So I said... #16 for March 31 to April 7

 So another variegated conglomeration of perspectives and postulates from your couthy sesquipedalian. At or least I think it is.

As always, I’ve included context where I thought it would help understanding the comment itself along with links to the original if you’d like to check it out. With that, here we go.

2026-03-31
[Most comments in WaPo on SCOTUS oral arguments re Trump’s birthright citizenship order supported the 14th Amendment being read literally. Supporting Trump, someone wrote dismissively “Please tell me which Supreme Court case ruled where the plaintiff’s parents were in the US illegally. This reminds me of being told the 14th amendment case about getting Trump off ballot was a slam dunk, only to lose 9-0.”]

I expect this will not satisfy you but US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) involved a child who was born to parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China and so had neither US citizenship nor allegiance but yes, were here legally. But his parents had no diplomatic exception (they were “not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China”), so he was “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US - interpreted to mean “required to obey US law.” So yes, the Court did rule on that very point. Thus, the Court ruled, Wong Kim Ark was a citizen by birth.

Bluntly, it’s hard to imagine a space in there where the argument “Yeah, but they were documented so that doesn’t count” would fit unless you were to argue that being undocumented means you’re not required to obey the law, an argument I doubt would find much support.

Oh, as for those “legal scholars,” a phrase I strongly suspect was used sarcastically, you should have asked me. I predicted it would fail, albeit on a different basis.(1)
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[Wong Kim Ark was actually a test case. In 1884, a person named Look Tin Eli had sued the government in the US Circuit Court for the Central District of California over his citizenship. He won, as the court affirmed that a native-born person is a US citizen regardless of race or ancestry. Some supporters were disappointed that the US declined to appeal because they wanted to get the matter before SCOTUS and the case of Wong Kim Ark provided the opportunity. The Look Tin Eli case was cited by SCOTUS in its favorable opinion.]

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2026-04-01
There should be a requirement that any client considering conversion “therapy” should be given accurate information on all risks involved, including psychological harm and increased risk of suicide, and the success rate. Then they can make an informed decision and bluntly I wonder how many would continue in that event.

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2026-04-01
[A woman in Kansas named Samantha Boucher noted Trans Day of Visibility by openly defying the state’s new bathroom ban.]

Bravo to her.

I wonder if [Gov. Kris] Koback would try to dodge the whole thing by saying he doesn’t want to bring attention to a “stunt” so will do nothing because she didn’t really “use” the restroom, just went in and right out.

I doubt he’s that clever, but these kinds of laws are often passed with the idea that trans folks will simply disappear from the restrooms and there will be no consequences that might get attention or even some sympathy among the public.

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2026-04-03
[Referring to a list of suggested responses to being challenged for using the “wrong” restroom.]

I’ve re-written this three or four times because I keep thinking it could by misunderstood. This is my last shot at this.

I doubt the situation described will arise for me (I’m cis and in a safe state) since the freakage level over transmen in restrooms seems quite muted (which I say supports my contention that a lot of this is old-fashioned, albeit an extreme form of, sexism) but if it ever did I would be the bystander.

I think in that case my first instinct would be to blurt out “Why?” and if anything about being trans figured in a response, follow with “Prove it.” That is, “put up or shut up,” intending to shield the target from the harassment. (It occurs to me now that a better response would be “And?”)

But my favorite among the proposed bystander responses is #3 - actually, forget the first part as unnecessary; just use the second.

[The whole #3 was ”Who polices other people’s restroom use? You’re being really weird right now.”]

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2026-04-03
[The Ohio House passed a bill to outlaw drag shows. Someone argued that some provisions could make it illegal for transgender folks to appear in public.]

The bill is indeed bad and hopefully will be killed or at least significantly modified, but I have to say I think your description in some ways goes too far.

Specifically, the section on “adult cabaret performance” (lines 153-173 of the bill, found at https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb249/02_PH/pdf/) repeatedly uses the terms “performance,” performers,” and “entertainers.” Applying that to “a transgender individual simply walking down the street wearing makeup” stretches the wording (the “legislative intent”) far past the breaking point.

But! That “cisgender woman playing a guitar in a park” wearing “too masculine” clothing? Oh, yeah. Just call her a performer and bang, covered by the law. Um, except wait - the section also says the performance must be “harmful to juveniles or obscene,” so just playing a guitar in a park isn’t enough, regardless of the clothing. (Yes, I looked up the definitions of “harmful to juveniles” and “obscene.” They’re all about “prurient interest” and “arousing lust.” https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2907.01)

I wholeheartedly embrace your (implied but accurate) argument that actually defining what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine” expression is a fool’s errand and I also agree that any attempt to do so, even by implication, is a threat to trans rights.

But here I’d focus on the obvious intention to ban drag shows by regarding them as de facto sexual and thus obscene. One thing I think the attempt shows is how difficult (if it’s even possible, which I very much doubt) to do that without trampling on basic rights and opening the door to “guilt by personal opinion of a cop.” Such bills can and should be rejected outright.

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2026-04-03
Ben Meiselas reports that in a talk at George Washington University, Karoline Leavitt told the audience that her advice is to always be the most well-read person in the room - then said Trump always is.

I used to call her Levity because no one should take her seriously but this goes beyond that. She is either a pathological liar or in some other way deeply mentally disturbed.

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2026-04-03
[The Georgia legislature ended its session with all of the nearly 15 anti-trans bills having failed.]

This is excellent news and everyone involved in this achievement should savor the moment and accept congratulations.

In passing, this raises something I’ve wondered about. This isn’t the first time a state legislature has come to the end of a session with a whole bunch of anti-trans laws dying without action.

So do some of these people sometimes introduce such legislation without really caring if it passes or not, they just want to be able to use “I introduced” or “I supported” such-and-such on the campaign trail, avoiding both the possibility of being “out anti-transed” by some opponent and the stronger pushback from the other side that could arise if it actually passed?

Just speculating; as a practical matter, I doubt it makes any difference.

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2026-04-04
[Referring to forgiving MAGAs: “My gut instinct is to NEVER forgive them for their cruelty and greed.”]

I’ll just offer a variation on what I said about this very topic several days ago on a different site.

I’m what used to be called a fallen-away Catholic. In fact, I fell so far I fell away from theism altogether. But I can remember from my Catechism what’s required for forgiveness in Confession: contrition and penance - genuine regret and a sacrifice to make up for what you did.

