Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,434]

Big thought for the times we all exist in on this mortal coil.

2 words.

We (as in humanity) are more and more rapidly sliding towards a multivariate, global system-rupturing

epistemic breakdown.

 

[Vesper 28,434]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-10-04-how-donald-trump/

 

“Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious,” said Vice President Kamala Harris at her DNC speech in Chicago. It was a good line, and one that begs a much bigger question: How the f*** are we here again? How are we a handful of swing-state voters away from giving head-wound Hitler another shot at the Oval Office? How are we here, when everything about this man is both unserious and dangerous?

Trump and J.D. Vance prove week after week just how unserious they are about this election. Their answers to policy questions are at best mere slogans and at worst nonsensical. Trump told a bearded biker concerned about housing affordability that they were going to “drill baby drill,” and said that his proposal for lowering the cost of child care is to impose tariffs on foreign nations. I’m sorry, what?

Meanwhile, Vance is just an upcycled Mike Pence with more venture capitalist money. He is pathologically obsessed with the idea of somehow making women have more babies, but when actually asked about child care, says that states should lower regulations for day care providers. Doesn’t he represent the party that alleges groomers in education are harming children? Yes, let’s take down the guardrails for day care providers. CPR certification is woke!

Look, we know the Trump campaign has been in hysterics ever since President Biden did something they could never fathom doing—relinquishing power—and now they have to actually try. But this level of negligence on basic policies is both dumbfounding and terrifying. It’s clear that if elected, their administration will just be a cipher for libertarian billionaires and religious theocrats. Maybe they think they don’t need to do more given the new MAGA state election board in Georgia and new voter ID laws in Nevada? None of it resonates with the American electorate and yet somehow, somehow this election is still close.

And therein lies my real issue with this election. Once again I am asking, once again I will continue to ask, from now until November 5: How?

How in the gReAteST DEmoCraCy on EaRth, how is Trump still running for office? How have the courts, the media, and our electoral system allowed a convicted white-collar felon and sexual abuser, a man with dozens of criminal charges hanging over him, who time and again abused the office of the presidency to do things like blackmail the government of Ukraine, weaponize the DOJ, and oh yeah, advocate for a DIY coup of ex-military boat dads to attack the Capitol, to take a shot at becoming the most powerful man in the world, again? And on top of that, how is every judge and prosecutor too chickensh*t to sentence the guy for the crimes he has been convicted of before November, out of fear of politicizing the election? Heaven forbid the election becomes TOO POLITICAL!

“But whatever could we do about it?” the centrists coo in their calmest NPR voice. Let’s pause and take a look at another democracy in the Americas: Brazil. Former President Jair Bolsonaro, the “Trump of the Tropics,” also denied the election results of his 2022 loss. He also summoned a mob to attack the nation’s legislature. But because Brazilian democracy stipulates elections are overseen by a federal electoral court rather than a state patchwork, Jair Bolsonaro was ruled ineligible to run for president for eight years. Brazilian law says that any elected official who abuses their power is temporarily barred from seeking re-election. Meanwhile, about a dozen states in the U.S. have tried, and failed, to disqualify Trump from the ballot for inciting an insurrection against the government because *NPR voice* “Would that merely embolden the president?” Yes, wouldn’t the criminal be emboldened to commit more crime if they were held accountable for their criming? Are we hearing ourselves?

To function in American democracy is to perpetually paper over the feeling that you’re going crazy. And to treat this election as normal is to agree to be gaslighted over and over again in the service of “balance,” “respectability,” or any of the other meaningless traits we use to characterize ourselves like a bad cover letter for our country. America is proficient in racial unity and ballot access. Also Microsoft Excel!

But anyway, back to the horse race. Oh look! Another poll!

[Vesper 28,434]

What Kind of Damage Will the Supreme Court Inflict This Term?

To understand the ambitions of the conservative majority, look no farther than Project 2025, which was cooked up by some of the same people who engineered the current court.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-2024-term-preview/

The Supreme Court returns from its summer vacation on October 7, four weeks and one day before the November 5 general election. The court’s fingerprints (as well as the fingerprints of the wealthy Republican donors who likely paid for some of the justices’ summer vacations) are already all over the upcoming election. Earlier this year, the court ensured Donald Trump a spot on the ballot when it ruled against an attempt to prevent him from running for president because of his participation in an insurrection against the government; then, in July, the Republican justices granted Trump “absolute immunity” for crimes committed as part of his “official duties,” likely ensuring that he will never face accountability for his worst actions. Thanks to these rulings, Trump can legally run for an office he previously attempted to steal.

