Politico/Morning Consult have some polling data out, taken after the Kavanaugh SCOTUS pick, and sixty-one percent support term limits for Supreme Court justices- and support crosses party affiliation, with two-thirds of polled Democrats and 58% of Republicans in favor. 20% overall oppose limits.
Sixty-one percent of voters support term limits for Supreme Court justices, including two-thirds of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans. Twenty percent overall oppose such limits, according to the survey of 1,991 registered voters.
“It’s important to have justices who are reflective of the population they’re bringing judgment upon,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of the group Fix the Court, in a Tuesday interview. “Before Kennedy retired, we still had justices who were appointed during the Reagan administration. A lot’s changed in the world since the Reagan administration.”
Fix the Court, a nonpartisan advocacy group, is pushing a plan that would place an 18-year limit on a judge’s term, which would start as current judges leave and new ones come in. Roth said despite momentum in the legal community and among many Americans in support of term limits, there is no such movement on Capitol Hill and a number of legal scholars argue such changes would require a constitutional amendment.
“Since the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act that required justices to release their financial disclosure reports, there has been little action in Congress to change the institutional structure of courts,” he said.
Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, said while there is support for term limits, the challenge is in how to implement them – whether they are made retroactive or exclusively apply to future nominees.“If you make it forward-looking, it would take literally 30 years for it to actually make any impact,” he said in a Tuesday interview.
I propose an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:
Section 1. The number of Justices serving upon the Supreme Court of the United States shall be nine, including the Chief Justice.
Section 2. Upon the vacancy of any seat on the Supreme Court, the Attorney General or such other officer as the President may designate shall convene a Selection Committee.
The Selection Committee shall consist of three Chief Justices of the Supreme Courts of the several states, chosen by lot, and four Presiding Judges of the several Federal Courts of Appeal, chosen by lot. In the event of a vacancy or a refusal of a chosen member of the Selection Committee to serve, the Chief Justice or, if there is no Chief Justice the most senior member of the Supreme Court, shall appoint a replacement from the same pool of potential members as the selected committee member not serving.
The Selection Committee shall meet and propose three candidates to the President to fill the vacancy upon the Supreme Court within thirty days of the vacancy. No member of the Selection Committee may themselves be proposed as a candidate.
Section 3. Within thirty days of his receipt of the Selection Committee’s three candidates, the President shall nominate one of those three candidates to the Senate.
The Senate shall convene if not then in session, and approve or disapprove of the proposed candidate within thirty days of the President’s proposal by a majority vote. In the event of the Senate’s rejection of a nominee, the President shall thereafter propose from the remaining proposed candidates within thirty days of the Senate’s rejection, and the Senate shall then approve or disapprove of the proposed candidate within thirty days of the President’s nomination by a majority vote.
If for any reason the Senate fails to act in response to the President’s nomination, the nominee shall be deemed confirmed, effective on the thirty-first day after the nomination is made.
If all three nominees are rejected by the Senate, or the Senate by majority vote indicates that none of the three proposed nominees will be acceptable, a new Selection Committee shall be convened within thirty days.
SectionSection 4. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Would this help or hurt? I’m trying to ratchet down, but not completely eliminate, the role of politics in the process of selecting Supreme Court nominees. And yes, I’m proposing tying the President’s hands a lot and the Senate’s hands at least a moderate amount. For instance, by prohibiting court-packing in section 1.
Lori A. Ringhand and Paul M. Collins write in the Chicago Tribune that while the Garland/Gorsuch/Kavanaugh headlines have stirred up the intellectual exercise of imposing change, the concept of SCOTUS term limits is liable to be just that.
Comment → -The final argument against term limits may be the most important: They may be impossible to implement. Creating legally enforceable Supreme Court term limits would almost certainly require amending the Constitution. That’s unlikely to happen any time soon. Any solution short of a constitutional amendment would require getting justices and senators to agree to change the norms and customs governing retirement and confirmation. In other words, they would have to voluntarily agree to play by a new set of rules. Given the state of politics today, that may be too much to ask.
Leave it to this administration to use DNA tests meant to reunite families as DNA testing is being used to keep families apart–not reunify them“>a stall and barrier.
Some of the records that linked parents and children have disappeared or have been destroyed, according to one report. In other cases, the records are sitting in border patrol or ICE files, but the government has claimed that the fastest way to prove that families are related is to give them DNA tests rather than for one agency to call another. (This came two weeks after Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, said that he would be able to find children “within seconds” when questioned about the challenges of reunification.)