The penance was pretty invariably symbolic, saying some prayers and the like, but still was a necessary part of the process of forgiveness.

The same should apply here. You want me to “welcome you into our tent?” First, give me good cause to believe you sincerely regret what you’ve done. (I think of the woman in that viral clip who said she voted for the Orange Overlord three times, punctuated with “That’s on me. Obviously, I’m an idiot.”)

Second, tell me what you’ll now do to make up for - more importantly, to undo - the harm you’ve helped to cause. Note that “I’ll never vote for another Republican” is not good enough. It is not penance and will not serve the purpose any more than a convicted robber saying “I’ll never steal anything else” does not excuse them from consequences. Tell me what positive action you will take (or have taken).

Then we can talk about forgiveness.

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2026-04-04
So Gregg Phillips, associate administrator for FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has doubled down on his claim of having been repeatedly teleported and connected it to his religious beliefs, claiming that the Bible refers to being “translated” or “transported” - that is, he got to a Waffle House through divine intervention.

“Here’s the real question,” he said. “What’s harder to believe? That God could move in a moment during a spiritual battle, or Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is coming again?”

In other words, which is harder to believe: 1+1=5 or 2+2=pi?

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2026-04-04
[Various extremist Xians want women to be unable to vote.]

Whenever I read about this sort of bigoted insanity presuming a Biblical basis for their anti-democratic, anti-freedom, male-supremacist crackpot notions, I recall seeing (as part of my job at the time) a marriage manual from either the late 16th or early 17th century advising that, as near as I can quote from memory, a man who marries a woman from who he can’t get advice has a fool for a wife - and she has a fool for a husband.

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2026-04-05
[In a comment, a parent told how their trans daughter, despite having adopted a new name at school, had declined using it at home until some time later.]

I can understand how that would hurt. But I suspect there was a reason: The whole purpose of the sort of social transitioning she did at school could have well been for her a matter of, if you will, trying it on, seeing if it fits, if it feels right, “is this me.” You said it yourself: She “tried” new pronouns and a new name.

Doing it with you, OTOH, isn’t a trial or a test, it’s a conclusion. A decision. She just needed more time to make it.

So when she did come out to you, she was saying “This is who I am. I’ve decided.” By giving her that time, you did the right thing.

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2026-04-05
My response to “Yeah, well, all lives matter!” was to say “Yes, all lives matter. And if we actually acted like all lives matter, it wouldn’t be necessary to say ‘Black lives matter.’”

[I also used to say that in saying or thinking the phrase, the stress should be on the last word, not the first.]

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2026-04-05
[“Some Democrats soften or side step trans rights. It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation in the face of coordinated attacks.”]

“It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation.”

More accurately, it reads as fear. The same old fear that has plagued the Democratic party for decades, the fear that the reactionaries might say something nasty about you in a campaign, so better to downplay the issue, even better to avoid mentioning it at all and be forever prepared to yield ground if it comes up. Consider it a political version of “duck and cover.”

Transgender rights are not the only example. There have been many over the years. The issue here, narrowly defined, is not trans rights but institutional cowardice, the kind of stark political cowardice that has had a major role in getting us into our current mess.

I know I have several times on this platform recalled seeing a survey from all the way back in the Gingrich era finding that people didn’t dislike Democrats for what they stood for but because they didn’t seem to stand for anything.

Well, that remains true today, as the intensity of Democrats’ active opposition to The Orange Overlord (TOO) is pretty much in inverse ratio to his favorability rating and the safer it looks politically on a given issue the more willing they are to go after him.

(I still cringe when I recall Hakeem Jeffries, around the time of the OBBB - the Obnoxious Barbarous Bigoted Bill - actually saying something to the effect that the Dems were waiting for TOO’s favorability rating to drop below 40% - in other words, when it was safe enough - promising that then, they’d really go after him. You can decide for yourself how well they followed through on that.)

I’ve said this before, perhaps even here, but I think it bears repeating. It’s not necessary for Dems to make trans rights the or even a centerpiece of their campaign, particularly as it ranks low on lists of people’s concerns and even Republicans in some polls say their party spends too much time on the issue.

What is necessary is to say clearly that you support trans rights and when challenged don’t evade and don’t back down.

And don’t settle for defense. Instead say something like “Of course I support trans rights because they are human rights. Trans folks have every bit as much right to grow and flourish, to go through their lives smoothly, without discrimination, and to be treated with respect and fairness the same as anyone else does. The really important question is why the other side is so damned focused on people’s genitalia instead of on” whatever issue or issues seem appropriate at the moment.

I’ve gone on long enough. Probably too long. So I’ll stop.

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2026-04-06
The Pentagon has failed its department-wide financial audit eight years in a row.

Admittedly, US military operations are very complex, so clean audits are a challenge.

But if any “woke” program had a record anything like that, Faux News would be melting TV screens with the heat of its rage.

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2026-04-06
I was watching the live NASA coverage of the Artemis mission. As the crew went to the Moon’s dark side (losing contact for 40 minutes) one of them just had to invoke Jesus to say “love your neighbor,” punctuated by ground control echoing the statement and adding “How great Thou art.”

:sigh:

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2026-04-07
[Erin Reed demolished a study claiming to prove GAC actually harms the mental health of trans youth.]

Okay, I gotta be honest. I got as far as the percentages (the 9.8% before vs. 60.7% after) and a vibrantly bright red flag started flying.

Phrased rather more coherently than my initial response, it was “Wait - they’re comparing the mental health of folks who got and didn’t get GAC based on psychiatric visits after an initial one? But if someone was at that initial visit to obtain GAC, getting additional counseling would be a pretty normal part of the process of transitioning. Of course they’d have more visits than the general population!”

And that was before learning that they might have years of visits before they could even start actual medical transitioning (i.e. GAHT) - not to mention the history of the study author.

And this tripe got published? Just wow.

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2026-04-07
[A commenter responded to Megan Rapinoe saying “They lost the battle on gay marriage” with “If they don’t lose hard enough over transgender issues, they will level their political guns to reverse that loss.”]

“they will next level all their political guns to reverse that loss”

They already are. The “LGB without the T” folks who think they’re safe are fools.
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2026-04-07
[They are. I do think that attacking us is distracting some of the SoCons efforts from that though...]

