Friday, May 31, 2024
About 219,000 Workers Filed For Unemployment Last Week
The Labor Department released its weekly unemployment report on Thursday. It showed that about 219,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending on May 25th. Here is the official Labor Department statement:
Int he week ending May 25, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 219,000, an increase of 3,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 215,000 to 216,000. The 4-week moving average was 222,500, an increase of 2,500 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 219,750 to 220,000.
Alito And Thomas Should Be Forced To Recuse Themselves
It has become obvious that Justices Alito and Thomas are biased in the cases concerning Donald Trump, but both are refusing to recuse themselves. Maybe it is time to force those recusals. Here is part of what Rep. Jamie Raskin has to say about that in The New York Times:
Many people have gloomily accepted the conventional wisdom that because there is no binding Supreme Court ethics code, there is no way to force Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from the Jan. 6 cases that are before the court.
Justices Alito and Thomas are probably making the same assumption.
But all of them are wrong. . . .
Justices Alito and Thomas face a groundswell of appeals beseeching them not to participate in Trump v. United States, the case that will decide whether Mr. Trump enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, and Fischer v. United States, which will decide whether Jan. 6 insurrectionists — and Mr. Trump — can be charged under a statute that criminalizes “corruptly” obstructing an official proceeding.
Everyone assumes that nothing can be done about the recusal situation because the highest court in the land has the lowest ethical standards — no binding ethics code or process outside of personal reflection. Each justice decides for him- or herself whether he or she can be impartial. . . .
The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455. . . .
The constitutional and statutory standards apply to Supreme Court justices. The Constitution, and the federal laws under it, is the “supreme law of the land,” and the recusal statute explicitly treats Supreme Court justices like other judges: “Any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” The only justices in the federal judiciary are the ones on the Supreme Court.
This recusal statute, if triggered, is not a friendly suggestion. It is Congress’s command, binding on the justices, just as the due process clause is. The Supreme Court cannot disregard this law just because it directly affects one or two of its justices. Ignoring it would trespass on the constitutional separation of powers because the justices would essentially be saying that they have the power to override a congressional command.
When the arguments are properly before the court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Sonia Sotomayor will have both a constitutional obligation and a statutory obligation to enforce recusal standards.
Indeed, there is even a compelling argument based on case law that Chief Justice Roberts and the other, unaffected justices should raise the matter of recusal on their own (or sua sponte). Numerous circuit courts have agreed with the Eighth Circuit that this is the right course of action when members of an appellate court are aware of “overt acts” of a judge reflecting personal bias. Cases like this stand for the idea that appellate jurists who see something should say something instead of placing all the burden on parties in a case who would have to risk angering a judge by bringing up the awkward matter of potential bias and favoritism on the bench.
But even if no member of the court raises the issue of recusal, the urgent need to deal with it persists. Once it is raised, the court would almost surely have to find that the due process clause and Section 455 compel Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves. To arrive at that substantive conclusion, the justices need only read their court’s own recusal decisions. . . .
The federal statute on disqualification, Section 455(b), also makes recusal analysis directly applicable to bias imputed to a spouse’s interest in the case. Ms. Thomas and Mrs. Alito (who, according to Justice Alito, is the one who put up the inverted flag outside their home) meet this standard. A judge must recuse him- or herself when a spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest in a case that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”
Thursday, May 30, 2024
Trump Could Make An Ethically-Challenged Court Even Worse
The following post is by Dan Rather:
No one has ever cast their ballot for Samuel Alito. Ditto Clarence Thomas. Or any Supreme Court justice. They are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, then guaranteed a job for life. And they are accountable to no one.
It’s a sweet deal as long as you can stay on the straight and narrow. Today that unwritten but implied requirement seems almost quaint.
We have taken for granted that justices should be impartial, should have sound judgment and their conduct should be beyond reproach. Unfortunately, “shoulds” leave a lot of room for interpretation.
And it was always understood that in order for the American people to have faith in the high court, the justices must display unimpeachable integrity. For the past 233 years, this has seldom been an issue. Now it is a major one.