In at least some cases, parents were told they’d have to pay for the DNA tests themselves, with money they don’t have. The tests take at least a week for the government’s contractor to process.
As one immigration attorney put it, it could be a delay tactic: The longer the government can keep children and parents apart, the more it can pressure them to accept deportation. Immigration advocates say that DNA tests raise privacy concerns, and only make sense in cases where there’s clear evidence a child might be a victim of human trafficking. When some DNA testing companies offered to donate tests in June in an attempt to help with reunification, some nonprofits working with separated families turned the offers down.
The evidence that they’re actually doing this is kind of slight, but the thing about running the program the way this administration has you don’t get much benefit of the doubt.
Comment → -A Russian woman is under arrest and charged with acting as a foreign agent, but not as part of the ongoing Mueller Probe. Among other activities, her association with NRA events and other conservative groups are alleged to be part of a plan to win “back channel” relationships with the politically powerful.
Maria Butina, 29, who recently received a graduate degree from American University, was arrested Sunday in the District and made her first appearance in U.S. District Court before Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson, where she was ordered held without bond.
Butina is accused of trying to cultivate relationships with American politicians to establish “back channel” lines of communication and seeking to infiltrate U.S. political groups, including an unnamed “gun rights organization,” to advance Russia’s agenda. Descriptions in court papers match published reports about Butina’s interactions with the NRA.
The case, which is not part of the special counsel investigation into Russian interference, lays out the strongest allegations to date of American involvement in Russia’s influence operations.
Butina was allegedly assisted in her efforts by a U.S. political operative who helped introduce her to influential political figures. That person was not charged and is not named in court papers, but the description matches that of Paul Erickson, a GOP consultant who sought to organize a meeting between then-candidate Donald Trump and Alexander Torshin, Butina’s Russian colleague and a former Russian senator, at a May 2016 NRA convention.
NRA officials and Erickson did not respond to requests for comment.
There are a few key takeaways from today’s news:
First, Butina’s operation predates the Trump campaign. Back in March 2014, Butina emailed U.S. Person 1 and projected that the GOP would “likely obtain control over the U.S. government after the 2016 election.” Moreover, she said that party is “traditionally associated with negative and aggressive foreign policy, particularly with regards to Russia.” She identified the NRA’s significance in Republican politics and hoped to exploit that influence to gain relationships.
Second, the affidavit provides the clearest example yet of an American working knowingly and willingly with a Russian operative to advance Russian interests. U.S. Person 1 enthusiastically cooperated with a project that had nothing to do with advancing Russian gun rights and everything to do with facilitating her access to key Republican leaders.
Third, don’t jump to conclusions about the NRA’s role in Butina’s scheme. There are those who will read Twitter or skim headlines and immediately leap to the conclusion that “the NRA was facilitating a Russian intelligence operation” or that the “NRA helped a Russian agent” without considering that there’s a difference between exploitation and cooperation. So far it appears that she worked with U.S. Person 1 to exploit the NRA’s connections to the GOP. Any claim of cooperation is way ahead of the evidence.
Finally, it’s worth saying this after each new revelation in the ongoing series of Russia investigations (interestingly, this indictment didn’t come from the special counsel’s office but instead from DOJ national-security prosecutors), there is much we still don’t know about Russian efforts to influence American politics and about American participation in Russian plans.
While others are noticing a pattern in who and why she targets certain groups, are quite convinced they know exactly why, and to who, Russia was trying to influence in their plans.
Mother Jones:
In 2015, just a month after Trump announced his White House run, Butina directly asked him a question about US-Russia relations during a FreedomFest event in North Dakota, eliciting a response from Trump that he would likely soften the US stance against the Kremlin. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions,” he said. “I think we would get along very, very well.”
In another apparent indication of her interest in infiltrating US politics, Butina also met Republican Gov. Scott Walker at the 2015 NRA convention. Two days after her FreedomFest exchange with Trump that July, Butina was in Wisconsin to attend the event where Walker announced his own candidacy for the presidency.
In an affidavit unsealed Monday, FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson wrote that Butina attempted to “exploit personal connections with U.S. persons having influence in American politics in an effort to advance the interests of the Russian Federation.” The filing alleged that Butina established contact with an unnamed American political operative in Moscow in 2013 and obtained the operative’s help meeting influential Americans.
