air conditioning.
That has changed. In recent decades, heat has crept northward, increasing the number of school days with temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Large parts of the country, where temperatures were previously cooler, now experience at least one month of school days with temperatures above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Many schools still don’t have air conditioning.
America’s aging school buildings are on a collision course with a rapidly warming climate.
Last fall, school officials were forced to send students home across the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic – just as many were returning from summer break – because of extreme heat and schools lacking air conditioning. In Baltimore and Detroit, high heat led to early dismissals, the same as it had four months earlier when summer temperatures struck in May.
In Philadelphia last year, administrators moved the first day of school from late August to after Labor Day, in part to avoid a repeat of heat-related school closures in previous years. But the weather didn’t cooperate. They ended up closing more than 70 schools three hours earlier than usual for the entire week.
Hot weather is not a new concern for school districts. But as the burning of fossil fuels heats the planet, it’s delivering longer-lasting, more dangerous heat waves, and higher average temperatures. Across much of the northern United States, where many schools were built without air conditioning, districts are now forced to confront the academic and health risks posed by poorly cooled schools. Fixing the problem often requires residents to pass multimillion dollar school repair bonds, which can be hard to do. Climatic change is arriving faster than most can adapt.
“We have had situations where it’s been 88 degrees outside but the real feel in the classrooms is well over 90 degrees because of the humidity,” said Shari Obrenski, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union. Although most of the district’s schools have air conditioning, 11 switched to virtual instruction during a period of high heat in 2022. “It’s miserable,” she said, “students throwing up, not being able to keep their heads up, just horrible conditions.”
Because of the highly localized nature of U.S. public schools, data on school air conditioning is scarce and researchers rely on surveys to gather information.
In 2021, when the environmental advocacy group Center for Climate Integrity set out to examine air conditioning, its researchers collected information on more than 150 schools and school districts across the country. They found that in places where temperatures historically hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit at least 32 days during the academic year, the vast majority of schools already had air conditioning.
Using this as their threshold for when AC is needed, they modeled what it would cost to keep schools cool in the near future under a moderate warming scenario. Their answer: more than 13,700 public schools in the United States that did not need air conditioning in 1970 need it today. Some have already installed it, some are working on it now and some can only dream of having enough money. The estimated cost of this huge investment exceeds $40 billion.
Paul Chinowsky, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led the analysis, said it showed two distinct trends in America: Northern school districts experiencing hotter school year temperatures that are overheating classrooms and forcing closures, especially in old buildings without enough electrical capacity to run air conditioners. And Southern districts with aging cooling systems outmatched by abnormally hot weather.
A generation ago, few would have imagined that school districts from Denver to Boston would need to spend millions of dollars on cooling. Today, the reality is different.
Aging schools, built for a different climate
The scene at Dunbar Elementary was so distressing that, six years later, it is still fresh in Jerry Jordan’s mind.
In late August 2018, a punishing heat wave gripped Philadelphia just as public school students were returning from summer break. Jordan, the president of the local teachers union, was holding a news conference at Dunbar to demand the state help pay to air-condition schools. Before the event, he walked through the building to get a feel for what its students and staff were experiencing.
“I ran into one teacher as she was walking her first-grade class down to computer science – she was wearing a dress and the back of the dress was literally soaked right through. It was sticking to her,” Jordan said. A little boy got out of line and lay down on the concrete floor. He stayed put, even when the teacher urged him to rejoin the class. “But it’s cool here,” Jordan remembers him pleading.
Today, roughly 30 percent of Philadelphia public schools don’t have fully air-conditioned classrooms, according to district officials. In interviews, teachers said many more buildings don’t have cooling in gyms, cafeterias and libraries. The district has made progress since that 2018 heat wave, thanks in large part to millions of dollars in federal pandemic aid and a $200,000 donation from Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts. But it still has many buildings with only enough power to support window AC units in every other classroom, or on certain floors. Some units are broken or barely functional. At one school, parents said the units are window dressing – they can’t be switched on for fear of using more electricity than the building can safely handle.
The district’s goal is to have all classrooms air-conditioned by 2027, but its pandemic money is about to run out and state funding remains uncertain. “The aspirational is absolutely dependent on funding,” said Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr.
