Shira Sheindlin at The Guardian writes—Donald Trump is capturing the judiciary at an alarming rate. Judges confirmed by the president – 92 to date – have shown loyalty to their party which seeks to roll back decades of progress:
Mexico is not paying for Donald Trump’s wall. The 2018 tax cut did not give tax relief to middle-class Americans. And no infrastructure or healthcare bills have emerged from this administration. But, the one promise that the president has kept, and perhaps the one that is of greatest importance to his base, is his selection of judges for the federal bench. The president has vowed to appoint judges who share the views and values of the minority of Americans who voted him into office. And he has succeeded. A look at the growing list of judges now occupying life terms in the federal judiciary shows that, as a general matter, they oppose reproductive rights, gay rights, affirmative action, unions, government regulation, any form of gun control, and immigration.
To date, 92 judges selected by Trump have been confirmed: two for the supreme court, 37 for the circuit courts of appeal, and 53 for the district courts (the entry level trial courts). [...]
These appointments are well on their way to reshaping the federal judiciary. Because so few cases are heard by the supreme court – between 80 and 90 per year – the circuit courts are often the final word on issues raised in federal court. A number of the circuit courts of appeals now have a majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents.
David Leonhardt at The New York Times writes—A Man With a Plan for Inequality. Let the rich be taxed the way everyone else is:
The average wealth of the poorer half of American households has dropped below zero in the years since the financial crisis, according to the World Inequality Database. What does that mean? It means that fully half of Americans hold more combined debt than assets. [...]
Fortunately, some policymakers are starting to come forward with proposals to address the wealth imbalance. The latest is Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon. He joins a few presidential candidates — Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — who have also proposed higher taxes on wealth.
The Wyden plan “would transform how the U.S. taxes the wealthiest people,” The Wall Street Journal’s Gabriel Rubin and Richard Rubin write.
Under current law, investors pay taxes on the increased value of the stocks and bonds they own — known as capital gains — only when they sell them. They also pay a lower tax rate than that on most forms of income. Wyden’s plan would remove both of those advantages.
Investors would have to pay the ordinary income-tax rate on their capital gains. And they would have to do so each year, based on the assets’ value at the time. In accounting terms, this practice of updating the value of an asset is known as “mark to market.”
E.J. Dionne Jr. writes—We need constitutional reform — starting with the electoral college:
The 26th Amendment, approved in 1971, which let 18-year-olds vote, was the last to get through in a conventional way. The fluky 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992, had been sent to the states in 1789. It bars a sitting Congress from raising its own pay and was approved only after Gregory Watson, a sophomore at the University of Texas, discovered in the 1980s that it was still out there.
That our last amendment was something close to an accident underscores how unwilling we are to confront the need for systematic change. That’s why I cheered this week when Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) joined a group of colleagues to propose an amendment providing for the election of our president by popular vote, not the electoral college. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) offered a comparable proposal last month. So far, at least seven Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed the idea.
Schatz is under no illusions that his proposed amendment will even get out of Congress anytime soon. But “the basic principle that the person who gets the most votes should be president of the United States” is worth fighting for, he said in an interview. There’s value in staking out “clear, principled and popular positions” and pursuing them with “persistence and patience.”
Moira Donegan writes— So Joe Biden's not a pussy grabber. Is that really good enough?
One predictable defense of Biden is that these allegations against him – and the behavior that has been documented in photos and videos of Biden touching women and girls – do not show explicitly sexual motivations by Biden. This strains credulity somewhat; are we really supposed to believe that there was nothing lascivious in Biden’s deep sniff of Flores’ hair? But the line of argument by his defenders is that Biden’s inappropriate touching is not as inappropriate as other men’s inappropriate touching – that he is not as bad, namely, as Donald Trump.
In this line of thinking, Biden is not being sexually aggressive when he rubs women’s shoulders, rubs noses with them, or kisses their hair. He is merely being incompetent, his behavior a relic of an older and supposedly more innocent time when men could touch women without their consent and know that they would face no reprimand.
Again, this is not entirely believable – it paints a picture of Biden as clueless and unthinking that does not align with his other public behavior. But the argument also fails on its own merits. It is unclear, for instance, why Biden has not adjusted to the social mores of this time, or why his persistent ignorance of them is deemed exonerating. If he is not malicious, but merely incompetent, this is hardly a defense, and it is certainly not an argument that this socially incompetent man should be given the most powerful job in the world. The mandate to understand basic social cues, and to adjust to a world in which women’s bodies are no longer available for opportunistic fondling by white men in their vicinity, are basic requirements for much less powerful positions than the presidency.