Given the court’s demonstrated eagerness to put its thumb on the scale for Trump before the election, we can only imagine what it will do to help him after the election. Trump could lose by millions in the popular vote and by 40 votes in the Electoral College, but if he can get just five Supreme Court justices to rule in his favor, none of those votes will matter. The court will invest him with the power to usher in an age of authoritarianism and permanent one-party rule.

Still, even if Kamala Harris does manage to clear every hurdle to the presidency—if she manages to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and those votes are honored—it is important to understand that the Supreme Court’s dread work of dismantling democracy and setting back the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community to the prevailing standards of 1859 will continue apace. The deck has been stacked, and the court’s six conservative justices are not going to let this opportunity go to waste. They have an agenda—a mandate, you could say—and it looks a lot like the one that’s gotten a lot of attention in recent months: Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the conservative plan to take over the federal government and remake the executive branch in a Christofacist image should Trump win.

Project 2025 is the work of the Heritage Foundation. So, in many ways, is the current Supreme Court. Alongside the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation has been one of the big players determining which Republicans end up on the nation’s highest court. For over 50 years, it has worked to pack the judiciary with extremist Republican judges in an attempt to wipe out the civil and social progress of the 20th and early 21st centuries. And it has largely succeeded.

This success may help to explain one of the few gaps in the 900-page Project 2025 document: the absence of a detailed section dedicated to the Supreme Court. I believe this is because the fascist blueprint assumes that the court has already been captured. Project 2025 is in motion in the courts, and it will continue to move forward there, with or without Trump in office, because its core tenets are supported by a majority of the Supreme Court’s justices.

This tells us a lot about what we can expect from the court in the future. Over the coming term and the many that follow, we will see Project 2025’s agenda play out in three key areas: the administrative state, environmental regulations, and civil rights.

The dismantling of the administrative state has been a defining obsession for conservatives for decades, and one they’ve come closer and closer to realizing in recent years. At the beginning of the summer, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron deference—the legal doctrine that courts should defer to executive agencies on matters concerning the interpretation of congressional statutes. The ruling calls into question thousands of regulations that have been put forward by those executive agencies. Leonard Leo, the ever-ruthless Svengali of the Federalist Society, has called on Republicans to “flood the zone” with challenges to these regulations, and the lower courts are already weighing a number of cases that seek to punch holes in the regulatory authority of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Many of these cases might not be ready for Supreme Court review this term, but when it comes to the environment, there are already two cases on the court’s docket that will let the conservative justices fulfill their role as unofficial members of the fossil fuel and chemical industries. In City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court will likely decide that its members, not environmental experts, should determine just how much pollution and human filth can be dumped into the ocean. And in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, the conservatives will likely choose to weaken the role of environmental-impact studies. The National Environmental Policy Act requires agencies to conduct such studies before commencing major projects that will alter the surrounding ecosystem, but conservatives and polluters want to free developers to wreak as much havoc as they want on the environment.

Nor will the court stop at deregulation and environmental abuse. One of Project 2025’s main goals is to reassert and safeguard white supremacy by overturning any law or policy meant to even the playing field. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling ending affirmative action was only the beginning for these people. The plan is to take Clarence Thomas’s willful misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, as articulated in his concurring opinion for Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and weaponize it against any civil rights program they don’t like. Already there are cases making their way through the lower courts of appeal that seek to make race consciousness in hiring unconstitutional. There’s an effort to declare that workplace training on diversity and inclusion creates a “hostile” work environment. And a Trump judge in Texas has ruled the Minority Business Development Act unconstitutional. The Supreme Court hasn’t decided to hear any of these cases yet, but they are likely to do so soon—which means that in the coming months and years, we will almost certainly see the court redefine “civil rights” to mean “for white people and no one else.”

Beyond these kinds of Project 2025–aligned cases, this Supreme Court term will, once again, see the conservative justices make schools dangerous for children but safe for mass shooters, make the country unwelcoming to immigrants from the Global South, and take barbarous positions on the death penalty and send potentially innocent people to die. And notwithstanding their positions on the death penalty, the conservative justices will declare themselves “pro-life” and resume their assault on reproductive rights. Last term, the court punted on two major abortion cases, probably in an attempt to avoid inflaming the issue before the election. But you can bet those cases will be back on the docket after the election.

In FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the Supreme Court ruled that a group consisting of doctors, a dentist, and several individuals without any medical training or licenses had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its authorization of the drug mifepristone for use in medication abortions. The court then remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit, to Trump-appointed Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who is the one who allowed these assorted randos to sue in the first place. Now Kacsmaryk has given state officials in Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri the right to join the litigation as coplaintiffs, potentially solving the standing problem. The question of whether mifepristone will remain legal is still very much up in the air.