True enough. But the reactionaries have already legitimized the notion “transgender = drag queen = sex” and it’s not that far a reach to reprising “disgusting” descriptions of “disgusting” gay/lesbian sex of the sort I remember from not that many decades ago.

The LGB/noT crowd should remember that Martin Niemöller’s poem is not just about Germany.

THAT’S IT! SEE YA IN A WEEK OR SO!

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1 The 14th Amendment, Section 3, says that anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US is ineligible for public office. The argument was that Trump was thus disqualified and Colorado tried to remove him from the ballot. The Court ruled that it was up to Congress, not the states, to make the decision about ballot eligibility. I had predicted they would rule that for Constitutional purposes he couldn’t be held to have “engaged in insurrection” absent a conviction on a relevant charge.

It's time.

I've been saying for a few months now that yes, it is time for civil disobedience but I kept getting told "after the election" or "after this Congressional vote" or "after" this or that or the other. But always after.

 

So I was heartened and moved by Robert Reich's declaration at the close of this video, when after referencing MLK Jr.'s campaigns, he said "It is time again for civil disobedience, an upheaval across this land."

 

Because yes, it is.

That doesn't mean we stop what we're already doing. So, yes, by all means lobby Congress. Yes, organize for and support progressive candidates in the primaries and the general. But we should be ready, we should be organizing, for more. To do more than lobbying, to go beyond protest¹ to an aggressive (in the social and political senses, not the physical) campaign of active nonviolent civil disobedience, to find the power of, as a '60s quote put it, "doing 'No,'" of stepping beyond "you should not" to "I will stand in your way," a category in which I include among the rest of the tactics a general strike.

My own organizing skills fall woefully short of the level needed to put together such a campaign, so all I can do is plead, argue, and hope. But I genuinely look to see one arise and to which I will pledge, to paraphrase a rather well-known document, my life, my (such as it is) fortune, and my sacred honor.

Footnote: Another response to the same video wrote of using CD "protect your communities." I replied in agreement: 

It is indeed time for organized civil disobedience. "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security" - Declaration of Independence.

While I don't think any of us are talking about overthrowing the government, I think we are talking about, if you will, "overthrowing" certain select parts of it.

 

¹I almost used the adjective "mere" here but there is nothing "mere" about either street protest or individual acts of conscience.
 

What is this "Constitution" of which you speak?

AP reported recently that an internal ICE memo being used to train new ICE thugs declares that they can smash their way into private homes without the need for a judicial warrant required by the 4th Amendment.

All they need, according to the DHS Office of the General Counsel (in other words, DHS's own lawyer) is an administrative arrest warrant issued by the agency for someone with a final order of removal and the Constitution is totally cool with it.

What could go wrong? Oh, wait....

This news came out in the immediate wake of the case of American citizen ChongLy "Scott" Thao, the man who was dragged out of his home in St. Paul in his underwear in freezing temperatures after ICE secret police thugs smashed their way in with no warrant, screaming and pointing guns at his family. (And because of a delay in posting this clearly before the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.)

The Tonton Macoute (I keep telling you: Look it up!) wannabes were supposedly after "two convicted sex offenders." In other words, it went just like the memo described and "we don't need no stinking (actual proper) warrant."

Sadly, the AP meekly described the memo as "a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches." This is no "reversal of guidance" as if it's a matter of opinion or worse, convenience, and the agency is not to "respect" such limits, it is to obey them.

What this is, is an immoral, illegal, improper, infuriating rejection of a base Constitution principle on the sanctity of the home that dates back in English law to at least the early 1600s and can even be found to date from ancient Rome.

Our 4th Amendment protections have already been undermined and restricted (for example to the point that your car is often referred to as a "4th Amendment-free zone") but this is not just a bright red line, it's a line of flashing beacons and blaring klaxons.

In an earlier version of the story, one that got updated while I was first writing this, the AP reported that ICE agents sometimes wait hours for a targeted person to leave a house. Apparently we are now to accept that the Constitution must yield because their constitution cannot bear such a burden.

The next level

The fascists and the self-interested camp followers are working up to their campaign to "destroy the left" and its "terrorism networks" and we accept the threat is real because we seem to have finally embraced Maya Angelou's famous quote, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." As I remarked a little while back, "It is possible to overstate their power; it is not possible to overestimate their intentions."

But I also have a next-level concern, beyond the coming attempts at repression, that I wanted to raise, one to be filed under "be ready for the fallout from unintended consequences, even if they’re not your own."

It's what happens when the MAGA Masters can't make good on their promises to "destroy" the left? Because they won't. They can't. Oh, there may be, probably will be, some show trials or at minimum multiple prosecutions; there will be a lot of "investigations" and a surfeit of accusations; there will be repression of speech and assembly; there will be a lot of pain for those directly and the much greater number indirectly impacted - but no, while the left may even be significantly injured it will not be "destroyed." We survived the Palmer Raids, we survived McCarthyism, we survived the conspiracy trials of the 60s, we will survive this. Maybe scarred and limping, but alive and continuing and re-building. And truth be told, every time we have gone through one of these cycles, at the end of it the country is a little better than it was before. The moral arc of the universe and all that, I suppose.

So anyway, getting back to the point, what happens when after the MAGA Masters have gotten their rabid followers all pumped up, they can't produce the ultimate victory they promised? How far will they go, how desperate will they be, to keep that loyalty, to hold that blind commitment?

And will those followers try to make that victory come true on their own? It wouldn't be the first time that leaders of a movement lost control of their creation. We've already seen it here on a small scale in the refusal of some of the MAGA crowd to accede to the attempts of the Orange Overlord and company to drop the whole Epstein file business. So yeah, that could happen.

If it does and the MAGA Masters start to lose control, lose their grip on the formerly obedient, will those Masters turn on their own followers? Again, it has happened before.

And don't anyone tell me "that'd be good" because now we're talking about literal blood in the streets and guerrilla warfare and if you think that wouldn't affect you, wouldn't come to your door (it's often been said, with cause, that civil wars are the worst), you're an idiot.

This doesn't mean, of course, that other than the moves at repression this will happen. Of course and yes it's a string of "what ifs." I only raise it as a scenario for which we should be prepared - because even if you think it unlikely, you, I think, have to agree it's plausible.