John Pfaff at The Washington Monthly writes—Preet Bharara’s Willful Blindness:
The broad agreement that our criminal justice system is profoundly broken, most recently embodied in a reform bill passed by Congress in December, is a rare contemporary example of genuine bipartisanship. We incarcerate and punish far too many people; we rely on counterproductively punitive sanctions that are often disliked by the very victims in whose name they are imposed; and the system is rife with racial bias at every stage. Thanks to years of work by advocates, academics, and journalists, a broad coalition is now pushing to overhaul how we punish in the U.S.
You would not know any of this, however, from reading Preet Bharara’s new book, Doing Justice. Bharara was appointed by President Obama in 2009 as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, perhaps the most prestigious posting a federal prosecutor can get. [...]
In Doing Justice, Bharara explores the criminal justice system by looking at how cases work their way through it, from investigation to trial to punishment. Nearly all the examples and anecdotes come from cases that Bharara’s office handled, which often gives the book the feel of a memoir. But it is clearly intended to be a broad discussion of criminal justice—not just of the rarified world of the federal courts, but of the far messier state systems that handle well over 90 percent of all cases.
The closest thing the book has to a thesis comes toward its end, when Bharara describes the process as “an inquiry fairly conducted, an accusation rightly made, a judgment properly rendered.” This is a stunningly sunny take on our criminal justice system, optimistic to the point of being dangerously misleading. It’s a shame, because Bharara’s insider status would give any criticisms significant heft. Yet not only does he celebrate the current system, he does so without even confronting any of the major criticisms that have been leveled against it. (The major exception is when he addresses the brutality of American prisons.) He offers what is effectively a paean to a slow, deliberative process, divorced from political pressures, that focuses almost exclusively on pursuing the truth, wherever that may lead. It is a laudable system, well worth defending. But it is also one that does not actually exist.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—The Supreme Court’s Twisted Devotion to the Death Penalty:
Supreme Court justices like to project an image of collegiality and sobriety to the American public. But that comity often breaks down when the court debates the death penalty. The latest example is Monday’s opinions in Bucklew v. Precythe, which read more like a barroom brawl than a judicial exchange of views.
Russell Bucklew, a Missouri death-row prisoner with a rare medical condition, filed a lawsuit in 2015 to make the state execute him by nitrogen hypoxia. Missouri’s choice of lethal injection, he warned, could force him to die drowning in his own blood. The five conservative justices on the court ruled that he hadn’t met their high threshold for challenging execution methods. The Eighth Amendment, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court, “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death—something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.”
In their dissent, the four liberal justices accused their colleagues of placing judicial convenience over Bucklew’s constitutional rights. “There are higher values than ensuring that executions run on time,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote. “If a death sentence or the manner in which it is carried out violates the Constitution, that stain can never come out.” Justice Stephen Breyer, the court’s foremost critic of the death penalty, laid out the court’s ruling in stark terms. “Bucklew has provided evidence of a serious risk that his execution will be excruciating and grotesque,” he explained. “The majority holds that the State may execute him anyway.”
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Trump to Puerto Rico: Who’s Your Daddy? The logic seems to go that everyone is better off, even minorities, when white people are calling the shots:
Donald Trump’s lie-filled rage tweets about Puerto Rico this week over disaster aid continue a Trump pattern that mirrors a method that white supremacists have used throughout American history. Particularly present since Reconstruction, this method involves proclaiming that minorities lack the character and capacity to create effective government, and therefore minority-led jurisdictions are a hopeless drain on resources.
He tweeted that Puerto Rico’s government “can’t do anything right” and that the island’s politicians are “incompetent or corrupt” and only “complain and ask for more money,” which they spend “foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.” He specifically called the mayor of San Juan “crazed and incompetent.”
Point of fact: Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It is a territory. Its citizens are U.S. citizens. The structure of Trump’s comments leaves open the possibility that he doesn’t know that, or conversely, knows it but doesn’t fully accept it or care about it.
If this were a one-off spat with politicians opposed to his conduct, one might reasonably write Trump’s comments off as politics as usual. Instead, this questioning of the competence of black and brown leaders is not anomaly but motif.