The second case is Moyle v. United States. In late June, the Supreme Court dismissed a case arguing that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) could not require hospitals to provide abortions when the life or health of the expectant mother is at risk. Once again, it did so on technical grounds—but with a twist. While the court’s decision sidestepped the underlying issues in the case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s important concurrence included some advice to forced-birth advocates on how to win in the future: tweak the case to argue that Congress cannot require hospitals to follow EMTALA as a condition of receiving Medicare funds. Should challengers take the hint, that case could be back at the Supreme Court sooner rather than later.

The court has not yet finished slating all of its cases for the term, but its docket is already filled with cases that cover a range of important areas, and this bodes ill for millions of people. Let’s review the worst of the cases we know about so far—and hope that this is the last term we have to suffer an unchecked, unaccountable, Republican supermajority entrenched in lifetime power.

DIY death: A 9mm pistol self-assembly kit is displayed during a Rose Garden event publicizing the Biden administration’s 2022 ghost-gun rules.(Nathan Posner, Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)

This case will give conservatives on the Supreme Court the chance to legalize “ghost guns.”

A ghost gun is essentially a do-it-yourself gun made from a mishmash of parts sold online or from a self-assembly kit. A seller sends all the parts and instructions to a purchaser, who then puts together the deadly weapon themselves. Because the resulting gun does not have a serial number, the gun is effectively untraceable (hence the “ghost” moniker).

The astute reader might notice that ghost guns allow purchasers to avoid nearly every gun law we have on the books. And that, of course, is the point. Because the gun is delivered disassembled, purchasers do not have to go through background checks and are able to avoid any “red flag” laws that would prevent them from buying a fully assembled firearm from a licensed retailer. You can see the utility of these weapons from the perspective of those who should never be allowed to buy guns.

Defenders of ghost guns say that making a gun from an assembly kit is no different from gunsmithing, which has been legal since before the country’s founding. Indeed, the technical term for this category of weapons is “privately made firearms,” or PMFs, and the conceit is that people are merely buying parts that they are legally allowed to buy and then combining them in ways they are legally allowed to do. The only way they violate the law is if they use their DIY gun illegally—say, by killing their spouse or your children with a gun they could not have bought but now own because they made it themselves.

This argument sounds like one a terrorist might make. You can search on the Internet and pretty quickly find instructions on how to make your own bomb. You can also go to a hardware store and legally buy everything you need to follow the bomb-making recipe. You might not technically violate the law… until you rig the bomb to blow up. And yet, I believe that if Home Depot or Dick’s Sporting Goods had a “Bomb-Making” section tucked neatly behind the aisle for “Shrapnel & Incendiaries” and staffed by the Unabomber, the government would put a stop to it. If Home Depot mailed all the bomb-making materials to your house, its lawyers would probably make the company stop based on the threat of legal liability alone. (At least I hope they would: The Home Depots in Texas could call that section the “Anti-Immigrant” aisle, and then Ted Cruz would defend it with his life.)

In 2022, the ATF attempted to put a stop to ghost guns by promulgating a 98-page rule that expanded the definition of “firearms” under the 1968 Gun Control Act to include them. The rule change mandated that the sellers of these weapons had to comply with all the laws (including background checks, transfer records, and serial numbers) that other gun manufacturers must respect.

Predictably, that change triggered the lawsuit that has now reached the Supreme Court. Ghost gun sellers (along with a pair of owners and several ammosexual rights groups) argued that the new rule exceeds the ATF’s authority and violates the Administrative Procedures Act (which addresses how agencies create new regulations), while also making all the usual ammosexual arguments about the Second Amendment and freedom and America and the inviolable primordial need to kill whatever is bothering you.

You’ve heard it all before. And, unfortunately, you also know how the court’s bloodthirsty conservatives are going to rule on this case. That’s because the Supreme Court weighed in on a similar issue just last term. In Garland v. Cargill, the court’s conservatives overturned a ban on bump stocks, which are devices that turn a semiautomatic weapon into what is functionally a fully automatic machine gun. The court ruled that the ATF exceeded its authority, and to get there, the justices engaged in a long discussion about the technical specifications of bump stocks, while largely ignoring what bump stocks allow a shooter to do.

We can expect the conservatives to do the same thing in VanDerStok. They’ll focus on the technical definitions of “frame” and “receiver” and determine that modern ghost guns do not function like guns did in 1968—instead of considering the fact that ghost guns allow their users to do exactly the same thing as guns did in 1968: kill people. It is the killing function that necessitates regulation, not the mechanical interplay of the bits and bobbles. But it’s that killing function that conservative jurists have decided to ignore.

This case will likely be decided 6–3, along partisan lines, with the conservative justices enabling more violence. The best hope to keep our children and our society safe from DIY guns is to vote Democrats into control of both chambers of Congress and have them pass a new law banning ghost guns and bump stocks.