That unnamed operative appears to be Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican activist from South Dakota who has been associated with Butina since at least 2013, according to our previous reporting. Late last year, the New York Times reported that Erickson sought to set up a “back channel” between Trump campaign officials and the Kremlin in May 2016. Erickson did not respond immediately to inquiries from Mother Jones, but he was identified Monday in an NPR report as the operative described in the affidavit.
What is clear is, as agents go, Butina was doing exactly what operatives have done for years unseen: infiltrate, build relationships, work contacts. Interesting to note here that this investigation pre-dates the Mueller probe, and has largely run parallel. How much, if any, overlap there might be remains to be seen.
The full affidavit is available to read here:
Comment → -This looks like an online quiz waiting to happen.
Would you think a person who frequents Arby’s is a conservative? What about Applebee’s? Is a person who buys Grey Poupon likely rich? Is someone who buys Thomas’ English muffins probably white?
The answer to all of the above questions are “yes,” according to an interesting University Of Chicago study covered in The Washington Post this week. The study claims that researcher-developed algorithms can predict a person’s political and social viewpoints—or even their race—depending on what they purchase with up to 90 percent accuracy
A lot of it is probably regional selection. You have some things, like ranch dressing, that are absolutely huge in East Texas and Oklahoma, which are red. And even national brands are more competitive in some places than others.
Comment → -If Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, all nine Justices of SCOTUS will be Ivy League affiliated in their education. But the Presidency is not any less upper-crust in credentials of late, to say nothing for the rest of government. Bill Whalen writes at Real Clear about “America’s Government-Hooked Up to an Ivy Drip?”
Comment → -A second point worth noting: It’s not just the Supreme Court that’s covered in Ivy, but the White House too.
Starting with George H.W. Bush (Yale Class of ’48), the five most recent presidents have earned a combined seven Ivy degrees – George W. Bush (Yale-Harvard) and Barack Obama (Columbia-Harvard) being double-dippers. Yes, this includes Donald Trump, University of Pennsylvania Class of ’68 (apparently, this vexes the southernmost of the Ivy campuses).
Never before has the White House experienced such an Ivy rash. Prior to Bush 41, the last Ivied presidents were John F. Kennedy (Harvard and, briefly, Princeton) and Franklin Roosevelt (Harvard undergrad and a posthumous JD from Columbia).
The American presidency did experience an Ivy spurt in the first two decades of the 20th Century – Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard and Columbia Law), William Howard Taft (Yale) and Woodrow Wilson (Princeton). Somehow, the nation survived the 60 years between Roosevelt and the previous Ivied president, William Henry Harrison (the briefest of America’s presidents spent one semester at Penn; technically, he’s a non-graduate alumnus of the Medical Class of 1793).
Is America destined for an Ivy-Ivy duel in 2020, ala fellow Harvardians Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012 and Yalies George W. Bush and John Kerry in 2004? That would exclude the likes of former Vice President Joseph Biden, California Sen. Kamala Harris, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
However, it rules in New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (Yale Law), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (Columbia) and New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (Dartmouth undergrad). As Harvard seems to work wonders for Democratic nominees (Obama, Kennedy and FDR went 7-0 in presidential elections) the smart option would seem to be former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, owner of two Harvard degrees (maybe that’s why some Obama insiders reportedly want him to run).
For the sake of the disabled:
On social media, many people are ecstatic about the crush of cities and businesses pledging to ban plastic straws once and for all. Ever since a video showing a sea turtle with a straw stuck up its nose went viral, campaigns like #StopSucking for a strawless ocean have gained considerable traction. Seattle this month implemented a citywide ban on plastic straws, Starbucks announced on Monday that it will phase out the use of plastic straws by 2020, and many other municipalities and businesses are likely to follow suit. As one Twitter user posted, “My waiter asked ‘Now, do we want straws OR do we want to save the turtles?’ and honestly we all deserve that environmental guilt trip.”
But for many people with disabilities, going without plastic straws isn’t a question of how much they care about dolphins or sea turtles; it can be a matter of life or death.