In interviews, teachers said that classroom temperatures have climbed into the high 80s to low 90s in the early fall, past the point when studies have shown heat can impede learning.
“94 degrees F in my classroom today,” teacher Trey Smith wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on a day in late August, posting a photo of a thermometer in his third-floor un-air-conditioned classroom at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy. Smith said that, for years, he has had to endure high temperatures with only fans and a portable AC unit that trips the circuit breaker.
“I’m angry,” he said. “Not at the district and not at my administration, it’s just that as a state we’ve underfunded our schools. That’s the crime.”
As hotter-than-normal temperatures become more common in the late spring and early fall, they pose a risk to students’ academic success. Researchers have linked heat exposure to reduced learning, in addition to a range of well-known health effects such as dizziness, headaches and worsening asthma symptoms. Teachers aren’t immune either – especially in places that aren’t used to hot weather.
“On those really really hot days, our attendance is low because kids don’t want to boil in a classroom and asthmatic kids are being kept home by their parents,” said Olney High School teacher Sarah Apt, who also has asthma. “Those are days I have used my inhaler and kind of take it slower.”
Climate change is expanding the swath of the country facing these problems.
At the same time, as school shootings become more frequent, district leaders are under pressure to turn their buildings into fortresses to stop an attacker.
“We’ve got schools that want to button up for security reasons, but that’s making them hotter, stuffier and requiring more mechanical air conditioning,” said Chinowsky. “You’ve got two different goals working against each other.”
Well-off school districts often address this problem by putting a bond before voters, asking them to support higher taxes to pay for cooling. But despite its improving poverty rate, Philadelphia is still the poorest big city in the nation. And a quirk in state law bars the school district from raising its own revenue, leaving it few options but to ask the city and state for money. That hasn’t worked out so well – last year, a state court found that Pennsylvania’s funding formula leaves some schools so underfunded that it violates students’ constitutional right to an education.
Parents and teachers have become increasingly vocal in demanding healthier conditions following scandals over asbestos and lead contamination in schools. The teachers union now employs a director of environmental science and commissioned an app that allows teachers to report extreme temperature problems, as well as leaks and pest infestations.
Yet some families don’t know their children attend schools without air conditioning.
Sherice Workman was among them. When she chose Paul Robeson High School in West Philadelphia for her youngest son, Juelz, she was unaware how hot it was inside until he began bringing deodorant to school to mask his constant sweating. He came home with stories of students sleeping through class to deal with the heat. She and some of the school’s staff delivered a petition to district leaders two years ago.
“When it is 80 degrees outside, it is 90 to 100 in the classrooms. When it is 90 degrees outside, it is 100 to 105 degrees in the classrooms,” the petition read. “This extreme heat in our building has caused our children to pass out and miss classes due to dehydration-related headaches.”
The district installed window air conditioners at Robeson the next year, an experience that Workman said taught her the value of speaking out. When it comes to air conditioning in neighboring suburbs’ schools, she said, “It’s just something they have. Our fight isn’t their fight.
Hotter school days and no cheap fixes
Fall in Colorado’s Front Range can be glorious – with blue skies and aspens changing color in the Rockies. But it is also the time of year when Colorado has experienced its greatest warming, with temperatures rising by 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit from 1980-2022, according to a state report.
That’s when kids are in class. In the northern Colorado city of Fort Collins, classroom temperatures in some buildings reach upward of 90 degrees when the school year starts in mid-August, said middle school social studies teacher Jacque Kinnick, and the heat is lasting longer in the season.
“I used to need sweaters,” in October said Kinnick. “Now, I wear short sleeves.”
Kinnick said one of her colleagues compared the test scores of students in her morning and afternoon classes and found that the children performed worse later in the day, when the heat was highest.
“It’s like you can actually see kids just wilting,” she said. “They’re sweating, they’re laying their heads on the desk.”
University of Pennsylvania economist R. Jisung Park has studied the effect of rising temperatures on students. He found that, even when other factors are controlled for, students who are exposed to days in the 80s and 90s perform worse on standardized tests. His research also suggests that, in the United States, heat has a greater effect on Black and Latino students, who are less likely to have air conditioning at school or home.