In 2023, Tennessee banned gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18. The ban outlawed hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gender-transition surgeries for minors—regardless of whether parents had knowledge of the care and had given their consent. Tennessee might as well be called “Hogwarts” given its legal hostility to the transgender community. More than a dozen states have since implemented similar bans.

Tennessee was sued by three trans adolescents and their parents on the grounds that the state violated their equal protection rights; eventually, the Biden administration joined the suit on their behalf. This case pits parents’ rights—specifically their right to get their kids the medical care they deem to be in the children’s best interest—against the state’s right to prohibit medical care simply because that care makes conservatives angry and liable to throw away their cans of Bud Light.

The equal protection arguments raised by the parents are compelling. The drugs and therapies in question are readily given to adolescents whose gender identity matches the one they were assigned at birth; boys born with male anatomy are allowed to have access to testosterone boosters, for instance, but trans boys are not. The Biden administration says the Tennessee law targets transgender kids in an effort to “enforce conformity.” For their part, Tennessee officials don’t really back away from the discrimination charges but instead argue that their bigotry is justified. In court documents, they argue that gender-affirming care has “exploded” in recent years and that the treatments are “unproven and risky.” Unproven and risky, however, only for those who disagree with the gender the state of Tennessee assigned them at birth.

The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the ban. Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, argued essentially that social acceptance of transgender individuals is moving so fast that the courts should stay out of the issue and let states ban gender-affirming care as they see fit. He said courts should be wary of announcing new “substantive” constitutional rights that “limit accountable elected officials from sorting out these medical, social, and policy challenges.” I’ll just point out that equal protection is not a “new” constitutional right; it’s a foundational one that conservatives keep trying to deny to anybody who doesn’t fit within their white, cis, hetero male preferences.

The Supreme Court is likely to agree with the Sixth Circuit. As a legal proposition, the Tennessee ban is a point-and-click violation of the 14th Amendment, but as a social matter, the six conservative justices don’t really give a damn about the Constitution when the Constitution requires them to be tolerant of others.

This case is about pornography, which means it is about free speech, as all Supreme Court cases about pornography ultimately are. In recent years, conservatives, especially the kind who pay $8 to feel popular on Twitter, have tried to fool people into thinking they are the defenders of free speech. But for the Elon Musk brand of conservative, this version of free speech usually extends only to the right to use the N-word while shouting at somebody online. When you get to a real free speech issue, like pornography, the conservative sphincter usually tightens enough to turn coal into diamonds.

Unfortunately for the world’s graphic fantasy enjoyers, liberals, especially elected liberals, are also usually prudish when it comes to porn. Defending porn and the right to watch it is generally not a job anybody wants.

Nobody, that is, except the Supreme Court. Historically, the court has been surprisingly permissive when it comes to pornography. It’s not like the court is out there with an OnlyFans page, but often enough the court has treated pornography more like protected speech and less like valueless smut.

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton will test that tradition. It will test whether the court’s current archconservative majority hews to porn precedent or ignores it in the service of Christofascism.

At issue in the case is an age-verification law passed in Texas. It’s a two-part law, and the first part mandates, according to the ACLU, that “websites on which one-third or more of the content is ‘harmful to minors’ must verify the age of all users.”

Age verification might sound benign, but it significantly restricts access to porn for adults. The Texas law requires users to upload a picture of some form of government-issued or otherwise official ID to the desired website. The problem is that many people do not want to share their driver’s license (if they even have one) or other forms of identification with a porn site. And it is, shall we say, exceedingly hard to know which porn sites can even be trusted with such information, as consumer protection oversight of the porn industry is patchy at best. If their data is stolen or hacked, many users might be unwilling to press claims against the company, to say nothing of the blackmail potential inherent in hacks of porn sites. The Texas law isn’t really about restricting access to porn for minors; it’s about restricting access for adults.

The second part of the law is just… cringe. It requires porn sites to post a public health warning on their landing page that reads, in part: “TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function.” I feel obligated to remind readers that this is Texas we’re talking about, a place that has no problem “weakening brain function” with live ammunition fired from openly carried assault rifles. Texas wants to slap a public health warning not on the GrabAGun online arms retailer, but on Pornhub. I can say with confidence that if Texas made it very easy for 19-year-old boys to grab Abella Danger or Johnny Sins videos and very hard for them to grab AR-15s, the entire country would be a safer place.

In any event, the Supreme Court has struck down age-verification systems like this before. In 2004, in Ashcroft v. ACLU, the court struck down a provision of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) that mandated age verification for adult content because it was too restrictive of protected speech.