And I raise it for another reason: to remind ourselves that, in another old but true phrase, the best defense is a good offense. The more strongly we today, now, don't just defend our rights but press our commitments to justice, the more strongly we don't merely say "no" to what shouldn't be done but also say "yes" to what should, the more prepared we are to sacrifice in the present for the sake of the future, the sooner and more clearly we can show "destroy the left" to be the pipe dream it ultimately is, the less pain there will be in the end to us and, more importantly, everyone else.

So carry it on. Except more.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"

We need to talk about the "Unitary Executive"

A couple of seemingly disparate points that will come together in an unholy embrace:

First, there have long been philosophical debates among Constitutional scholars about the role and nature of the office of the presidency, which are not as defined as those for Congress.

The debate has revolved around two lines in Article II: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President” (Section 1) and the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Section 3).

The latter provision, it has been argued, means that the role of the president is to carry out, to execute, the will of Congress as expressed in the laws. Through the veto power, the president has a say in what the laws are, but once a law is passed, that say is limited to what Congress allows - somewhat like a CEO subject to oversight by a board of directors. In its extreme versions, the president is reduced to little more than a functionary of Congress.

The former, on the other hand, claims that “as night follows day,” in the words of one advocate, giving the president “the executive power” means giving them direct and personal control over all matters that could be considered executive functions, including those related to staffing and the heads of agencies, distribution of funds, establishment and administration of regulations, and more. In addition, any federal-level board or agency carrying out any executive function such as regulatory oversight or enforcement is likewise under the president’s control, as are, therefore, their staffs.

That theory of the presidency is known as the “Unitary Executive”* and perhaps because of the enormous amount of power this would concentrate in one person’s hands, it was long considered a fringe theory, only to emerge from the shadows in recent decades, particularly since about 2010.

Okay, point two is that the Supreme Court has something called the “emergency docket,” where it takes up “emergency” appeals of lower court rulings, usually injunctions of some sort, in cases where the issue is at least supposedly of such immediate and pressing importance that it can’t wait to go through the normal appears process. The rulings are made without a full briefing, without oral argument, and, it appears, often with the justices discussing them at all. It seems to often be just “Here’s the appeal, how do you vote?”

The decision is issued often without any legal reasoning and frequently with no record of who voted which way. Because of the opaque nature of the whole business, this “emergency docket” is often called the “shadow docket.”

Point three is a Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The case dates from 1935 and in it, the Court unanimously held that Congress has the authority to create independent agencies, not under the direct management of the president, and to insulate their members from presidential removal unless a good cause for the firing existed.

Okay, how do these points come together?

Over recent months, various federal courts, at both district and appellate levels, have blocked the Orange Overlord and his minions from carrying out mass firings and mass deportations, kicking trans folks out of the military, cancelling various grants, moving to dismantle the Education Dept., undermining birthright citizenship, trying to take over various agencies by firing their boards or administrators, giving DOGE’s (pronounced “dodgy”) band of grizzled veterans of high school access to our personal data - and more. And SCOTUS has repeatedly used the shadow docket to get rid of many of those injunctions, letting King Spray Tan continue his rampage. (It should be noted - while unnecessary to say - that almost all of these were by votes of 6-3, so “who voted which way” isn’t exactly a Final Jeopardy!-level challenge.)

Most recently, on September 8, they declared both that a)Rebecca Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, can be, sure, why the heck not, fired and b)that those roving bands of masked government thugs can continue to strut around LA assuming anyone non-white who happened to be near, for example, a car wash is a potential “worst of the worst” “illegal alien” to be assaulted, cuffed, and hauled off - y’know, just in case.Um, but hold on a sec there. By any rational standard, in at least a great portion of those cases there is no “emergency.” There is no irreparable harm to either the Big Brother-wannabe in the White House or his coterie of clowns if courts freeze things in place during appeals - which is the idea behind an injunction. Indeed there is no harm to them at all, except to their egos and dreams of unrestrained power. So why were these on the shadow docket at all?

Perhaps even more to the point, a good number of these rulings are in stark contradiction to the Humphrey’s Executor case, the one which found that Congress could put precisely the sort of limits on Executive action that the Scurrilous Six (AKA the SS) are allowing.

“Piffle,” the SS reply. “We’re not deciding these cases. These are not final decisions.” Oh, yeah, that’s right. They are just “while appeals continue.” No harm, no foul.

Except, of course, to the irreparable harm that is done to those who, to name a few, will be kicked out of their jobs or their careers or the country, the irreparable harm done to scientific research, to health care, to the environment, the irreparable harm to the aspirations for justice among those, like trans folks**, who are stripped of anywhere to seek it if “the Messiah of America” (as wild-eyed Xian fundamentalist Shane Vaughn calls him) is given continued free rein. Or reign.

Which is the real point. In a technical, legal sense, it’s true, these actions are not final. But in a practical sense, for those people and agencies impacted they are.

And it’s more than that, which is the ultimate point I wanted to make, what brings this all together. Because it won’t be the end. By consciously choosing to allow the slaughter of reason, of ethics, of functioning government agencies built up over decades to continue, by empowering the mass firings, the mass deportations, the stripping of rights, the destruction of independent agencies, and doing it all in direct defiance of 90 years of Supreme Court precedent, these reactionaries in robes, the Scurrilous Six, have de facto embraced an extreme version of the Unitary Executive, one in which, as a mirrored version of the alternative that could make the presidency just a functionary of the Congress, could and if they have their way would make Congress little more than a piggy back for an Executive Branch controlling all the levers of power in the federal government.

So don’t be fooled for a minute, a second, by the “while appeals continue” blather. I see no reason to think that if and when an appropriately useful case gets to them, they will not contrive some reason, some justification, for kicking Humphrey’s Executor to the curb in favor of centralized power, even if that power is not in the hands of our present pretender to a nonexistent throne.

This does not mean give up, it does mean stop going to the federal courts, if only because SCOTUS can’t take up every case, with some wins at the district and circuit levels having gone unappealed for just that reason.*** And it definitely does not mean not hitting the streets or ignoring state-level pressure and organizing.

It does, however, mean that this is the reality of the legal universe in which we are operating and we have to be prepared to fight on that basis.