The effect may not be noticeable at first – a one-degree hotter school year is linked to learning loss of about one percent – but the damage accumulates and the impact is likely underestimated. A federal analysis published last year noted that while these losses only account for students’ exposure to hot days during high school, newer research suggests heat experienced by elementary and middle school students also impedes learning.
Some of the coldest parts of the country will eventually have to face overheating schools, too. The federal study found that at the 2 degrees Celsius threshold, the states with the highest projected learning losses per student, because of low AC coverage in schools, will be Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Vermont and Wyoming.
Heat also affects students’ well-being. It increases ozone pollution in cities, extends the pollen season, worsens asthma symptoms and can exacerbate a host of other medical conditions, forcing students to leave their classes in search of relief. Children become dehydrated easily and turn woozy and irritable. After sitting in a hot classroom all day, they may struggle to play sports or participate in after-school activities.
Schools along the Front Range have historically counted on the region’s overnight low temperatures to cool off their buildings. But as climate change causes nights to warm faster than days, such methods are proving ineffective.
Jeff Connell, chief operations officer of the Poudre School District, which is centered in Fort Collins and includes surrounding towns, said the district recorded temperatures between 85 and 90.5 degrees in an elementary school classroom last fall. Poudre’s leaders have discussed postponing the start of school, but with extreme daily highs becoming more common, “it’s harder to know with certainty that if we move the calendar, we’ll avoid the hot days,” said Connell.
Fort Collins exemplifies two trends that confront public education as climate change intensifies. Heat is one problem – in part because urban schools are often ringed by heat-reflecting asphalt parking lots and playgrounds.
Demographics are another. Since funding is tied to enrollment, some school districts face budget crises as their student populations shrink – yet they need more money for air conditioning projects to keep their schools habitable.
Fort Collins’ affordability and easy access to the mountains has long-fueled the city’s growth. But the increasing number of high heat days has put a strain on teachers and students as enrollment is beginning to decline, prompting the school district to consider closing schools. Poudre has a $700 million deferred maintenance backlog. Last year, an assessment of how much it would cost to fully air-condition 36 school buildings came in at more than $200 million – money the district does not have.
The city is hardly an outlier.
In 2020, the Government Accountability Office found that an estimated 41 percent of school districts surveyed needed to replace or update their HVAC systems in at least half of their schools. But the report also found that roughly 40 percent of districts rely on state money for large-scale facilities improvements and don’t have the capacity to issue bonds or raise property taxes.
Persuading school board members and voters to fund air conditioning in schools can be a tough sell. This is an acute problem in Southern school districts where cooling was installed decades ago, but is now breaking down from near-constant use, Chinowsky said.
“The people making these decisions have a tendency to say, ‘We dealt with it when we were in school,’ Or, ‘It’s only hot for a couple of days,’” Chinowsky said. “And the fact is that’s not really the truth anymore.”
Often, the states aren’t coming to districts’ aid. Neither is the federal government. Advocates for more school funding said the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which rebuilds schools once they’re destroyed, is the biggest source of government money.
Decades of planning help keep classrooms cool
Some communities have more latitude to address the problem.
In Denver, about an hour south of Fort Collins, school officials have slowly been preparing their buildings for a hotter world. It began a decade ago with simple measures such as blinds and nighttime cooling. But as the years progressed and nights didn’t cool off like they once did, officials decided they were going to have to install air conditioning. The district began prioritizing retrofits based on factors such as student poverty levels and disabilities, the age and condition of the buildings and indoor temperatures.
Denver residents have approved multiple bond measures to pay for the upgrades and they may be asked to vote on one again soon. The district expects that 30 schools still won’t be fully air-conditioned by the end of the year. Fixing them will cost an estimated $290 million.
“The voters have been pretty receptive,” said Trena Marsal, chief operating officer of Denver Public Schools. “We’ve heard from our teachers, from our community members and our parents that the classrooms are hot.”