But in March, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ignored that precedent and upheld the Texas law. In the Ashcroft case, the Supreme Court applied what’s known as “strict scrutiny” to COPA, which means that the government had to show that its law was the least restrictive way to achieve its goal of keeping minors away from pornography, and the court found that the government had failed to meet that burden. But in Free Speech Coalition, the Fifth Circuit said that strict scrutiny should not apply in this scenario, but rather that Texas needed to prove only that there was a “rational” relationship between its restriction and its goal, and it ruled that Texas had met that burden.

I honestly have no idea which way the Supreme Court will rule this time around. The 2004 Ashcroft case was decided 5–4, but it didn’t split along party lines. In fact, it was one of the few cases where Clarence Thomas disagreed with Antonin Scalia, with Thomas joining the majority to strike down the COPA age-verification requirement over a dissent from Scalia.

What I can say is that our society has its priorities ass-backwards. We live in a country where it’s easier to show someone getting beaten to death with a dildo than it is to show a person faking an orgasm with the same goddamn dildo. We are the most violent wealthy nation on earth and one of the most sexually repressed wealthy nations, and I will go to my grave thinking those things are linked.

At the mercy of the court: Richard Glossip, pictured here at the state penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 2014.(Janelle Stecklein, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. / AP)

That Richard Glossip, a man who has been on death row in Oklahoma since 1998, is still alive to argue his innocence, despite repeated attempts by Republican judges to kill him, is a miracle. Glossip was convicted for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese. Van Treese was the owner of a Best Budget Inn motel, where Glossip was the manager. But the person who killed him was not Glossip but the maintenance man, Justin Sneed, who beat Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. Sneed said that Glossip paid him to do it and testified against Glossip in exchange for being spared the death penalty himself. On the strength of Sneed’s testimony and virtually nothing else, Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 2014, Glossip was one of four death-row inmates who challenged Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. There was a fourth plaintiff, Charles Frederick Warner, but he was killed in January 2015, after the Supreme Court denied a writ of certiorari that would have stopped his execution. Glossip was granted a temporary stay of execution around the same time, as the court considered the case, but in June of that year, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a 5–4 opinion giving constitutional blessing to Oklahoma’s procedure; he once again ordered Glossip to die.

That might have been the bitter end of the story, but even before the Supreme Court had issued its decision, there was a complication. Oklahoma accidentally gave Warner the wrong drug during his execution, causing him to suffer excruciating pain as they killed him. (His last words were “My body is on fire.”) Oklahoma’s then–attorney general, Scott Pruit, ordered a moratorium on executions while the state investigated.

That moratorium ended in 2021, and Glossip was again scheduled to die, but in the intervening years new evidence had come to light that cast doubt on Sneed’s testimony. Many people, including Sneed’s own family members, came to believe that he had lied (Sneed was 19 years old and addicted to meth when he killed Van Treese). Prosecutors had also suppressed evidence that Sneed was under psychiatric care while in jail. In August 2022, 61 lawmakers in Oklahoma sent a letter to the state attorney general supporting Glossip’s request for a new hearing. That case is the one now in front of the Supreme Court.

Unlike the earlier case, which sought to throw out Oklahoma’s execution procedures, this one seeks to set aside Glossip’s conviction based on new evidence. The question before the court is whether the new evidence about Sneed (whose testimony, again, is the central thing linking Glossip to the murder) is enough to throw out Glossip’s conviction. The current Oklahoma attorney general, Gentner Drummond, supports Glossip, telling the court, “Justice would not be served by moving forward with a capital sentence that the State can no longer defend because of prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative error.”

The problem for Glossip now is that the conservatives on the Supreme Court seem to really like killing people. They have rejected death penalty appeals in a host of cases, and Justice Neil Gorsuch in particular has written some of the most cruel opinions sending people to their deaths that I have ever read from a Supreme Court justice. For his part, Justice Alito, supported by Chief Justice John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, has already ordered this man to die once before.

I hope these justices can admit that they were wrong. I hope they are thankful that their murderous 2015 decision didn’t send an innocent man to die, instead of being bitter that they haven’t been able to kill him yet. I hope that Glossip lives and is eventually freed. I hope that at least one person out there reads Glossip’s story and reconsiders their position on the death penalty.

Richard Glossip is the reason the government should not kill people. Our criminal justice system is simply not good enough, not reliable enough, and not fair enough to sentence people to die.

The cases on the Supreme Court’s docket demonstrate just how powerful the court has become as a policymaking body. The rights to live without fear of gun violence, masturbate to the stimulus of your choosing, and take pills at the direction of your doctor with the consent of your parents will be shaped by nine justices whom nobody elected.

And yet, as significant as the cases I’ve listed are, I doubt that any of them will be the biggest case of the term. That case will likely be one that the court adds later in the term as part of its regular docket or else shoehorns into its “shadow docket,” which consists of cases the court hears on emergency appeal (as long as it’s an emergency to Republicans).