I gave a much-shortened version of this to a group of folks with who I join in a weekly rally and was chided by one afterwards for not including something hopeful. I’m afraid on this matter I don’t see a lot of cause for hope at least in the short make that middle run - but I will say it makes whatever we actions we do take even more vital.

*Curiously, the term originally arose in the discussion at the Constitutional convention over if the presidency should be held by one person or a council.

**If you’re one of those “LGB without the T” folks, do you really think that if the fascist reactionaries who dream of, to quote George Will, “back to 1900" do succeed in driving trans folks out of society, do you really think you won’t be next? Really? At a time when right-wing voices are starting to openly talk about overturning Obergefell and two members of SCOTUS say it should be “re-visited,” do you really think that? Really??

***To the contrary, it suggests filing more suits, as many as can be justified and maybe some that can’t, flooding the system with more cases and findings than SCOTUS would have the room on its docket to overturn even if the SS wanted to.

Silent encroachment

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, June 1778

 

Here is something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.

 

We are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.

 

People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protest against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," to much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws and regulations.

 

The Guardian offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring

[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines.

 For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.

 

Social movements, the Guardian notes, usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining either “oppressive” or “disguise.”

 

So understand: Protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU,

“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” 

And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said

“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”

That is the goal.

 

And not just the legislatures and the executive, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties and expanding causes for individual action - a means of allowing repressive suits to be filed by individuals rather than government agencies. Such suits, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years, often take the form of a SLAPP* (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements. For example,

[i]n Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.`

Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.

The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them at all pass, especially when any one of them applied with hostile intent - which is the point of them - can do significant damage to our right to protest.

On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.

Years in prison and a bankrupting fine for "conspiracy" and "damage" that wasn't even to the statue and could be cleared up with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.

And don't you ever forget it.

 

*From April 5, 2013: A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.

They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.

 

For more on SLAPP-backs, go here. 

065 The Erickson Report for November 11 to 23, Page 1: On the election results

065 The Erickson Report for November 11 to 23, Page 1: On the election results

 

[This is a little different from the broadcast version, which was done the day after the election. It's essentially the same, but has in a few cases been updated to reflect later results.]

So. We had us some elections.

So I'll give you my comments on a rundown of the results.

I'll start by confessing I was concerned - to be honest, fearful - coming into this election because I was afraid the Dimcrats would blow it in the same way they blew 2016. That time, they managed to lose to the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in the history of such polling, one even less popular than Hillary Clinton, whose own approval was well under water.

They did it by making the central theme of their campaign "We're not Donald Trump. He's a scumbag, a creep, disgusting, so vote for us." Not that they never talked about anything else, but that was the primary approach, forgetting (or ignoring) the fact that not enough people cared; in fact, there were people who liked Tweetie-pie because of that, who thought "That's the kind of 'I don't give a damn' attitude we need more of in our leaders."

This time, they staked it all on reproductive rights, to the point where even as the burning anger over the Dobbs decision, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, faded some (as anger naturally does over time) and it appeared people were shifting their attention to economy and crime, party campaign consultants were telling candidates to just not talk about those issues, even though Dems had, particularly on the economy, good things they could say on their own behalf.

So it came as a great relief that this time around they did better than expected, indeed they held their own and even marked a few gains as the predicted "red wave" or "red tsunami" proved to be more of a pink ripple.

One reason for that is shown by exit polls that indicated that people who voted for Demcrats had reproductive rights and threats to democracy high on their list of concerns while GOPper voters were more focused on the economy and crime.

It was claimed that this validated the Democrats' strategy, but I'm not giving up on my own analysis quite so easily: Holding your own, not getting swamped, is hardly a stirring goal or a basis on which to build. I maintain that had they spent some of their time addressing those other issues, where again they did have
things to say for themselves - even on crime, on violent crime, which yes, had gone up recently but had already peaked and was starting to come down and in any event even at the peak was way below what it had been in the '90s - anyway, if they had spent just some time on those two points, they could have done better than just hold their own. We should have learned at least by the time of John Kerry's run that you can't let those sort of attacks go unanswered for weeks on end and expect that to not affect people. This time they ran the same risk - but they got away with it. Fortunately.

Anyway. The GOPpers, as expected, retook the House of Reperesentatives, with the breakdown now projected as 221-214, essentially the same majority the Dems had before.

It easily could have been worse, part of the reason the results are being called "better than expected." In each of the last four midterm elections, the president’s party has lost an average of about 37 House seats. In 2010 (Obama’s first midterm), Democrats lost 64 seats; in 2018 (Tweetie-pie's midterm), Republicans lost 42 seats.

This time, they lost about nine or ten, depending on the results of few campaigns that are still not called.

In the Senate, they actually stand to gain a seat. With wins in both Arizona and Nevada, they are guaranteed no worse that a 50-50 split, which leaves the Dems, as the party in the White House, in control because VP Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote in the case of a tie.

Meanwhile, Georgia is set for a run-off on December. You'd have to think that Raphael Warnock is the favorite not only because he came in first in the general, almost always an advantage, but because the third candidate in that race, a guy named Chase Oliver who got a couple of percent of the vote, presented a pretty liberal platform despite being a Libertarian, focusing more on civil liberties including - something I'd really like to see - an end to qualified immunity, so I expect that many of the people who voted for him, if they vote in the runoff, are far more likely to go for Warnock.

Which means the next Senate could easily be 51-49, which delights me because it would mean that on any given vote, either Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin could be told to go F themselves.

Okay, on some more general notes:

I enjoyed the tweet from Hannah Trudo, the senior political correspondent at TheHill.com, who said

The entire Bernie Sanders-aligned wing of the Democratic Party won tonight, from Fetterman in the Senate to the new Squad members in the House.

It's also important to note where the results came from: voters under 30. Not only did they turn out, they voted for Democrats by a net 28 percentage points, enough to offset the votes of those over 45.

As the Washington Post noted in an post-election article, voting took place against a background of increasing worry among Americans that US democracy is under threat. About 70% of voters in an exit poll said our degree of democracy is “very” or “somewhat” threatened.

Interestingly, the same poll said that about 80% of voters were "very" or "somewhat" confident that elections in their own state would be fair and accurate, which reminded me of all the polls about Congress where people would say how much Congress sucks but when asked about their own representatives, they'd say "Oh, they're okay. It's all those other ones who are lousy."

