Pay Attention. Courts Are on the Ballot
The sixth month of the calendar year really should be called “Judicial June.”
Between Supreme Court cases, scandals involving justices, the former president’s probation hearing, Hunter Biden’s trial, and a group of Senators threatening to shut down the process for reviewing federal judicial nominations over a decision made in a State Court, the rule of law and its applications will be top of mind throughout the month.
The Really Big Case still unsettled by the Supreme Court concerns presidential immunity from prosecution. If, as some analysts predict, the court tries to do a little of this and a little of that, it will still have the desired effect for Donald Trump, namely that sorting out the impacts of this ruling will effectively put pending trials in limbo. He won’t have to grant himself a pardon because the legal strategy of delay, delay, delay will have worked its magic.
Other cases to be decided as of this writing include a challenge to the legality of abortion-inducing medications, transgender healthcare and rights, limits on laws restricting firearm possession, and whether a faulty DNA test is grounds for retrial in a death penalty case.
What’s been learned about the lifestyles of Supreme Court justices lately and the failure of that institution to police itself, it would be reasonable to suggest the idea of term limits or other corrective action will gain currency in the coming weeks, as this article from the Brennan Center suggests.
Rolling Stone revealed it has possession of an audiotape with Justice Alito discussing how the battle for America 'can’t be compromised.'
In a new, secret recording, the Supreme Court justice says he “agrees” that the U.S. should return to a place of godliness.
Investigations by ProPublica’s have revealed that Justice Clarence Thomas received at least 38 luxury vacations, 26 private jet flights, eight helicopter rides, and numerous VIP passes to high-profile events. Notable among the benefactors is Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire who has previously paid for Thomas's vacations, purchased his mother's home, and covered his nephew’s tuition.
The total value of these undisclosed gifts since Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 1991 is more than $4 million. That’s more than the combined financial disclosures of the rest of the Justices by far.
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Former President Trump will participate in a Zoomed probationary hearing from the comforts of Mar a Lago today as part of the July 11 sentencing resulting from a jury’s guilty verdicts for 34 fraudulent actions in pursuit of influencing an election. As part of the report, a New York probation officer will gather Trump’s prior criminal history — which is none — employment history and economic status. If available, state law also requires the report to include findings about a defendant’s physical and mental condition.
Assuming probation is part of the sentencing mix for the former president, it’s a standard requirement for convicted persons not to associate with felons. That might prove to be more difficult than jail time.
Here’s former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, writing at The Atlantic:
Probation is onerous and its restrictions are determined somewhat arbitrarily, often by probation officers whose recommendations the court tends to accept. It can entail all kinds of potential restrictions and government intrusions, starting with mandatory regular visits to the probation officer. One hundred or more hours of community service is a not-uncommon term of probation. And a long list of standard restrictions applies, including limits on travel, unannounced searches, and drug testing at the probation officer’s discretion. If Trump committed any additional crimes (not ones currently pending), he could be jailed in New York immediately.
Merchan might fashion more forgiving conditions for Trump, but the remaining ones could still be quite burdensome. And if he fails to comply, his probation officer could “violate” him, meaning ask the court to put him in prison.
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Both the prosecution and defense have finished their presentations in the Hunter Biden trial concerning the purchase of a handgun while addicted to drugs in 2018. Closing arguments and jury instructions will take place, and I suspect deliberations will be short. BTW– President Biden has said he will not pardon his son should a guilty verdict come down.
Outside the New York State judicial system there is a willful effort to ignore the distinctions between state and federal courts. House Speaker Mike Johnson has called on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s guilty verdict.
More than a dozen Senate Republicans have formally resolved to prevent the Biden administration from confirming any more of its nominees for political appointments or federal judgeships as a response to the former president’s conviction in a New York court.
Speculation on Capitol Hill as reported by CourtHouse News Service, is that the purported voting bloc isn’t settled on how this threat will play out in reality.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who also chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, had a blunter observation about the initial group of Republicans who pledged to block White House nominees.