For these reasons, I still don’t know what the biggest case of the term will be, but I do have a suspicion. Since it is an election year and Donald Trump is one of the candidates, my best guess is that he will trigger the case. As in 2020, if Trump is defeated, he will not accept it; but this time, he will have a different way to thwart the will of the people, because this time he’s put a lot more effort into stealing the election without the need for rioters, gibbets, and zip ties.

All over the country, Trump and his allies have installed sycophants on state boards of elections, and these people are poised to refuse to certify the results if Trump loses. His election-overturning legal team is already staffed up, headed by lawyer Christina Bobb, who is still facing charges over her attempts to help Trump steal the last election. There is simply no version of events in which Trump loses that the fate of this election doesn’t end up with the courts.

Any hope that the Supreme Court will be fair and impartial when it hears those election challenges should have been dashed last term, when the court declared Trump akin to a king who is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. And if that decision wasn’t enough to tell you where the court’s partisan biases lie, Martha-Ann Alito’s flagpole and Ginni Thomas’s texts should tell you everything else you need to know.

Moreover, the current conservative majority has even more reason to install Trump as president now that the Democratic Party, including Vice President Kamala Harris, has come out in favor of court reform. If the Democrats win, they will very likely pass some form of legislation designed to take back the crowns the Supreme Court justices have given themselves.

So what to do? The only protection against the Supreme Court meddling with this election is to make it a blowout. If Harris is cruising toward victory with a three- or four-state Electoral College margin, there will be little the court can do.

And then we can start the hard work of remaking the court. Republicans have spent a lot of time, money, and energy capturing the Supreme Court and bending it to their agenda. The damage they have done to the court cannot be undone in one election or even in one presidential term. But a Harris victory could truly be the start of loosening the Republicans’ grip on the court and reforming the entire institution.

Breaking the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, reining in its corrupt justices, and stripping the institution of some of its power—these are the only ways to restore reproductive rights. The only ways to address mass shootings and gun violence. And the only ways to preserve the environment so that it is livable for future generations. I urge people to consider what’s at stake in the unelected branch of government—and use their votes for the elected branches of government accordingly.

Edited 20 hours ago by Vesper

[Vesper 28,434]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/03/trump-republicans-non-citizen-voters-myth-stolen-election

As some Americans are informed they need to prove their citizenship, Trump and other Republicans are spreading the false idea non-citizens could vote in vast numbers

James Cozadd, a 49-year-old plumber born in Montgomery, Alabama, has no idea why he got a letter from Alabama’s top election official telling him he was potentially ineligible to vote. He was born in the US, yet the letter said he was suspected of being a non-citizen and he would have to prove his citizenship to vote.

“I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue,” Cozadd said in a court filing in September.

He was one of more than 3,200 voters the secretary of state asked to prove their citizenship – part of a wave of actions amid heated rhetoric among Republicans over the idea that non-citizens could be voting in large numbers in US elections, a theory that runs counter to data.

It’s not just happening in Alabama. Alvaro Manrique Barrenechea, a Tennessee immigration law professor, got a letter this year claiming he could be illegally voting, despite becoming naturalized in 2019 and having the legal right to vote. And Nicholas Ross, an Ohio music professor, became a US citizen in May after nearly three decades in the country but received an accusatory letter from the Ohio secretary of state in June telling him he could be ineligible to vote because he wasn’t a US citizen. Voting as a non-citizen would be a crime, it warned.

These purges are not just complicating the ability of some qualified voters to cast a ballot this year. They are also setting the stage for future laws to restrict voters’ access to the ballot and are giving fuel to Donald Trump and his allies to seed doubt about the integrity of elections and undermine results if he loses in November.

Trump and other Republicans are already using the false idea that non-citizens could vote in widespread numbers to suggest the election could be stolen.

“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the 10 September debate. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” .

There is no proof that non-citizens are voting, or even registering to vote, in any meaningful numbers. It’s not the first time Republicans have made these claims, but the purges and rhetoric over non-citizen voting this year are, perhaps, at their apex.

The rhetoric makes voting an immigration issue, linking two red-meat issues for Republicans. It also aligns with broad anti-immigrant sentiment the right is advancing, with much of it stemming from a conspiracy that there is an intentional and systematic effort to replace white Americans with minorities through mass migration – the great replacement theory.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the theory holds that the white population is being displaced by non-white immigrants “who will vote in a certain particular way”.

“These attacks on non-citizens and voters are part and parcel of the great replacement conspiracy theory,” she said. “They’re indistinguishable.”

---

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said it was clear why Trump and supporters were leaning into the myth of non-citizen voting.

“This is about setting the stage to claim an election was stolen,” he said. “This will be one of the primary, but among many, false claims made if Trump loses. And it will be false, but it still could be dangerous because it could incite his supporters to believing a totally secure election was stolen.”