As you may have seen, Justice Samuel Alito has a flag problem. Well, two flags, actually. Flags flown at his homes in Virginia and New Jersey are symbols used by the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
Justice Clarence Thomas has a billionaire problem. ProPublica has reported how Harlan Crow, a heavily monied Texan, paid for luxury vacations for Thomas and his wife and funded their nephew’s private school tuition, among other gifts. In addition, Mrs. Thomas was involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Neither of these justices should be involved in cases dealing with the January 6 insurrection or Trump’s claim of absolute immunity. But they are, and there is no mechanism to stop them. Democrats’ demands that Alito and Thomas recuse themselves have been ignored.
The approval rating of the Supreme Court has never been lower. However, an approval rating for a group with lifetime tenure and no accountability is fairly meaningless. Historically, the Supreme Court has not had, nor needed, a code of ethics, going back to the first court in 1790. But after the revelations about Crow’s gifts to Thomas, Congress made it clear that something had to be done.
That did not sit well with some Supreme Court justices, including a vociferous Justice Alito. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last summer, he said, “Congress did not create the Supreme Court. No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”
Justice Elena Kagan vehemently disagreed with her colleague’s assertions, arguing that Congress can and does regulate the court. “Congress funds the Supreme Court. Congress historically has made changes to the court’s structure and composition. Congress has made changes to the court’s appellate jurisdiction. We’re not imperial.”
The high court, it seems, is not immune from the rancor and hostility overwhelming the rest of the country.
Finally, late last year, Chief Justice John Roberts announced the court had agreed to a voluntary code of conduct. But because it is so full of loopholes and lacks an enforcement mechanism, critics say it’s toothless.
The court that Donald Trump packed with three far-right jurists is steering the country and setting the political agenda much more than Congress, despite the resounding unpopularity of many of those decisions, such as the one that overturned Roe v. Wade.
And more are coming. In the weeks ahead, decisions on controversial cases from bump stock bans to medication abortion to Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution are expected.
Three of the current justices are in their 70s. There’s a good chance whoever wins the presidency in November will fill more than one court vacancy. A strategy for Democrats would be to hammer home the long-term effects of this election on all three branches of government.
This, among many other reasons, is why defeating Donald Trump matters well beyond the four years he would occupy the Oval Office.
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Ken Burns Commencement Address At Brandeis University
The following is an excerpt from historian Ken Burns' speech at Brandeis University:
But it's clear as individuals and as a nation we are dialectically preoccupied. Everything is either right or wrong, red state or blue state, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, Palestinian or Israeli, my way or the highway. Everywhere we are trapped by these old, tired, binary reactions, assumptions, and certainties. For filmmakers and faculty, students and citizens, that preoccupation is imprisoning. Still, we know and we hear and we express only arguments, and by so doing, we forget the inconvenient complexities of history and of human nature. . . .
In a filmed interview I conducted with the writer James Baldwin, more than 40 years ago, he said, "No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it. That is, slavery is a condition imposed from without. Of course, the moment I say that," Baldwin continued, "I realize that multitudes and multitudes of people for various reasons of their own enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example," he went on, "are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negroes are slaves. People who love money are slaves. We are living in a universe really of willing slaves, which makes the concept of liberty and the concept of freedom so dangerous," he finished. Baldwin is making a profoundly psychological and even spiritual statement, not just a political or racial or social one. He knew, just as Lincoln knew, that the enemy is often us. We continue to shackle ourselves with chains we mistakenly think is freedom.
Another voice, Mercy Otis Warren, a philosopher and historian during our revolution put it this way, "The study of the human character at once opens a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul. We there find a noble principle implanted in the nature of people, but when the checks of conscience are thrown aside, humanity is obscured." I have had the privilege for nearly half a century of making films about the US, but I have also made films about us. That is to say the two letter, lowercase, plural pronoun. All of the intimacy of "us" and also "we" and "our" and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and even controversy of the US. And if I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us. There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment, which brings me to a moment I've dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality.