The important point, however, is that the Post looked at 569 GOPper candidates for state and federal office and found that 291 of them, 51% of the total, questioned or refused to accept that Joe Biden is the legitimate president and over half of that number, somewhere between 150 and 200, won.

A mitigating factor is that the vast majority of those who won were running for seats in the House, where they would have little involvement with or impact on the actual conduct of elections. And most of the them campaigned on a range of issues, so it's hard to say how much their wins translate into support for election denial in the general public.

They still could be an issue, however, as they will be a sizable majority within the House Republican caucus and so still could drive the selection of Speaker despite Kevin McCarthy having won an initial intra-party caucus - and the Speaker would in turn preside over the House in 2024, when the presidential vote could again be contested.

So while having those people win for the House is not as threatening, it's not non-threatening.

Better news is at the state level, where officers like governor, secretary of state, and attorney general have significant power overseeing and conducting elections. That is where the concern really is and there, happily, the elections deniers by and large lost. In Arizona, the heartland of paranoid election denial, it appears the whole slate of deniers went down.

This doesn't mean some of the deniers didn't get in, but not nearly as many as were feared.

But that doesn't mean the issue goes away. Even before polls closed and many states began releasing vote counts, far-right users in Telegram channels and other fringe forums were spreading conspiracy theories and trying to declare the midterm elections fraudulent.

Consider Maricopa County, the largest county is Arizona. They had a problem which was later shown to be a printing problem with the ballots such that the tabulating machines had trouble reading them. Officials announced they had a problem, explained what they were doing about it, which involved getting tech help from the manufacturers of the machines, and assured everyone not to worry, the ballots would still be counted because they had the paper ballots which if necessary could be counted by hand.

Which prompted wacko loser Kari Lake - who really is a Karen and who still has not conceded - to point to officials acknowledging a problem and specifying what they were doing to fix it as clear evidence of fraud. And she was not alone.

In response to such inanities, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, herself the target of such claims, noted that “There are always things that potentially could be seized upon that really have no impact" and aptly called the whole conspiracy claims "a political strategy that some have chosen to pursue to the detriment of who we are as Americans and our democracy.”

Since we talking now about the state level, its a good time to note that another surprise in the elections was that Democrats also over-performed at that level, including flipping a couple of legislative houses and winning two governorships along with increasing the number of states where they control both Houses and the governorship, the so-called trifecta. They still trail GOPpers in that measure, but no longer by as much.

One area that matters to me is the progressive prosecutors movement, comprised of those District Attorneys who make reform of the criminal justice system part of both their campaign platforms and their practice in office. They did rather well in the midterms, winning in places, as said by Lara Bazelon, director of the Innocence Commission inside the San Francisco DA’s Office, "purple and blue and even red."

The right wing had persistently tried to bury the movement under a barrage of "criminals running wild" rhetoric. After progressive Chesa Boudin was recalled from his position as San Francisco DA in June, a good deal of the media, always ready to be swayed by right-wing screeching, was prepared to declare the whole movement dead. The wing nuts failed and the media was wrong.

Meanwhile, the Dems were right about one thing: Protection of reproductive rights is broadly popular. Protection of such rights was on the ballot in five states. It won in all five.

Voters in California, Vermont, and Michigan added protections for reproductive rights to their state constitutions, while reliably red Montana and bright red Kentucky rejected measures that would have added restrictions to access to reproductive care, in Kentucky's case by proposing to specifically deny any state constitutional protections for abortion.

Include the vote in Kansas is August that rejected a ballot measure that would have given the state legislature the authority to restrict abortion access through a state constitutional amendment, and you have reproductive rights going six for six this election cycle.

On another matter, legalization of recreational marijuana was on the ballot in five states. Maryland and Missouri approved their measures, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota said no.

As of now, 21 states and Washington, DC, have legal recreational marijuana, something polls say 60% of the public supports. It is worth noting that in all three states that rejected the idea, medical marijuana is legal.

While I support legal grass and in fact have for oh my word over 50 years, it has never been high on my list of personal political priorities. So I want to mention that even as they rejected legal grass, the voters of South Dakota did something of more importance to me: By a hefty margin, they approved expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act. Some 40,000 people in South Dakota thus become eligible for Medicaid, many of who would not afford access to health care without it.

Finally on elections for now, something of which many of us are unaware: The 13th amendment did not ban slavery outright. It says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [Emphasis added.]

That is, slavery can be a punishment for crime. Which is why there has been and continues to be forced labor in US prisons.

Today, such prison labor is a multibillion-dollar industry, with prisoners given the choice of working for pennies on the dollar or being punished by being denied phone calls and family visits or even being thrown into solitary confinement.

Nearly 20 states had language in their state constitutions permitting slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners. On election day, voters in four of those states said "Not here, not any more." Voters in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont approved measures to remove the relevant language from their state constitutions.

A fifth measure, in Louisiana, failed only after its backers told people to reject it because they realized they had screwed up the legalese and it didn't clearly outlaw involuntary servitude.

Max Parthas, campaigns coordinator for the Abolish Slavery National Network, said his network hopes to have this on the ballot in a dozen states next election cycle.

057 The Erickson Report for July 7-20

 

057 The Erickson Report for July 7-20

This episode of The Erickson Report focuses on three recent and one upcoming case before of the Supreme Court that reflect and reveal aspects of the slow-motion coup that threatens our future as a civil society and a free people. The issues are the practical ability of any federal regulation of any sort to exist, the ability to put any regulations on guns, the ability to maintain a separation of church and state, and even the ability to vote for president.

If that sounds over-dramatic, watch the episode.

The Erickson Report is news and informed commentary from a member of the radical nonviolent left (and a proud member of "the 'woke' mob"). As what's known as advocacy journalism, it uses facts and logic while never pretending it is neutral on or indifferent to the topics it addresses. Your host, Larry Erickson, is a veteran of 50 years of political activism in both "the streets and the suites" and looks with this show to both inform and inspire action.

Questions and other reactions are welcome by email at whoviating at aol dot com.

Footnote: I realize the episode is a week late. I do apologize. We do try to keep a bi-weekly schedule, but sometimes, well, we fail. Again, my apologies and I hope you'll find this show was worth the wait.