Among the districts where voters have agreed to support facilities bonds, some have used the money to not only air-condition their classrooms, but to also electrify their heating and cooling systems with air source or geothermal heat pumps. In St. Paul, Minn., the school district has finished installing a geothermal system at one of its high schools, where heat is pumped out of the building during the summer, transferred to water and stored deep underground in pipes. That heated water is pumped back into the buildings in winter to warm them.
Some of these systems can qualify for major federal subsidies. Yet to the chagrin of environmentalists, large school districts in cities such as New York City, Boston and Philadelphia are buying thousands of window units, which gobble up electricity and break down easily.
“They’re a maintenance nightmare. They’re an operating cost nightmare,” said Sara Ross, co-founder of the group UndauntedK12, which advocates for green building improvements in schools. “The decision to use window units is only going to worsen these districts’ challenges in terms of their emissions because they’re using much more energy.”
The picture in selected areas
Philadelphia: 3.7°F warmer since 1970
197,115 students enrolled
67 out of 218 schools are not fully air-conditioned.
By 2025, students will experience 22 more days with temperatures above 80°F. In 1970, 28 days were above 80°F. In 2025, it is predicted that 50 days will be above 80°F.
Fort Collins, Colo.: 3.4°F warmer since 1970
29,914 students enrolled
36 out of 49 schools are not fully air-conditioned.
By 2025, students will experience 17 more days with temperatures above 80°F. In 1970, 25 days were above 80°F. In 2025, it is predicted that 42 days will be above 80°F.
Denver: 1.3°F warmer since 1970
89,235 students enrolled
37 out of 207 schools are not fully air-conditioned.
By 2025, students will experience 18 more days with temperatures above 80°F. In 1970, 32 days were above 80°F. In 2025, it is predicted that 50 days will be above 80°F.
About this story
Sources: Resilient Analytics and the Center for Climate Integrity (hot school days); NOAA Regional Climate Centers via the Applied Climate Information System (temperature trends); Denver Public Schools.
The Post used data from Resilient Analytics and the Center for Climate Integrity that estimates the increase in hot school days by 2025 using downscaled climate projections for North America from CMIP5. The gridded data has a resolution of 3.7 miles. To calculate the increase in hot days by 2025, researchers used the middle-of-the-road RCP 4.5 scenario.
There are some U.S. counties where varying terrain affects county-level temperature projections. Monroe County, Fla. – just west of Miami-Dade – includes mainland, coasts and islands. The varied terrain creates microclimates that make county-level averages cooler than neighboring counties, even if mainland areas of the county remain very hot.
School years days were defined separately for each state using the 2018-2019 school year calendar for the state’s largest school district. Charter schools are not included in the analysis.
To determine the increase in average temperature for each school district, The Post used station temperature records from NOAA Regional Climate Centers via the Applied Climate Information System. Maximum temperature records for 1970-2023 were analyzed using a linear regression to determine the average rate of warming over the time period. Days with missing temperature measurements were excluded.
Extreme heat hits Texas and Florida early in the season
Denise Chow – May 22, 2024
Jason Fochtman
Scorching heat and humidity have descended over parts of Texas, the Gulf Coast and South Florida this week — a bout of early-season extreme heat that has experts bracing for what’s to come.
A full month before the official start of summer, Miami is already in the midst of its hottest May on record, according to experts.
The city’s heat index — a measure of what conditions feel like when humidity and air temperatures are combined — hit 112 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend, smashing the previous daily record by 11 degrees, according to Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami. The weekend heat index also beat Miami’s monthly record by 5 degrees, he wrote in a post on X.
Last summer was the hottest on record for Miami — and the entire planet. Forecasters say the coming season could match or surpass the temperatures seen in 2023.
Miami’s recent 112-degree heat index reading was recorded both Saturday and Sunday, marking only the second time in the city’s recorded history that there have been back-to-back days of heat index values at or above that level, according to McNoldy. The other instance was Aug. 8 and 9, 2023.
“But it’s only mid-May!” he wrote. “To anyone who was hoping 2023 was a freak anomaly: nope.”
Miami has already expanded the time period it considers to be the official heat season to span from May 1 to Oct. 31 annually — a response to earlier onsets of high heat and humidity.
Meanwhile, a heat advisory is in effect across much of south Texas. Temperatures up to 113 degrees can be expected in some places, particularly along the Rio Grande, according to the National Weather Service.