“Those eight senators rarely support them anyway,” he said.
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A broken judicial system is the ultimate goal for Trump’s people, as Paul Waldman notes:
Though Republicans talk about Trump’s conviction as a distortion of the true purpose of the justice system, they quite clearly believe the actual purpose of that system is to be a weapon you use to destroy your enemies; they’re just unhappy that it was wielded against their god-king. The solution to corruption is not integrity but more corruption, except on behalf of the right people.
This is why this particular controversy is not at all isolated from the rest of the conservative project. They are engaged in a wide-ranging attack on institutions, in which they attack the institution for not living up to its values, then seek to seize control of the institution not so they can restore those supposedly lost values but so they can use the institution for their own ends.
So they attack universities for not being enough of a forum for free inquiry and expression (when a few conservatives are shouted down), then attack it for tolerating bigotry and not protecting (certain) minority rights, with the hopes that they can discredit higher education or make it more hospitable to their own ideological agenda. They attack the election system for not being fair and transparent, when what they actually want is for their own friendly officials to overrule results they don’t like no matter what the voters choose. And they attack the courts so they can use the courts for their own ends.
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Monday News You Should Read
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Surveillance Defense for Campus Protests by Rory Mir, Thorin Klosowski, and Christian Romera at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Many tools used on campuses overlap with the street-level surveillance used by law enforcement, but universities are in a unique position of power over students being monitored. For students, universities are not just their school, but often their home, employer, healthcare provider, visa sponsor, place of worship, and much more. This reliance heightens the risks imposed by surveillance, and brings it into potentially every aspect of students’ lives.
EFF has also been clear for years: as campuses build up their surveillance capabilities in the name of safety, they chill speech and foster a more adversarial relationship between students and the administration. Yet, this expansion has continued in recent years, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns.
This came to a head in April, when groups across the U.S. pressured their universities to disclose and divest their financial interest in companies doing business in Israel and weapons manufacturers, and to distance themselves from ties to the defense industry. These protests echo similar campus divestment campaigns against the prison industry in 2015, and the campaign against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. However, the current divestment movement has been met with disproportionate suppression and unprecedented digital surveillance from many universities.
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Economic Termites Are Everywhere by Matt Stoller at The BIG newsletter:
The concept of an economic termite is the cousin to Cory Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ or Yves Smith’s ‘crapification,’ terms that describe how a platform gradually degrades the quality of its service as it gains market power and gets pushed to extract cash by financiers. Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.
These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that makes our world turn, there’s fortunes to be made, and bottlenecks to foster.
They also explain a dynamic we all face, a profound wariness in our society, a sense that stuff just costs more and is more difficult, for no discernible reason. Added up, these end up sapping our faith in the American system, because they make what seem like simple problems become not just unsolvable, but not even capable of being diagnosed.
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'Moderate': The weasel word masking extreme politics by George Lakoff and Gil Duran at FRAMED:
For example, Nikki Haley was often described as moderate. Yet the Republican former presidential candidate wouldn’t get many votes in San Francisco. Neither would Elon Musk, who has called himself both a “centrist” and a "moderate" while simultaneously acting a superspreader of right-wing ideas and conspiracy theories.
More to the point: Both Haley and Musk are now backing Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. Clearly, they have simply been trying to mask their extreme authoritarian politics as "moderate."
But moderate and centrist are "political weasel words." Their definitions vary widely because there is no such thing as a moderate or centrist ideology. There is no united “middle” or “center” in politics, no single set of ideas on which all moderates or centrists agree. Some support abortion rights, but others oppose them. Some support marriage equality, but others don’t.
These terms obscure, rather than reveal, political beliefs. They are misnomers often used to describe a segment of voters called “biconceptuals”: people who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others. But this ideological mix differs from issue to issue and person to person.
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