The NYT lists The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results in January 2021; the eight senators and 139 representatives who voted to sustain one or both objections to certifying the presidential election. Remember them.
Well, with the release of the latest West Virginia v. EPA decision (details here), it seems to me that once the rulings have begun to demonstrate clearly appalling consequences for the safety of US citizens and for the planet, as well as send an overt signal that may prevent federal agencies from properly regulating their charged duties, it’s time to consider reining in this court to prevent future erroneous actions. See Ezra Klein’s excellent podcast interview with Columbia Law professor Jamal Greene for a wonderful discussion on the subject of improving the court – and not just changing it for reasons of partisanship.
From the Dobbs v. Jackson majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade:
“Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
From the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Seems contradictory, no? Consider that the mortality rate for a term pregnancy of a black woman in Mississippi is more than 100 times the mortality rate for a first term abortion. Shouldn’t the right to life be retained by the people who are living? How ironic.
The NEJM editors have published a relevant editorial dated June 26, 2022: Lawmakers v. The Scientific Realities of Human Reproduction
John Gruber at the always excellent Daring Fireball pulls some sadly relevant language from the dissent of the all-too-erroneous Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court Decision. John’s last quote from that dissent (it starts on page 148 of the decision), written by justices, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan follows:
“One of us once said that “[i]t is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” For all of us, in our time on this Court, that has never been more true than today. In overruling Roe and Casey, this Court betrays its guiding principles.
With sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection — we dissent.”
From the You Should Have Known Better Department; Emily Baker-White, writing in BuzzFeed, notes that TikTok “US User Data Has Been Repeatedly Accessed From China.” No surprise at all there, kinda like the crypto crashes. An excerpt:
“I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.
Many of these access attempts have supposedly been from a team assigned to check security, but there is not yet any such absolute block to Chinese data access. Be careful out there…
It’s most unsettling to me how many Americans seem that they would be happier living in Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, and are intent on driving the bus in that direction. See the latest Texas Republican Party’s platform and resolutions, here. For a selection of some of the more egregious examples, [popup_anything id=”2255″]
Some positive information, this from David Leonhardt’s NYT Morning Newsletter of June 9. An excerpt:
“…Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.”
and
“The successful part of the story is the rapid increase in vaccination among Black and Latino Americans since last year. Today, the vaccination rate for both groups is slightly higher than it is for white Americans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s surveys.”
Gosh, it seems that getting vaccinated against Covid may save lives…
As I had noted in a previous post, Kim Stanley Robinson does a superb job of rendering climate change’s near future earth in his novel The Ministry for the Future. The harrowing first chapter I mentioned back then foreshadowed this year’s heat wave in India. And now Bill Gates has joined Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, and Bill McKibben in recommending the novel. I urge you to give it a read.
Donald McNeil writes a nice piece in Medium discussing the recent Monkeypox outbreak, including his views on an appropriate level of concern (his is a bit more than mine). But definitely worth reading..
Tom Friedman, writing in the NY Times, I think has it right when he argues that the US ought to be more circumspect when speaking publicly about the war in Ukraine. An excerpt:
“Our goal began simple and should stay simple: Help Ukrainians fight as long as they have the will and help them negotiate when they feel the time is right — so they can restore their sovereignty and we can reaffirm the principle that no country can just devour the country next door. Freelance beyond that and we invite trouble.”