The myth of non-citizen voting has also taken hold after some of the most outlandish myths about the 2020 election weredebunked, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank.

“It keeps ‘Stop the Steal’ alive at a point where most of the other things about ‘Stop the Steal’ don’t have much currency,” he said, referring generally to the movement that tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election.”

Republicans have waged an aggressive legal effort in Congress, state capitols and courtrooms to create the false impression that there are non-citizens on the rolls. Congressional Republicans are pushing a bill to address the nonexistent problem, though it is stalled in DC after a failed effort to tie it to a government funding bill.

The Republican National Committee and other Trump-aligned groups have also filed suit in a number of battleground states – including Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona – accusing election officials of not doing enough to ensure non-citizens aren’t on the voter rolls. The state officials have all said there are adequate safeguards in place to ensure that only US citizens are voting.

Republican statewide officials in several states – Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio and Texas – have also launched efforts to hunt for non-citizens on the voter rolls and have flagged thousands of voters for possible removal. Voting rights groups have raised deep concerns about those efforts, saying the methodology is flawed and that states are presenting misleading statistics to give an exaggerated impression of how many non-citizens may be on the rolls.

The list of potential non-citizens flagged in Alabama has so far shown itself to be off-base, the US Department of Justice said in a lawsuit filed last week, claiming the purge was conducted illegally. In response to letters asking suspected non-citizens to provide documentation of their citizenship before voting this fall – an extra hoop to jump through before casting a ballot – more than 700 voters, nearly one in four on the list, have provided such proof.

---

Ross, the Ohio music professor who received a letter from the state’s top election official, said he dug into why he might have been flagged and found a likely reason. He had renewed his driver’s license in January, when he had a green card, which seemed to land him on the secretary of state’s potential non-citizen list. He sent in paperwork to prove his citizenship after receiving the letter.

“When you do this and just look at the last driver’s license, you’re just netting a lot of naturalized citizens,” Ross said. “And of course, my concern is, then you’re creating this narrative of lots of non-US citizens trying to vote by including those numbers.”

Dan Lusheck, a spokesman for the office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, says it found “approximately 600 non-citizens registered to vote, a relatively small number considering there are over 8 million registered voters in Ohio”.

LaRose’s office forwarded the flagged registrations to the state attorney general for potential prosecution, claiming some of them may have voted. Prosecutors say they have investigated and found little. A prosecutor in one county office told the Ohio Capital Journal that most cases involved people checking the box claiming they are not citizens on their registration forms. When told they should rescind their registration, almost all of them complied.

“The secretary believes that voter fraud is extremely rare because we take it seriously here in Ohio,” Lusheck said. “A law that is not enforced isn’t a law, it’s a suggestion.”

Many of the naturalized citizens erroneously on the list as non-citizens appear to have been flagged from outdated motor vehicles data. The voters may have driver’s licenses that have not expired, then got their citizenship. The guidelines for what to do after you become a citizen say a driver’s license can be renewed or updated, but it’s not a requirement.

In Tennessee, state officials sent more than 14,000 notices to people asking them to prove their citizenship. The secretary of state’s office there has since said it would not remove voters who didn’t prove their citizenship. The office did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the voters targeted was Manrique Barrenechea, an immigration law professor at Vanderbilt University, who became a US citizen in 2019 and has voted since. He did not feel comfortable sending documents in the mail to prove what he believes the state should already be able to confirm.

“You’re putting the burden on me to get information that you already have as government,” he said.

For some immigrants, the letter may read as intimidating, he said.

“I hope it’s not that they’re trying to make it difficult for immigrants to vote, but it really generated an extra step to me,” he said.

The Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, started a process to purge alleged non-citizens from the rolls within 90 days of an election, which both a private lawsuit and the justice department lawsuit claim runs afoul of federal law. Allen also referred the alleged non-citizens on the voter list to the Alabama attorney general’s office for criminal investigation, which the lawsuit argues amounts to voter intimidation. Allen’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Some eligible voters who were sent letters by Allen issued declarations in court. Cozadd, a Republican and lifelong Alabaman, received a letter claiming he had previously been issued a non-citizen identification number. He wrote in his declaration that he cannot figure out why the state would believe that.

“I was stunned to receive that letter. It feels like they are trying to make me think I’ve broken the law – just for trying to exercise my right to vote,” he wrote.

There have been some isolated examples of states that have had relatively small problems with non-citizens on their rolls. Oregon election officials recently said they would remove more than 1,200 people from its voter rolls after they failed to provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Only nine of them had cast ballots and there are 3 million registered voters in the state.

Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers who has studied incidents of voter fraud for decades, said that for years Republicans have seized on misunderstandings of the complex processes to maintain the voter rolls to suggest that non-citizens were voting.