There are many alternatives to plastic straws — paper, biodegradable plastics and even reusable straws made from metal or silicone. But paper straws and similar biodegradable options often fall apart too quickly or are easy for people with limited jaw control to bite through. Silicone straws are often not flexible — one of the most important features for people with mobility challenges. Reusable straws need to be washed, which not all people with disabilities can do easily. And metal straws, which conduct heat and cold in addition to being hard and inflexible, can pose a safety risk.
And also to… uhhh… use less plastic?
The World Wildlife Fund and Ocean Conservancy both provided ebullient quotes for Starbucks’ press releases. Liberal magazine The New Republic praised the move as an “environmental milestone.” Slate hailed the Starbucks straw ban as evidence of as a victory for a bona fide anti-straw movement, one that would hopefully lead to bans of more things plastic in years to come.
Yet missing from this fanfare was the inconvenient fact that by ditching plastic straws, Starbucks will actually be increasing its plastic use. As it turns out, the new nitro lids that Starbucks is leaning on to replace straws are made up of more plastic than the company’s current lid/straw combination.
Right now, Starbucks patrons are topping most of their cold drinks with either 3.23 grams or 3.55 grams of plastic product, depending on whether they pair their lid with a small or large straw. The new nitro lids meanwhile weigh either 3.55 or 4.11 grams, depending again on lid size.
(I got these results by measuring Starbucks’ plastic straws and lids on two separate scales, both of which gave me the same results.)
This means customers are at best breaking even under Starbucks’ strawless scheme, or they are adding between .32 and .88 grams to their plastic consumption per drink. Given that customers are going to use a mix of the larger and smaller nitro lids, Starbucks’ plastic consumption is bound to increase, although it’s anybody’s guess as to how much.
And the main argument in favor seems to be… raising awareness?
Comment → -Straw bans aren’t going to save the ocean, but they could jumpstart much-needed conversations about the level of non-biodegradable trash in them.
I don’t think there is any such thing as a “private person” anymore. The vast majority of us constantly groom our internet presence, choosing the right filter on Instagram for our brunch and taking polls of our friends about our next Facebook profile picture. We don’t think about this as a public act when we have only 400 connections on LinkedIn or 3,000 followers on Tumblr. No one imagines the Daily Mail write-up or the Jezebel headline. We actively create our public selves, every day, one social media post at a time. Little kids dream of becoming famous YouTubers the same way I wanted to be a published author when I was twelve.
But there are also those of us who don’t choose this. We keep our accounts locked, our Instagram profile set to “friends only.” Maybe we learned a lesson when a post took off and left the safe haven of our community, picked apart in a horrifying display of context collapse. Maybe we are hiding from something: a stalker, an abusive ex, our family members who don’t know our true queer identity. To some of us, privacy is as vital as oxygen. Without it we are exposed—butterflies with our wings pinned to the corkboard, our patterns scrutinized under a magnifying glass. For what? For entertainment? For someone else’s mid-workday escapism? For a starring role in someone else’s bastardized rom com?
A woman boarded a plane in New York and stepped off that plane in Dallas. She chatted with a stranger, showed him some family photos, brushed his elbow with her own. She wore a baseball cap over her face and followed him back on Instagram. At no point did she agree to participate in the story Rosey Blair was telling. After the fact, when the hunt began and the woman took no part in encouraging it the way Holden did, Blair tweeted a video in which she drawled, “We don’t have the gal’s permish yet, not yet y’all, but I’m sure you guys are sneaky, you guys might…”
Blair’s followers were sneaky. They did as they were told and immediately replied with screenshots of the woman’s Instagram account. They shared links.
When people called Blair out for this blatant invasion of privacy, she blocked them. Because she, apparently, could control her own boundaries. Later she tweeted about wanting a job at BuzzFeed.
Source: We Are All Public Figures Now – Ella Dawson
Comment → -DAG Rosenstein announced indictments of 12 Russian GRU members for various activities related to the 2016 Presidential Election.
The 12 were members of Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU, and are accused of engaging in a sustained effort to hack the computer networks of Democratic organizations and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein planned to detail the new charges at a mid-day press conference. Mueller, as has been his practice, was not expected to attend the announcement. Court records show a grand jury Mueller has been using returned an indictment Friday morning.
Mueller and a team of prosecutors have been working since May 2017 to determine if any Trump associates conspired with Russia to interfere in the election. His work had already led to charges against 20 people on crimes ranging from money laundering to lying to the FBI. Fourteen of those charged earlier are Russians who are unlikely to ever be put on trial in the United States.