There is no real choice this November. There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route. When, as Mercy Otis Warren would say, "The checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed." The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems. When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, "a bigger delusion", James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer. . . .
Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, "god in us". Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
60% Of Texas Support Legalizing Marijuana
The chart above is from the Texas Lyceum Poll -- done between April 12th and 21st of 1,000 adults in the state of Texas. It has a 2.83 point margin of error.
Trump Told Us What He'll Do - Why Don't Voters Believe It?
The following post is by Ruth Ben-Ghiat at MSNBC. Here is part of it:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who incited a violent insurrection in January 2021 to try and remain in office illegally after he lost the 2020 election, has been clear about what kind of president he intends to be if he returns to the White House in January 2025.
In December 2023, he declared that he would be a dictator “on Day One” of his time in office. He proposed deploying the National Guard and even the military as a deportation force in an April interviewwith Time magazine. Add in his recent statement at the National Rifle Association convention that he might need three terms, and a new video from his Truth Social account with multiple references to the “creation of a unified Reich” — the Nazi government was known as the Third Reich — and it seems likely that a Trump victory would usher in a new autocratic era for America.
Yet it seems that so many in America are treating this election as politics as usual. Primaries, caucuses and other events proceed, even as the Republican nominee refuses to commit to accepting lawful election results if he is not the victor. And most of the GOP still embraces the false reality that Trump won the 2020 election as well.
This surreal situation reflects both an information deficit and a disinformation surfeit. A March poll of swing-state voters revealedthat most respondents were unaware of Trump’s criminal charges, dictator threats, use of fascist language (such as calling people “vermin”), and vows to pardon the “patriots” who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. More worryingly still, the poll excluded voters who believed Biden stole the 2020 election. Those surveyed, though they are not lost in the Trumpist alternate universe, lack the information to take the threats to our democracy seriously.
And many better-informed Americans don’t take Trump’s proclamations and actions seriously either. Instead, they accuse those who are sounding the alarm at his strongman actions and rhetoric of hyperbole and hysteria.
Certainly, Americans are prone to thinking “it can’t happen here.” Our country has lived on its reputation as a bastion of freedom and democracy, and since we have never had a national dictatorship at home (though the Jim Crow South was a regional authoritarianism), many people don’t recognize autocratic creep as it unfolds. But as Robert Kagan’s stirring essay for The Washington Post put it: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
Yet too many are still pretending. President Joe Biden’s age receives far more coverage than Trump’s declarations that if he returns to the White House he will detain and deport millions of people and allowVladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.” Such is his affinity for Russia’s authoritarian that he’d let Moscow attack NATO member states if they pose obstacles to Putin’s imperialist ambitions — a situation that could trigger World War III.
These dire outcomes can seem unreal, a world away from our daily lives of school pickups, doctor visits, work commitments and sports competitions. Dwelling in denial is the default mode for millions who have taken our freedoms for granted and don’t want to think about how their lives would be altered by the advent of authoritarian governance in America. . . .
Tyranny “advances with the pace of a tightening screw rather than with the dash of the executioner’s blade,” wrote the Italian anti-Fascist exile G.A. Borgese in 1937. We can learn from this sad history and treat the actions and declarations of Trump with all the gravity they deserve.
Monday, May 27, 2024
Congress Should Cease Political Theater And Fix The Border
The following is part of an editorial by The Washington Post editorial board:
Washington needs to craft a better system to manage the mass migration of people seeking asylum in the United States, as migrants request U.S. protection at massive rates, knowing that the process for vetting their claims will drag out. That requires, above all, clear standards to determine who is entitled to protection that are enforced swiftly and certainly. Otherwise, they will not be credible. The bipartisan bill would have done some good in this respect. But its backers vastly oversold what it could accomplish.