Joshua Adams at Other Words writes—We All Practice ‘Identity Politics’:
As the 2020 campaign lurches to a start, get ready to hear a lot about “identity politics.”
If a candidate mentions or draws attention to her race, gender, or sexuality, some people say, she’s making our country “more divided.” We need to stop engaging in identity politics and start appealing to the “average” American, they say.
Which raises the question: Just who is “average”?
To be blunt, I’m convinced the charge of “identity politics” is mostly cynical. It’s a rhetorical whip used to guilt women, queer folk, and minorities into not advocating for their specific political needs. It’s as divisive as the division it claims to combat.
I was born in raised in Chicago — a microcosm of our country’s immense diversity as well as its segregation. Being a black man from the south side of Chicago, I have experiences that are different from someone who lives in a majority-white town in southern Illinois.
Why is mentioning this difference divisive? How does remaining silent about the specific issues that affect me help?
Christine Emba at The Washington Post writes—It’s time to ‘unsex’ pregnancy:
“Unsexing Pregnancy” is a phrase guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of social conservatives everywhere. [...]
In their article “Unsexing Pregnancy,” George Washington University law professors David Fontana and Naomi Schoenbaum explain the basic reasoning behind sex-equality and equal-protection laws around parenting and care work: When roles and rights are assigned on the basis of sex, they often reinforce the association of men with work and the marketplace and women with the home. These expectations become self-perpetuating, limiting women’s potential at work and men’s roles in the family. [...]
“Sex-equality law’s pervasive efforts to disaggregate sex from caregiving after birth are in stark contrast to its failure to do so before birth,” the authors write. After all, pregnancy involves a wide range of work that is non-sexed; fathers may not actually carry the child, but they can buy car seats, take child-care classes and attend prenatal medical appointments just as well as mothers can. But caregiving during the nine months of pregnancy is rarely as “unsexed.” The forward-thinking FMLA provides post-birth leave for both mothers and fathers, for instance, but prenatal leave applies only to women. Employment protections under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and essential health benefits under the Affordable Care Act apply only or mostly to women, too.
Extending sex-equality and equal-protection laws to both parents prior to birth, the authors argue, could bolster sex equality and in fact enhance women’s autonomy.
Tom Philpott at Mother Jones writes—Will Fast-Food Diners Pay an Extra Buck for Silicon Valley Soy Patties? Burger King’s “Impossible Whopper” faces an uphill battle:
Burger King isn’t the first fast-food chain to add Impossible to the menu. The much smaller White Castle debuted Impossible sliders at all 377 of its locations nationwide last year. Like Burger King, White Castle prices the meatless slider at a dollar above the conventional item. Even so, sales were stronger than expected and White Castle made them a permanent part of the menu in December, the Times reports. More recently, Roots’ drummer Questlove announced he’s “putting his name on a cheesesteak made with plant-based Impossible Meat” that will be available at 40 Live Nation concert venues across the country as well as the Philadelphia Phillies baseball stadium, according to Eater. Back in January, yet another burger chain, Carl’s Jr., started serving burgers made by Impossible’s also-much-hyped rival Beyond Meat—which tweaks its pea protein-based meatless mix with beet juice for a blood-like effect—at all 1,000 of its stores.
But as appealing as they are to tech investors and hip-hop artists, these meatless forays into all-American fast food face uphill challenges. For one, the percentage of the US population that sticks to meatless diets isn’t growing; rates of vegetarianism and veganism have long held steady at 5 percent and 3 percent, a Gallop poll found last year. That means Burger King can’t likely rely on vegetarians to make the Impossible Whopper a hit; it will be crucial to convert a portion of its beef-loving clientele.
And Americans consume beef at one of the very highest rates in the world—and have been eating more of it in recent years. That’s despite evidence (see recent studies here, here, and here) documenting the vast environmental footprint of industrialized beef production. The upshot: Even if the globe completely switches to renewable energy, we’ll still need to cut way back on beef consumption if we’re going to keep average global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—When Socialism Was Tried in America—and Was a Smashing Success. For much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was run by socialists—and Time magazine called it “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”:
If I owned all the real estate in the world, I wouldn’t feel so powerful as I do on the streets of this socialist city,” declared former New York City councilman Baruch Vladeck when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1932 for the Socialist Party’s national convention in that city.