What’s different now is the scale at which they are claiming it’s occurring.

“It’s now something that has almost a national audience where in the past it was a little more isolated to places like Texas or Arizona,” she said. Constant images of migrants coming over the border that are aired on Fox News and other conservative outlets, she said, had only augmented the myth.

Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said the messaging on this issue had ramped up over the past few years and coincided with racism and xenophobia. The misinformation about non-citizen voting could play into conspiracy theories and distrust of elections, she said.

“This is an extremely rare problem,” she said. “Because people don’t understand that this is extremely rare, we see laws or policies that end up sweeping in large numbers of naturalized citizens, or sweeping in folks who don’t have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship, and then really taking away their fundamental right to vote.”

Edited 19 hours ago by Vesper

[Vesper 28,434]

Series of explosions reported over southern Beirut

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/oct/04/israel-lebanon-hamas-hezbollah-war-live-updates-hashem-safieddine-beirut-west-bank-strikes

A series of loud blasts was heard over southern Beirut in the early hours of Saturday morning, following Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli military had earlier issued evacuation orders for parts of the capital’s southern suburbs. The first alert warned residents in a building in the Burj al-Barajneh neighbourhood and the second in a building in Choueifat district. The third alert mentioned buildings in Haret Hreik as well as Burj al-Barajneh.

Images coming in from news agencies show smoke rising over Dahieh, close to the airport.

[cosmicway 1,301]

8 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

That was primarily predicated upon Farages obsession with leaving the single market and sovereignty rather than neo fascism. It was firstly the UK Independence Party.

- rioters

Not really -same in Germany, France, Italy, Nordic diaspora and Eastern Europe too - all have educated trouble makers telling the uneducated working class that their problems are because of incoming brown skinned people

- small

Communist Party USA – cpusa.org 

- barely enough to fill a cab

-
- 

[Fulham Broadway 16,715]

7 hours ago, cosmicway said:

rioters

There were no Farage riots until this year

7 hours ago, cosmicway said:

small

Yes if you think 28-30 million is 'small'

 

7 hours ago, cosmicway said:

- barely enough to fill a cab

3-5000 in that party alone. There are other parties. But yes there are a lot more Communists in Greece

[Vesper 28,434]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

But yes there are a lot more Communists in Greece

cosmic dating pool

 

Members of the Greek Communist Party Youth during a demonstration against the new deal between Greece and the EU in Athens, Greece

Edited 8 hours ago by Vesper

[Vesper 28,434]

delete

Edited 8 hours ago by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,301]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Yes if you think 28-30 million is 'small'

28-30 million in France + Germany + Italy maybe.
Plus most of them live in Saint Tropez - Valearides now, they 're not the real mc coy they used to be.
Anyway their right wing opposition are no longer afraid of them, they talk about them only for fun - unlike what it used to be.
So who cares about Mitsotakis - Karamanlis (again unlike what it used to be) and they vote for junta parties.
The strength of the right wing ultras in Greece is about 20% now, still lower than western Europe.
The strength of the reds (the "original gate 21" as I call them) is 10%.
Another 10% approximately are fellow travelers but they 'd never like a communist regime to take over. No more Gallerie Lafayette if they do that, Harrods, Selfridges.

Edited 8 hours ago by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,434]

4 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Plus most of them live in Saint Tropez - Valearides now

commies running the road in Ibiza and the Côte d'Azur!

[Vesper 28,434]

[cosmicway 1,301]

Would you shag a commie ?
On three occasions I made a mess of it.
Occasion 1: She was reading a right wing newspaper. But maybe she was looking for some particular item, or just picked it up from a table. I said I was not a commie and all hell broke lose. The terrible woman trapped me in a pub. As I was about to offer her a drink the door opened and a boyfriend came in shouting at me. He was going to give my name to the KGB he said.
Occasion 2: I bought an England shirt of the 1982 outfit. The colours looked remarkably like those of the Greek New Democracy party. For either reason the woman hated me and still hates me.
Occasion 3: As we were walking down an avenue with female, we pass a cinema in which a commie movie was playing. She says "look, this is a historic movie". Carelessly I say "but this is a commie movie". She hates me.

Edited 6 hours ago by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,434]

4 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Would you shag a commie ?

wifey is a social democrat, just like me

that said, I would, if single, date a Trotskyite before a hard RWer (not that there are a lot of fit hard RW femme lesbis running about, lolol)

I have dated a couple Tory girl types in the past, no big deal there, I am pretty open-minded if we are talking left centre to the centre right zones, neither of the two I dated from the centre right were raving RW fascist lunatics 

I am not at all a radical lefty, I just call out RW shitbaggery, but would not subject myself to that hardcore RW madness coming from a romantic partner of mine