Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

It’s hard to overstate how bad this week has been for (among many other things) environmental regulations. On their own, the Supreme Court’s rulings on either Ohio v. EPA or Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo would be bad news. Together they spell out a new reality where our country’s robed clerics—guaranteed employment until death—have final say over how and whether government agencies can do their job.

On Thursday, the justices ruled in favor of Ohio and several other states that challenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to bring them into compliance with ozone pollution–control requirements. The justices’ ruling allows the EPA’s plan to remain paused as the states’ challenge proceeds through the courts. Laying out the context for that decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch—who authored the majority opinion—noted that the EPA “set as its target the reduction of the emissions of one ozone precursor in particular: nitrous oxide,” going on to explain that the agency “sought to impose nitrous oxide emissions control measures that ‘maximized cost-effectiveness.’”

Nitrous oxide is a colorless, odorless gas used for sedation and pain relief, commonly referred to as “laughing gas” and administered by dentists. It’s also a greenhouse gas and ozone precursor that can be generated by industrial activity, but Gorsuch presumably meant to refer to nitrogen oxides, the broader category of nitrogen-oxygen compounds that the EPA is trying to regulate through the Good Neighbor Plan. In total, Gorsuch—writing on behalf of the court’s conservative majority—mistakenly referred to nitrous oxide rather than nitrogen oxides five times in his decision.

That’s an easy enough mistake to make; I’ve written about nitrogen oxides a small handful of times insofar as they relate to federal environmental regulations, and had to look them up again to write this story. Like most people, and most judges, Gorsuch does not have specialized knowledge of chemistry or environmental science. His expertise is a fairly conventional one for Supreme Court justices: Georgetown Friends to Columbia and then on to Harvard Law, capped off by a Ph.D. in jurisprudence from Oxford. Despite these credentials, Gorsuch seemingly didn’t look closely enough at case documents to get the name of the chemical compound in question right. He didn’t google it. Opinions are circulated multiple times among the justices before being released to the public, and none of them—or their clerks—seemed to catch the mistake, either.

In just about any other document, mixing up nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxides would be an innocuous, even trivial typo; the Supreme Court eventually corrected the error. But on Friday morning, the man responsible for that error also effectively awarded himself and his colleagues veto power over ozone regulations and a whole bunch of other **** they know nothing about and don’t bother looking up. On Friday, the Court’s right-wing majority decided in Loper Bright v. Raimondo to overturn something called the Chevron doctrine or Chevron deference, which granted federal agencies the authority to interpret the laws that Congress passes. “In one fell swoop,” Justice Elena Kagan summarized in her dissent, “the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law.”

Here’s how the Chevron doctrine is supposed to work. “Sometimes Congress will use language that says, ‘Put together a system that requires companies to install systems of pollution control,’” Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president for programs for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told me by phone. “What does ‘system’ mean? What Chevron said was, when that comes up, the agency gets to take a shot at explaining what ‘system’ means. When a judge isn’t sure of what something means, the judge defers to the agency’s definition. By removing Chevron, what Justice Roberts is saying is, ‘When you see that word “system,” judge, you’ve got to figure out what that means.’”

When members of Congress write laws, they employ their own staffers as well as those of committees and independent bodies like the Congressional Research Service, which is tasked with providing “timely, objective, and authoritative research and analysis” on a nonpartisan basis. Even with those resources, laws—and complex regulatory statutes, especially—are written to contain significant ambiguities, allowing for future developments and for agencies to put their considerable resources to work in determining how best to implement federal policy priorities. It has historically been up to the EPA, for example, to determine that when the Clean Air Act refers to stationary and moving sources of pollution, that specifically means smokestacks, cars, and a number of other devices. Judges have no relevant expertise to make such determinations but are now entrusted with that power should they hear a case concerning those definitions.

“Judges are by design isolated from society. Their staffers are, at best, recent law school graduates,” Sankar said. “They have no ability to do research. They’re stuck with what the parties to a case tell them. Agencies employ hundred and thousands of scientific experts who do years of research and stakeholder outreach to learn about the impact of their regulatory decisions.” Agency heads are also subject to the control of the democratically elected politicians who appoint them, who can be at least theoretically held accountable for their decisions and those of their appointees come Election Day. Judges—on the Supreme Court, most infamously—are comparatively insulated from democratic accountability. What’s worse is that right-wing operatives like Leonard Leo have spent years stacking the judicial branch with activist, ideological appointees churned out of outfits like the Federalist Society, fueled by donations from corporate polluters and other industries with a vested interest in seeing certain regulations kneecapped.

The silver lining in the court’s ruling on Friday is that the justices opted not to call into question every single decision made on the basis of the Chevron doctrine. Sankar emphasizes that the ruling isn’t automatically deregulatory. “Agencies are still supposed to be trying to figure out the best reading of statutes. Now Congress is taking risks whenever it writes a law. If the statute isn’t clear they can’t be sure what a court is going to think of it, especially with some of these aggressively deregulatory judges. If you’re an agency now you know that you are not going to get the benefit of the doubt anymore.”

Chevron’s destruction may well also be seen as an invitation to well-resourced industries and political actors to bring cases that can chip away at whatever rules they don’t like, particularly if they’re heard by judges who share their friends and/or politics. The worst, in other words, is yet to come.

The Democrats and their Mossad handlers are busy actively dismantling the Constitution

The US of A is the only western democracy where the lawmakers can have dual citizenship.