The agency said heat index values between 110 degrees and 120 degrees are expected this week, with still more dangerous heat lingering into the weekend.
“As a result, major to extreme risks of heat-related impacts are expected across South Texas,” the weather service said in its advisory. “Be sure to stay cool, drink plenty of water, and take frequent breaks if you are spending time outside!”
High heat and humidity, including heat indexes around 100 degrees, are also expected in Houston in the coming days. The city is still reeling from last week’s deadly storms, with tens of thousands of residents still without power.
Studies have shown that climate change is making early-season heat more likely, in addition to fueling more frequent, intense and longer-lasting heat waves.
Before Iran’s attack on Israel prompted them to change plans, last week was supposed to be “appliance week” for Republicans in the House of Representatives. The House GOP had scheduled a review of a slate of bills with names like the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, the Liberty in Laundry Act and the Refrigerator Freedom Act.
Each of these bills is a response to new energy efficiency standards from the Biden administration that, when they go into effect a few years from now, will require a whole range of household appliances to use less energy and water. Over the past year or so, the Department of Energy has released new standards for products including dishwashers, air conditioners, water heaters, home furnaces, washing machines, refrigerators and even lightbulbs.
There’s nothing unique about President Biden requiring appliances to be more efficient. It’s been common practice for presidents of both parties since the first standards went into effect in the late 1980s. Over the years, these rules have helped drastically cut the amount of energy the typical household appliance uses. The average refrigerator sold today, for example, consumes 75% less energy than its equivalent in 1973 despite having significantly more storage space.
In previous decades, most of these changes were met with little pushback, but there’s been a groundswell of opposition to government-mandated efficiency standards within the Republican Party over the past few years. A big reason for that is former President Donald Trump, who regularly complained about energy-efficient lightbulbs and low-flow toilets during his time in office. Trump’s administration rolled back rules for some products and only consented to updating the standards on others when ordered to do so by a federal court.
Many Republicans now accuse Biden of waging a “war on appliances,” and efficiency standards have become part of a larger cultural battle. The dishwasher claims echo the uproar that emerged in 2022 when Republicans falsely claimed the president intended to ban gas stoves.
Why there’s debate
Supporters say strong energy efficiency rules are a win-win for consumers and the environment. Beyond the benefits to the climate achieved by reducing the use of fossil fuels and water that home appliances consume, the program will have helped American households save trillions of dollars on their energy bills by the end of the decade, according to estimates from the DOE.
But critics of Biden’s new standards argue that while the rules may have been necessary to phase out inefficient machines of the past, they do more harm than good because they limit consumer choice. These critics say the free market already gives manufacturers a strong incentive to make efficient products. Others add that at a certain point, the standards backfire because they lead to products that simply don’t work well.
Many liberals say the debate over Biden’s efficiency plans is just a political controversy manufactured by Republicans in an attempt to make the president appear like a “big government” tyrant.
What’s next
At the moment, it’s unclear if the House GOP has any plans to reschedule its “appliance week.”
Most of the Biden administration’s new efficiency standards won’t go into effect until 2027 or 2028, but it’s possible that Trump may attempt to intervene to block them if he regains the presidency.