Norman Thomas, the famed civil-rights and economic-justice campaigner who became the party’s presidential nominee that year, celebrated the fact that he was chosen for that honor in a city governed by Socialists. The success of Milwaukee under then-Mayor Dan Hoan, Thomas said, was proof that the party’s social-democratic “dreams will someday come true.”
“Someday” was dramatically delayed by the results of the 1932 elections. The Socialist ticket did well, securing almost 900,000 votes nationwide and registering its highest percentage of the total vote in Wisconsin. The winner of that year’s race, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took notice: He met with Thomas after the election and borrowed liberally from proposals that had long been championed by the Socialists—for a Social Security system, unemployment compensation, strengthened labor unions, and public-works programs. Roosevelt’s New Deal took the wind out of the Socialist Party’s sails in the national arena, but the party remained a force in Milwaukee for decades to come.
Now that Milwaukee has been selected as the host city for another national convention—that of the Democrats in 2020—Republicans have suddenly discovered its history.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—The Green New Deal Should Include Reparations. The Democratic Party is talking about both issues separately. They make more sense in tandem:
Environmental justice activist Anthony Rogers-Wright lives full-time in Seattle, Washington, but just happened to be in Massachusetts last weekend when he heard that Senator Ed Markey was holding a town hall about the Green New Deal in Northampton, a crunchy college town in the heart of the state. So Rogers-Wrightattended, in the hopes of asking Markey whether the Democrats’ emerging grand plan to fight climate change includes reparations for black and brown people.
Rogers-Wright believed that it did. After all, a paragraph on page six of the 14-page resolution Markey and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced in February says the Green New Deal should “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression” of vulnerable and minority communities. But Rogers-Wright wanted to be sure. So when he got to the microphone, he cited the passage above and asked, “Does that mean reparations?”
Markey would not commit to a definitive answer. The resolution, he said, deliberately “doesn’t mention any individual item” or specific policy, adding, “It’s meant to open up a big debate in our country” about how to fight climate change. A Green New Deal must eventually “ensure that every race, every economic strata is fully represented in this discussion—that we leave no one behind and it is environmental justice,” he added. But how that will be done is still up for discussion.
Rajan Menon at TomDispatch writes—Money Talks, Big Time. 1% Politics and the Scandals of A New Gilded Age:
Rising income inequality, wage stagnation, and slowing social mobility hurt ordinary Americans economically, even as they confer massive social and political advantages on the mega-rich -- and not just when it comes to college admissions and politics either.
Even the Economist, a publication that can’t be charged with sympathy for left-wing ideas, warned recently of the threat economic inequality poses to the political agency of American citizens. The magazine cited studies showing that, despite everything you’ve heard about the power of small donations in recent political campaigns, 1% of the population actually provides a quarter of all the money spent on politics by individuals and 80% of what the two major political parties raise. Thanks to their wealth, a minuscule economic elite as well as big corporations now shape policies, notably on taxation and expenditure, to their advantage on an unprecedented scale. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support stricter laws to prevent wealth from hijacking politics and want the Citizens United ruling overturned. But then just how much does the voice of the majority matter? Judging from the many failed efforts to pass such laws, not much.
Hannah McKinnon at Oil Change International writes—Business leaders, investors, and experts to IEA: Align with Paris and help us plan for success:
In order to succeed, we need the best tools at our disposal. We need to understand whether decisions will lead to success or failure, and we need policymakers and investors to have access to that information. Remarkably, almost all energy decision-making is based on assumptions that we will fail in meeting the Paris climate goals. This includes the go-to source for descriptions of our energy future: the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Today, over 40 business leaders, investors, and energy experts found remarkable alignment around demanding more from the IEA. In a letter covered by the Financial Times, a broad collection of signatories called on the IEA to develop a truly Paris-aligned scenario (including a reasonable chance at staying within 1.5 degrees Celsius with a precautionary approach to Negative Emissions Technologies), and make this the central scenario in the World Energy Outlook (WEO), replacing the current dominant business-as-usual scenario. [...]
“Without the inclusion of a central and realistic 1.5C scenario going forward, the World Energy Outlook would abdicate its responsibility to continue to chart the boundaries of the path of the global energy sector,” the letter reads.
The suggested changes to the IEA’s WEO would have an outsized impact on everything from the urgent need to “shift the trillions” away from climate-incompatible fossil fuel financing to helping governments plan for success in energy decision-making to how we collectively conceive our energy future.