“There is no allegation in this indictment that Americans knew they were corresponding with Russian intelligence officers,” Rosenstein said in his announcement.
The charges come just days before President Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. Rosenstein said he briefed Mr. Trump on the indictment earlier this week.
The charges come after Mueller’s investigation has already led to the indictment of 12 Russian nationals earlier this year.
The indictment charges 11 of the defendants with conspiracy to commit computer crimes, eight counts of aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money, according to the special counsel’s office. Two of the defendants are charged with a separate conspiracy to commit computer crimes.
In the face of alleged foreign interference, Rosenstein urged unity and patriotism against foreign interference.
“The partisan warfare fueled by modern technology does not fairly reflect the grace, dignity and unity of the American people,” Rosenstein said.
Let’s all hope that last statement hold ups. Full indictment can be read here.
Comment → -
A very old argument comes to a contemporary debate. In a fascinating article @Frankpasquale starts at Hayek and runs a thread through Jefferson and Hamilton to the current debate about what, if anything, should be done about the might of Google, Facebook, and other big tech.
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Society is in the midst of refactoring itself into various HCS-dominant group-justice poles and an LCS-dominant individual-liberty pole, with a bunch of disorganized JCS-types trying to propose solutions that might work for everyone.
I have to disagree totally with that. There is not some individual-liberty pole. At all. That simply does not exist.
You identify this hypothetical pole as libertarianism, and you are correct...but have failed to notice that libertarianism, functionally, does not exist either. It has never existed. Don't misunderstand, I will admit it is a fairly coherent political philosophy. But it's one with almost no support at all.
It's something that the wealthy have _wished_ existed for a very long time, and built entire structures in places to support, and schools to teach it, and pundits to extol the virtues of it, but the amount of actual human beings that believe in the _philosophy_ (As opposed to just calling themselves that because they don't want to call themselves 'conservative'.) is within statistical margin of error of not existing.
Weird fact: There's actually a much larger group of _anti_-libertarians, the ones who are 'socially conservative' but 'fiscally liberal'. They are generally known as 'Republican voters'.
This is because, even weirder fact: Basically no one is 'fiscally conservative'. Almost no actual human beings outside of internet debaters(1) hold that position, or dislikes the _concept_ of the government paying for useful things, or thinks that, as a matter of principle, the government should spend less.
This is why the politicians have _always_ had to explain 'cuts to spending' support by appealing to various identities, making sure their voters knew 'the wrong' people were getting money from the government. (Usually the right does this, but the left has also.) People are completely fine with the government spending money on 'deserving people like me who need help', so almost all 'fiscal conservativism' is just explaining, over and over, how 'different' and 'undeserving' those people are.
Or, let's pretend I'm a conservative for a moment, and rephrase that: Almost all 'fiscal conservativism' is just explaining, over and over, how specific government programs fail, and waste money, and cause people to want handouts instead of actually helping themselves. (I think that's entirely fair characterization of the conservative POV..)
The thing is, actual fiscal conservatives would not have to have that repeated over and over. They'd be against government spending in a general sense, people wouldn't have to explain _why_ something doesn't work. It's like, if someone doesn't like pop music, there's no point in someone explaining to them why they shouldn't like a certain piece of pop music.
And, yes, somehow, that has to be constantly explained. No one ever says 'Look, this government program seems to work well, and has some success, but we really shouldn't be spending this money just on political principle, it's not worth taking the money in taxes.'. It's always some specific failure of a specific program...because the amount of people who actually dislike pop music in general is like 2% of the population. (At least in this analogy, no idea in real life.)
--
So, anyway, right now, the actual dominant poles in American politics are a 'HCS' one that looks increasingly like white Christianist nationalism, and a different 'HCS' one that looking increasingly like a bunch of people just completely horrified at the other pole.
1) See, the problem is, when you go online to a place to discuss politics, and say 'Libertarians, as in actual libertarians, people who know the political philosophy, and aren't just 'Republicans plus pot', barely exist', like three people will chime in explaining they are, indeed, real libertarians. Well, yes, because this is a place on the internet where we talk about politics and people with offbeat political philosophies are a dime a dozen. But it is perhaps worth nothing we probably have more outright Marxists and anarchists than libertarians, and we don't think of _those_ as serious players in the political arena. The only reason we think of libertarians that way is that billions of dollars have been spent on making them look like it.
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