Perspectives
We can’t confront the challenge of climate change without curbing emissions everywhere we can
“Efficiency now is all about the opportunism. It’s also more critical than ever to meeting climate change goals. As more buildings and cars switch from fossil fuels to electric power, efficiency will be equally important to make sure the grid is actually meeting the strain from rising demand.” — Rebecca Leber, Vox
The government should just let people buy whatever they want
“What today’s environmentalists fail to realize is that people will change their purchasing behavior as it becomes easier and cheaper to do so, that the products they seek to impose will, in many cases, inevitably become part of the marketplace if they’re good enough. In the meantime, they’ve made our kitchens and cooking worse, with no real effect beyond annoyance and cost increases.” — Liz Wolfe, Reason
Efficiency rules have made our appliances better, not worse
“Making appliances more energy efficient does not affect their durability and quality. All of that … rests on the hands of the manufacturer and their designers.” — Shanika Whitehurst, associate director for product sustainability, research and testing at Consumer Reports, to NPR
The standards lead to worse products that cost more
“Americans have learned the hard way that stricter efficiency rules on already efficient appliances translate into higher costs, inconvenience, and ultimately waste.” — Editorial, Wall Street Journal
When energy-efficient products don’t get the job done, people end up being more wasteful
“Regulations that cap dishwashers at 3.1 gallons of water (who came up with that figure?) result in dishes that get less clean, which means a second run or washing dishes by hand. Low-flow toilets might use less water per flush, but are they actually saving water if you must flush two or three times to do the job? Rule-making bureaucrats rarely consider such questions — and we mustn’t ask them.” — Jon Miltimore, Washington Examiner
Strong rules ensure consumers make the right choices
“Part of the reason we have regulation is that consumers can’t research every product they buy. People normally count on regulators to decide these issues for them.” — Andrew Koppelman, Northwestern University law professor, to the Nation
Republicans are inventing a controversy for political gain
“This might all sound like a commonsense win-win: changes that save people money, reduce emissions, and are well within the bounds of long-established federal statute. Republicans beg to differ, of course. To hear the right tell it, new appliance efficiency regulations are the equivalent of federal agents barging, guns blazing, into the homes of hardworking Americans to burgle their laundry rooms.” — Kate Aronoff, New Republic
What a justice’s upside-down flag means for the Supreme Court
Mike Bebernes – Senior Editor – May 22, 2024
Photo illustration: Alex Cochran for Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images (Photo illustration: Alex Cochran for Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images)
What’s happening
Arecent report that an upside-down flag — a popular symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement to reject the 2020 presidential results — flew outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the days following the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol has created yet another scandal for a court that was already mired in controversy.
Late last week, the New York Times reported that neighbors had spotted the inverted flag at Alito’s Virginia home in mid-January 2020, just a few days before President Biden was inaugurated. Then on Wednesday, the newspaper published a followup story revealing that a flag featuring a different symbol popular among “Big Lie” proponents had flown outside Alito’s beach house in New Jersey.
The upside-down flag has historically been used as a distress signal by the U.S. military, but in recent decades it has been wielded by a variety of protest movements on both the left and the right. After Biden won the 2020 election, it was adopted by supporters of former President Donald Trump who subscribed to Trump’s lies that the race had been stolen, culminating in a Trump rally where his followers attacked the Capitol building to try to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
Alito told the Times that he had “no involvement whatsoever” in flying the inverted flag at his home. It was raised, he said, by his wife in response to yard signs featuring “objectionable and personally insulting language” outside their neighbor’s home.
Legal experts told the Times and other news outlets that the flag was a clear violation of judicial ethics rules, which bar judges from making political statements that might undermine the public’s faith in their ability to be impartial in divisive cases. Unlike other federal courts, though, the Supreme Court enforces its own rules, meaning any response to the flag could only come from the justices themselves.
The judicial code also calls for judges to recuse themselves from cases in which their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But like the ethics rules, recusal decisions are left up to individual judges. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, for example, chose not to take part in recent cases challenging Harvard’s admissions procedures because of her involvement at the school both as a student and a member of its board. Though Alito has recused himself as much as any of his colleagues in recent years, he has thus far declined to step aside from cases involving the 2020 election.
Alito isn’t the only conservative justice on the court to face ethical questions related to the “Big Lie.” His colleague Clarence Thomas also faced calls to recuse himself from cases related to the election and Jan. 6, which he ignored, because of his wife’s involvement in efforts to overturn the results.
Thomas has also been at the center of controversy over his friendship with a wealthy conservative political operative, who reportedly brought Thomas along on dozens of lavish vacations over the past several decades. Alito has faced similar questions about his relationship with a different conservative billionaire who later had cases before the Supreme Court. Both justices have asserted that there is nothing improper about their actions. However, the incidents helped prompt the court to adopt a new voluntary ethics code.
Why there’s debate
Democrats have characterized the flag report as yet more evidence that at least two of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices can’t be trusted to fairly rule on anything related to Jan. 6. Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisted that both Alito and Thomas recuse themselves from any cases on the issue — including the question of whether Trump has presidential immunity from prosecution, which is currently being considered by the court. Durbin also reiterated his call, echoed by other members of his party, for Congress to pass legally-binding ethics rules for justices.