SOURCES:

Re federal regulation
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/-supreme-court-says-epa-lacks-authority-on-climate-standards-for-power-plants.html
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/21/right-wing-supreme-court-readies-help-destroy-planet
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/21907/were-firearms-prohibited-in-dodge-city-kansas-in-the-1870s

Re regulations on guns
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/6/24/supreme_court_new_york_state_concealed
https://www.wbur.org/npr/1102995474/supreme-court-opinion-guns
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senators-aim-quick-passage-bill-providing-security-family-members-supr-rcna28000
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/roe-overturned-supreme-court-samuel-alito-opinion/661386/

Re separation of church and state
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-takes-aim-separation-church-state-2022-06-28/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/06/27/supreme-court-takes-wrecking-ball-separation-church-and-state-prayer-ruling
https://www.vox.com/2022/6/27/23184848/supreme-court-kennedy-bremerton-school-football-coach-prayer-neil-gorsuch
https://www.rawstory.com/lied-gorsuch-blasted-after-photos-expose-his-claims-in-high-school-coach-praying-case-are-a-flat-out-knowing-lie/

Re vote for president
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/07/01/beware-supreme-court-laying-groundwork-pre-rig-2024-election

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 4: Free Speech for Me

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 4: Free Speech for Me

I've got just a couple of minutes so I'm going to wrap up with this:

On January 14, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from a high school football coach in Bremerton, Washington, who lost his job after defying school administrators by kneeling and praying at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

The coach says the actions of school board violated his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion. The officials responded that the school was entitled to require that its employees refrain from public prayer to avoid the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.

When the Supreme Court declined to hear an earlier appeal in the case in 2019, four justices - Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas - issued a statement questioning a preliminary ruling in favor of the officials from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, saying that court's "understanding of the free speech rights of public-school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future.”

And now that future has come.

The coach "led the team in prayer in the locker room before each game, and some players began to join him for his postgame prayer, too, where his practice ultimately evolved to include full-blown religious speeches to, and prayers with, players from both teams after the game, conducted while the players were still on the field and while fans remained in the stands." In other words, he clearly was on the clock.

But that didn't matter to the dissenters at the Ninth Circuit, one of who wrote “It is axiomatic that teachers do not shed their First Amendment protections at the schoolhouse gate. Yet the opinion in this case obliterates such constitutional protections by announcing a new rule that any speech by a public-school teacher or coach, while on the clock and in earshot of others, is subject to plenary control by the government.”

But what really mattered to that judge, as it surely will to the sanctimonious six at SCOTUS, is that the speech involved was Christian prayer. I have no doubt that this case will ultimately come out in the coach's favor and the right wing will celebrate madly, after which I will await the occasion watching with bitter amusement the rapid shuffling of papers and redefinitions of meanings when some public school teacher gets into trouble for hurting the fee-fees of some white kinds by discussing in class white privilege or present-day racism and then says it's their freedom of speech so nyah nyah can't touch me.

The case is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

One last last thing: Kelly Shackelford, the president of First Liberty Institute, which represents the coach, said in a statement “By taking this case, the Supreme Court can protect the right of every American to engage in private religious expression, including praying in public, without fear of punishment.”

Protect the private expression of public prayer. For his next trick, Kelly Shackelford will square a circle.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 3: The Threat to Voting Rights

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 3: The Threat to Voting Rights

Okay, this is our first installment of what promises to be a long series, one my intent is to have as part of every or at least most every show. It's called The Threat.

To start, I want to lay out what I mean by the term and the sort of things this series will cover. We are faced with a wide variety of internal threats to our functioning as a free society driven by the reactionary - which these days pretty much means the entire - right sometimes in pursuit of power and sometimes in a pathetic but still damaging effort to keep the future from happening.

There are for example the threats to our ability to vote coupled with moves to turn election administration and vote counting into a partisan enterprise.

There are the attacks on the right to abortion and on the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+, now particularly transgender, people.

There are attacks on First Amendment rights relating to press, speech, and assembly.

Threats to our personal privacy, those coming as much from corporations as government.

Basic social services, particularly right now public education, are under attack.

And of course, there is the very major overlying, existential threat of climate change.

The idea is that every show I will address and cover some news and commentary relating to one or more such issues. This time, as you might have been expecting, it the threats to our right to vote.

We start by noting that a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice finds that GOPper state legislatures are showing no signs of slowing down what the report calls the "tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation" that we saw in 2021.

That tsunami of bills involved 49 states seeing a total of 440 proposed laws restricting the right to vote introduced between January 1 and December 7. Nineteen states passed 34 such laws, more than in any year since the Brennan Center began tracking such laws in 2011.

The group's analysis pointed to several categories of anti-voting restrictions, including restricting access to voting by mail, new or expanded voter ID requirements, the criminalization of "ordinary, lawful behavior by election officials" who try to help voters, and laws allowing voter purges.

It also highlighted what the Center called "a new trend" in which "legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely." That surely will continue in 2022: In at least five states, six bills that have been pre-filed aim to establish "illegitimate partisan review boards of election results." Pre-filed means they are already on record to be introduced in the 2022 legislative session. Revealingly of the actual intention here assuming it wasn't already obvious, four of those six focus on continuing reviews of the 2020 election results.

And all of this in the name of "election integrity" despite zero states having found any evidence of any level of voter fraud worth mentioning.

A big target of the attacks has been mail-in voting and there is every reason to expect that will continue in 2022. There are dozens of carryover bills, ones carried over from the 2021 session to this year's, that focus on restricting access to mail-in voting, ranging from shortening deadlines for applying for and delivering mail ballots to imposing criminal penalties for election officials who mail out unsolicited ballots or even for individuals who assist voters - including people with disabilities - with returning mail ballots.

In addition, there are at least 74 pre-filed bills assailing voting rights in various ways, at least seven of which specifically target voting by mail, including among others eliminating reasons that justified voting by mail and expanding the grounds on which a submitted absentee ballot can be rejected.

These efforts are already seeing results. Texas has one of the harshest laws attacking voting rights, one which among other provisions tightens the requirements for requesting an absentee ballot. Those are already hard to get in Texas, available to only a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents, or voters who will be absent from their county during the entire period of early voting plus Election Day.