In the Swiss more than 10%

The US of A is the only western democracy where the lawmakers can have dual citizenship.

In the US congress, it's clearly way more than half.

You call that representative democracy, Walter?

In addition to his comments about Russia in Ukraine, Trump said something else in Thursday’s CNN presentation that should be called out for its embrace of one of the darkest moments in U.S. history.

In response to a question about what the presidential candidates would say to a Black voter disappointed with racial progress in the United States, President Joe Biden pointed out that, while there was still far to go, more Black businesses were started under his administration than at any other time in U.S. history, that black unemployment is at a historic low, and that the administration has relieved student debt, invested in historically Black colleges and universities, and is working to provide for childcare costs, all issues that affect Black Americans.

In contrast, Trump said: “As sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the Black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. They're taking Black jobs now and it could be 18. It could be 19 and even 20 million people. They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

Trump was obviously falling back on the point he had prepared to rely on in this election: that immigration is destroying our country. He exaggerated the numbers of incoming migrants and warned that there is worse to come.

But what jumped out is his phrase: “They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs.”

In U.S. history it has been commonplace for political leaders to try to garner power by warning their voters that some minority group is coming for their jobs. In the 1840s, Know-Nothings in Boston warned native-born voters about Irish immigrants; in 1862 and 1864, Democrats tried to whip up support by warning Irish immigrants that after Republicans fought to end enslavement, Black Americans would move north and take their jobs. In the 1870s, Californian Denis Kearney of the Workingman’s Party drew voters to his standard by warning that Chinese immigrants were taking their jobs and insisted: “The Chinese Must Go!”

And those were just the early days.

But while they are related, there is a key difference between these racist appeals and the racism that Trump exhibited on Thursday. Politicians have often tried to get votes by warning that outsiders would draw from a pool of jobs that potential voters wanted themselves. Trump’s comments the other night drew on that racism but reached back much further to the idea that there are certain jobs that are “Black” or “Hispanic.”

This is not a new idea in the United States.

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told his colleagues in 1858. “That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.”

Capital produced by the labor of mudsills would concentrate in the hands of the upper class, who would use it efficiently and intelligently to develop society. Their guidance elevated those weak-minded but strong-muscled people in the mudsill class, who were “happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.”

Southern leaders were smart enough to have designated a different race as their society’s mudsills, Hammond said, but in the North the “whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.” This created a political problem for northerners, for the majority of the population made up that lower class. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond asked his colleagues who insisted that all people were created equal. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided.”

The only true way to look at the world was to understand that some people were better than others and had the right and maybe the duty, to rule. “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal’” Hammond wrote, and it was on this theory that some people are better than others that southern enslavers based their proposed new nation.

“Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth,” Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, told supporters.

Not everyone agreed. For his part, rising politician Abraham Lincoln stood on the Declaration of Independence. Months after Hammond’s speech, Lincoln addressed German immigrants in Chicago. Arguments that some races are “inferior,” he said, would “rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and…transform this Government into a government of some other form.” The idea that it is beneficial for some people to be dominated by others, he said, is the argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”

According to the mudsill theory, he said the following year, “a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be—all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.” He disagreed. “[T]here is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.”

He went on to tie the mudsill theory to the larger principles of the United States. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop,” he said. “If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No, no,” he concluded to cheers: “Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it.”

One hundred and sixty-six years later, Black and Hispanic social media users have answered Trump’s statement about “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” with photos of themselves in highly skilled professional positions. But while they did so with good humor, they were illustrating for the modern world the principle Lincoln articulated: in the United States there should be no such thing as “Black jobs” or “Hispanic jobs.”

Such a construction directly contradicts the principles of the Declaration of Independence and ignores the victory of the United States in the Civil War. Anyone who sees the world through such a lens is on the wrong side of history.

In France, it’s now only a matter of time before the far right takes power.

[...]
The second round, scheduled for 7 July, is turning into a moment of truth for French politics, with huge consequences for the country, for Europe, for Ukraine and so many other issues in this troubled world. The only question for the second round is whether the National Rally emerges with an overall majority, which would force Macron into a humiliating and complex “cohabitation”: a very French phenomenon in which the president and the prime minister come from opposing parties.

The only way to prevent such a majority is for all other political forces to apply a simple rule: withdraw their candidate if it’s a three-way fight in their constituency. This would bring a hung parliament, political instability and possible chaos; but it would be less damaging than having the far right in power. At least that’s what “reasonable” people would think.

But politics is more complicated than that, in a polarised country where the united front of leftwing parties came second, leaving Macron’s centrist bloc a distant third. Some people, it seems, are more afraid of the left than of the far right.
[... ... ...]
What went wrong? One can obviously wonder why Macron decided to gamble the country’s future on a snap election he had no chance of winning, opening the gate to the far right. We’ll leave that to historians, as the president is a spent force.

WASHINGTON, July 1 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court for the first time on Monday recognized that ex-presidents have immunity from prosecution for certain actions taken in office, as it threw out a judicial decision rejecting Donald Trump's bid to shield himself from criminal charges involving his efforts to undo his 2020 election loss.
The court ruled 6-3 that while former presidents enjoy immunity for actions they take within their constitutional authority, they do not for actions taken in a private capacity. The ruling marked the first time since the nation's 18th century founding that the Supreme Court has declared that former presidents may be shielded from criminal charges in any instance.
Chief Justice John Roberts announced the landmark ruling on behalf of the court's six-justice conserverative majority. The court's three liberal justices dissented.