Some left-leaning legal analysts have gone even further, arguing that Alito’s willingness to have such an inflammatory symbol outside his home is a sign of how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority feels no obligation to display even the appearance of political impartiality.
Judicial experts also worry about how this situation might further erode the public’s faith in the country’s highest court, which has hit record lows in recent years amid a wave of recent scandals and deeply controversial rulings — most notably the decision that overturned abortion rights established by Roe v. Wade.
Some Republicans have said they wish Alito had given more consideration to how the flag might be perceived. But they have roundly rejected suggestions that it indicates he’s incapable of doing his job fairly, arguing that it’s absurd to make the assumption that his wife’s response to a neighborhood spat in any way reflects on his ability to make sound decisions on the court. In the eyes of many conservatives, this controversy — along with broader criticism of conservative justices — is part of a Democratic campaign to pressure the justices into issuing less-conservative rulings or delegitimize the decisions that don’t fit their liberal worldview.
What’s next
Some Senate Democrats have called for an investigation into the flag incident, but Durbin is opposed to the idea, meaning it likely won’t happen.
The court is expected to release decisions in two major Jan. 6 cases — one concerning charges brought against hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol, the other on Trump’s immunity claims — within the next few weeks.
Perspectives
Anyone who is OK with the Big Lie can’t be impartial on Jan. 6 cases
“Who can possibly think he will decide this case in a neutral manner? Of course, Justice Alito’s political leanings were already well-known. But the flag flying incident indicates he has strong views about the facts underlying this case. His decision seems pre-ordained.” — Leslie Levin, University of Connecticut law professor, to Salon
There’s zero reason to question Alito’s ability to rule fairly
“The left wants to tarnish Justice Alito’s reputation, as well as cause him to recuse himself from participating in any case involving Mr. Trump. No such recusal is necessary on ethical or any other grounds. The political views of spouses don’t dictate, or in our experience even influence, how a Justice will rule.” — Editorial, Wall Street Journal
Alito knows that there are no consequences, no matter how openly partisan he is
“The arrogance is bottomless. Why did the Supreme Court justice do this, or allow ‘Mrs. Alito’—on whom he pinned the blame—to do it? He knew it was petty. And he surely knew that, by conventional ethical standards, it was wrong. But he didn’t care because he knew that he stands beyond punishment for such acts.” — Michael Tomasky, New Republic
Liberals have lost the court, so they’ll take any chance to try to tear it down
“There are two transparent purposes of these: to intimidate the justices into trimming their sails for fear of more criticism, and (when that fails) to delegitimize their decisions and lay the groundwork for radical changes to destroy the Court in its longstanding form.” — Dan McLaughlin, National Review
The integrity of the next election is in serious danger with Alito on the court
“After this November’s general election, there are almost certainly going to be further legal challenges to the election results, just as there were in 2020. Alito will be on the court to hear Trump’s arguments in those cases, too. The flag, then, is just the latest reminder of a disturbing reality: that as the Republican party further radicalizes against democracy, the Supreme Court – the body which is tasked with checking these unconstitutional impulses – has become their ally.” — Moira Donegan, Guardian
The court’s critics are trying to turn a nonstory into a national scandal
“If you look hard enough, you can find disturbing symbols anywhere you look, but you must sometimes suspend logic and reason in order to do so. This does not seem like a situation where a sitting Supreme Court justice is supporting overthrowing election results; it looks like a situation where the New York Times is straining to make that the narrative.” — Liz Wolfe, Reason
Alito and Thomas shouldn’t be on the court at all
“There are currently strong grounds to impeach not just Samuel Alito but his fellow benchwarmer Clarence Thomas. Both judges have given evidence of disqualifying corruption as well as of their harboring insurrectionist sentiment.” — Jeet Heer, The Nation
Alito’s wife has every right to express any opinion she wants
“Mrs. Alito has both the constitutional right to express whatever political opinions she pleases, whether I like them or not, as well as a moral right to express them independently of her husband and his position on the court.” — Bret Stephens, New York Times