Consider its provision to “shut the border” amid large surges of asylum seekers. There is a close precedent: Title 42, the rule deployed during the covid-19 pandemic, from March 2020 until May 2023, to summarily expel migrants on public health grounds without hearing their asylum applications. Trump adviser Stephen Miller said it could be invoked again to keep out “severe strains of the flu” or “scabies.”
Three million people were expelled under the rule. But it didn’t stop the flow. Border Patrol encounters with migrants increased sharply, largely because, under Title 42, they didn’t face consequences for repeat illegal entries, including criminal prosecution. So those kicked out would turn around and try again, hoping to sneak through undetected. Recidivists rose from 7 percent of encounters in fiscal 2019 to 27 percent in 2021. Unauthorized migrants whom U.S. agents detected but failed to catch — “gotaways” in Border Patrol parlance — also soared as migrants kept trying until they made it.
That was hardly the only glitch. Washington soon discovered it couldn’t apply Title 42 to everyone showing up at the border because often there was nowhere to send people back to. Overall, only 41 percent of those encountered at the border were expelled using the rule. The United States could expel single adults coming from Mexico and Central America, because Mexico would accept them. But countries such as Venezuela, Cuba and China would not take back their citizens. Only 8 percent of single adults not from Central America or Mexico got kicked out under Title 42.
Beyond political showmanship, “fixing” the border requires sending a credible signal around the world that the United States can enforce its rules. Today, it can’t. The country doesn’t have the agents to conduct interviews to find out whether migrants meet the standard to request asylum, the judges to rule on whether asylum is warranted, or enough beds to house migrants until these things are determined.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance, reports 1.3 million immigrants scattered around the country who have been denied permission to stay and face removal orders. ICE cannot detain 1.3 million people — it has only 40,000 beds. Nor can it deport them quickly, even if their home country would take them back. It has 11 planes. . . .
To be fair, the bipartisan Senate deal included provisions to boost the credibility of the United States’ rules. It would have funded more than 4,300 new asylum officers and support staff, 100 additional immigration judge teams, 1,500 Border Patrol agents and customs officers, 1,200 ICE staff to help with deportations. It would have increased detention capacity and added deportation flights.
This, but at a grander scale, would offer the best shot at bringing the border under control. After the political skirmishing is done, lawmakers ought to work on a solution.
Sunday, May 26, 2024
Saturday, May 25, 2024
Most Think Trump Is Guilty In His New York Trial
The charts above are from the CBS News / YouGov Poll - done between May 14th and 21st of a nationwide sample of 1,402 adults, with a 4.4 point margin of error.
Trump Would Reverse Global Warming Progress For Money
The following is part of a post by Dan Rather:
President Biden calls climate change an “existential threat.” His administration has been responsible for more than 100 new laws and initiatives aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and cutting pollution. A big part of his agenda is transitioning from gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles. . . .
For months Donald Trump has been openly hostile toward electric vehicles, saying they will “kill” the auto industry. His remarks are at odds with an industry embracing EV production. Maybe it’s because the United Auto Workers endorsed Biden. But perhaps there’s a different reason — money.
Trump, long a climate change denier, doesn’t want to unplug only the electric car effort; he’s against wind and solar energy too. Last month he held a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for 20 oil and gas executives. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee reportedly offered that, if elected, he would scrap every one of Biden’s new environmental regulations in exchange for the oil execs raising $1 billion for Trump’s campaign.
Call it what you want: a shakedown, quid pro quo, scandalous, but apparently it isn’t illegal. He went on to suggest that $1 billion is a “deal” for the oil companies because of the taxes and financial regulations they wouldn’t have to pay. While dealmaking like this isn’t new, the stunning transparency is.
Senate Democrats think so too. Today, they opened a second investigation into that now infamous meeting and whether Trump offered a “policies-for-money transaction.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or an environmental scientist, to know our planet is changing, and fast. We can all feel it. Weather experts say higher temperatures are causing more severe weather, more frequently.
More needs to be done. The White House climate initiatives are only a beginning. To abandon them now would be, well, madness. I want my grandchildren and your grandchildren to know that we did our best to save our democracy and our planet.
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