Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Last Call For The Cruelty Is The Point, Con't

Adam Serwer reminds us once again, that with Justice Alito and the Republican appointees on the Roberts Court and Alito's leaked opinion overturning Roe, the cruelty is absolutely the point.

Alito claims to be sweeping away one of the great unjust Supreme Court precedents, such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that Black people had no rights white men were bound to respect, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. But in truth, Alito is employing the logic of Plessy, allowing the states to violate the individual rights of their residents in any way their legislatures deem “reasonable,” as the opinion in Plessy put it. Homer Plessy’s argument was that the segregation law violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that those rights should not be subject to a popularity contest in every state in the union; what Alito describes as a “restrictive regime” of constitutional protection for abortion rights is the kind of safe harbor Plessy himself sought.

In Plessy, Justice Henry Billings Brown held that Louisiana’s segregation law, as far as the Fourteenth Amendment was concerned, “reduces itself to the question whether the statute of Louisiana is a reasonable regulation, and, with respect to this, there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature.” Alito has now applied this same logic to abortion—but not just abortion—arguing that in the future, courts should defer to state legislatures “even when the laws at issue concern matters of great social significance and moral substance.” There’s no doubt that the Louisiana legislature felt the 1890 Separate Car Act was such an issue.

Plessy is, at its absolute core, a states’-rights case, in which the Court envisioned a notion of federalism so weak, so toothless, so bereft of substance that the federal government had no legitimate role in protecting Black people from states imposing racial segregation upon them,” Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me. “This draft does the same thing: It envisions a notion of federalism so weak, so toothless, so bereft of substance that the federal government has no legitimate role in protecting women from states imposing forced births upon them.”

The implications of this ruling are therefore tremendous. Notwithstanding the reality that being a woman does not mean being pro-abortion-rights, all over the world the right to decide when and whether to give birth is tied to the political, social, and economic rights of women as individuals. That right is likely to be severely curtailed or to vanish entirely in at least 26 states if this decision takes effect. If the draft becomes the Court’s decision, however, it would have implications for more than just abortion. In the U.S., the rights of many marginalized groups are tied to the legal precedents established in the fight for abortion rights. This opinion, if adopted, provides a path to nullifying those rights one by one.

“The majority can believe that it’s only eviscerating a right to abortion in this draft,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me, “but the means by which it does so would open the door to similar attacks on other unenumerated rights, both directly, by attacking the underpinnings of those doctrines, and indirectly, by setting a precedent for such an attack.”

Aside from rights specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, Alito argues, only those rights “deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition” deserve its protections. This is as arbitrary as it is lawless. Alito is saying there is no freedom from state coercion that conservatives cannot strip away if conservatives find that freedom personally distasteful. The rights of heterosexual married couples to obtain contraception, or of LGBTQ people to be free from discrimination, are obvious targets. But other rights that Americans now take for granted could easily be excluded by this capricious reasoning.
 
Understand that if Alito's opinion holds, everything you take for granted as a right guaranteed by America is now solely up to the state legislature where you live, and that state legislature can take that right away. 

This was always the long game, as I've said before. State legislatures gerrymandered into permanent Republican control with super-majority margins to override vetoes from governors means the civil rights era all goes away.

Unless something radical changes, that is our destination by the end of the decade, if not the middle.

The cruelty, to women, to LGTBQ+ folks, to immigrants, to Black folk, to Latinos, to Asian and Pacific Islander folks, to Muslims and Jews, to anyone who is not a straight white Christian male, is the damn point.

And that cruelty will fall like summer rain.

Or, well, to be more accurate, like blood.

Ryan Versus The Hillbilly Hypocrite

 I've still not forgotten how Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan went after Nancy Pelosi with the intent of replacing her as Speaker and got his ass so thoroughly handed to him that he had to put out his palms to sit down.

But here we are in 2022 and Ohio's US Senate race is Ryan versus JD Vance, and Ryan wasted no time going after Hillbilly Hypocrite.

 

Ryan it seems actually has learned his lesson, and remembers which team he actually works for. Vance is an absolute clown and this is a winnable seat for the Dems now. You'd better believe Trump will be all over this race, and that's exactly what Ryan needs in order to turn out voters to remind them of what the other side actually represents.

Oh yeah, and Roe v. Wade is dead and a number of other civil rights are going down, so suddenly flipping this Senate seat because an absolute priority.

Give to Ryan here.

 

 

 

 

The Return Of The Time Turner

Looks like OH-11 Rep. Shontel Brown has more than made her case to run again in November to Cleveland voters as she handed primary challenger and Bernout Nina Turner a far more embarrassing loss than in last August.

Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, won a rematch Tuesday against Nina Turner, a progressive activist and former state senator who is known nationally for her work on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaigns, NBC News projects.

Brown was leading 63.4 percent to 36.6 percent, with 53 percent of precincts reporting at 10:32 p.m. ET.

Brown beat Turner by 5.5 percentage points in a crowded special primary last summer and then easily won the vacant seat in Ohio’s overwhelmingly Democratic 11th Congressional District in the general election
. Turner had hoped that new district boundaries, which now include more of Cleveland and the liberal bordering suburb of Lakewood, would be friendlier turf for her.

This year’s battle was quieter, lacking the national establishment-vs.-progressive intrigue that Brown and Turner played into the first time. Brown, who chairs the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, aligned herself closely with President Joe Biden and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, the district’s former representative, whose appointment to the Cabinet opened the seat. Turner co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 campaign against Biden and was on record making an obscene comment about the future president.

After losing last year, Turner decried the influx of what she called “evil money” into the race — a reference to spending by outside organizations and pro-Israel groups that saw Brown as a more reliable ally. Some Jewish leaders found the remark to play into antisemitic stereotypes. 
 
So Turner went from a 5.5 percent loss to a 25+ point loss. Yes, it sure was a great idea to waste all that money going after a primary race for a party that Turner said five years ago that she wanted no part of anymore, wasn't it?

Turner immediately blamed "outside money" for her loss, after fundraising nationally for...outside money using endorsements from Bernie and AOC. Smart!

Anyway, she announced her 2024 effort to primary Joe Biden/run against Kamala Harris which should go even better for her next time.

Right?