But one of the new demands is that the person making the request supply either their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, which must match the number they supplied when they registered. Which not only means a single-digit mistake could get your request denied, voters often face what Travis County clerk Dana DeBeauvoir called "a guessing game" because they can't recall which number they used to register in some cases decades earlier and there is no easy way to find out.

The result has been that Travis County officials said they have rejected around half of the requests for vote-by-mail applications they have received. Harris County has rejected over a quarter, Bexar County nearly the same.

Note that the primary is in March, leaving little time for a voter to determine what the error is and correct it.

By the way, some other new restrictions in Texas are barring residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives and spouses; making it harder for voters with disabilities or language access barriers to get help; constraining election workers’ ability to stop harassment or intimidation of voters by partisan poll watchers; and banning 24-hour and drive-thru voting.

Meanwhile, there also has been action in the courts on related matters.

In December, the NAACP and other civil rights groups filed suit in federal court, looking to overturn South Carolina's new and gerrymandered map of its state legislative districts. They charge that the map was created "in a flawed and nontransparent process" with the deliberate intent of disempowering Black voters and solidifying GOPper control of the state legislature.

The map used a mixture of "packing," the practice of placing people of color in the same district in order to prevent them from having greater political power in surrounding districts, and "cracking," the splitting of communities of color to dilute their power in a given district. The idea is to find the mixture that leaves Black South Carolinians with as little power as possible.

A similar story is playing out regarding Georgia, where voting rights groups and Georgia voters sued in federal court early in January charging that three of the districts in the state's newly drawn congressional map were packed and cracked to intentionally deny Black communities in Georgia fair representation and so are unconstitutional.

There was bad news out of North Carolina, where on January 11 a three-judge Superior Court panel ruled that Republicans' newly drawn political districts, which will give GOPpers an edge in future elections, do not violate the state's constitution - despite finding that the proposed districts were obviously drawn with and had heavy partisan advantage. As too often happens, the judges threw up their hands and declared that "redistricting is an inherently political process" that does "not impinge on the right to vote." Perhaps not in a narrow legalistic sense, but it surely impinges on the right to fair representation, which is after all what voting is all about.

On the other hand, some of the news is even good, as there was a double victory in Ohio.

On January 12, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out GOPper-drawn state legislative district maps. A majority of the justices found the map violated the state constitution because failed to "draw legislative districts that correspond with the statewide voter preference of Ohioans." That is, they were gerrymandered for partisan advantage.

Then just two days later, that same court also struck down the new GOPper-drawn map of congressional districts on the same basis.

The decision called the map "infused with undue partisan bias" which "perhaps explains," the ruling went on, "how a party that generally musters no more than 55% of the statewide popular vote is positioned to reliably win anywhere from 75% to 80% of the seats in the Ohio congressional delegation. By any rational measure, that skewed result just does not add up."

The advantage that voting rights advocates had here is that in 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly - by 75-25 - approved an amendment to the state constitution intended to limit as much as possible partisanship in redistricting, so the "it's all political" dodge wasn't available to the court and it was clear what voters wanted done.

Finally on this wrap for this time, a warning: There is a "bipartisan" proposal - assuming we can regard agreement of Fishface McConnell and Joe Maniac as being "bipartisan" - proposal to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act. This is the one that despite have functioned just fine for 35 presidential elections still had sufficient vagueness to be the basis for the claims that Mike NotWorthAFarthing could overturn the vote of the Electoral College or throw that vote to the House.

So there is the idea of reforming it so we don't risk facing in 2024 what we could have faced in 2020.

Which is fine but beware of conservatives bearing compromises. Because there is also a fear that such a reform would be presented as a substitute for election law reform rather than an addition to it. That is, that the anti-voter faction in Congress would agree to this and then say "Okay, we've dealt with election law reform. Let's move on." We can't let that happen.

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2

 

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2

Good News

- Cyber Ninjas closing

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/07/politics/cyber-ninjas-shutting-down-arizona/index.html

https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/spokesman-cyber-ninjas-is-being-shut-down

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- Climate protesters acquitted

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/14/juries-get-it-climate-activists-acquitted-after-train-protest

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- Group wins fight to feed hungry

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/05/after-7-years-anti-war-group-fed-hungry-wins-fight-fort-lauderdale

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- Migrant arrest unconstitutional

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/migrant-s-arrest-under-operation-lone-star-ruled-unconstitutional/ar-AASNlbK

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- Police reform in NYC

https://apnews.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-georgia-race-and-ethnicity-sentencing-savannah-0d1a8ed25f1a075844160f253a9d0535

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2022/01/07/extensive-research-supports-manhattan-das-new-20-year-cap-prison-sentences-says

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2022/01/09/manhattan-district-attorney-alvin-bragg-criminal-justice-reform-marijuana-guns-crime/

https://www.sentencingproject.org/

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/no-end-in-sight-americas-enduring-reliance-on-life-imprisonment/

The Death Penalty and Criminal Justice
https://www.aol.com/news/oklahoma-prepares-execute-man-1985-050314469-184404277.html

https://theforgivenessfoundation.org/2021/11/09/bigler-stouffer-executed-on-december-9-2021-in-oklahoma/

https://deathpenalty.org/innocence-isnt-enough-here-arizona-tells-scotus/

The Threat to Voting Rights

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/21/gop-tidal-wave-voter-suppression-set-intensify-2022-analysis-warns

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-december-2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/14/half-mail-ballot-requests-rejected-key-texas-county

https://www.aol.com/news/texas-rejects-hundreds-mail-ballot-232705241-022957930.html

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/24/packing-and-cracking-new-lawsuit-challenges-south-carolinas-racial-redistricting

https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2022/01/07/splc-georgia-voters-and-voting-rights-groups-challenge-georgias-racially

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/georgia_redistricting_complaint_01072022.pdf

https://www.nccourts.gov/assets/inline-files/22.01.22%20-%20Final%20Judgment.pdf

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/12/victory-ohio-supreme-court-strikes-down-gop-partisan-gerrymandering

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/0/2022/2022-ohio-65.pdf

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/14/ohio-supreme-court-strikes-down-rigged-congressional-maps

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/01/08/whats-next-corporate-democrat-plotters-voting-rights

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/05/eca-jan-6/

Free Speech for Me

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/us/supreme-court-football-coach-prayer.html