Alex Abramovich · Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie: ‘Country Music’ · LRB 8 October 2020

Alex Abramovich · Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie: ‘Country Music’ · LRB 8 October 2020
Country Music 
directed by Ken Burns.
PBS, eight episodes

In​ October 2017, two months after white supremacists had held a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both sides,’ Trump said, comparing the marchers – who carried torches and chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ – with those who had come out to protest against their presence.) In many quarters Kelly was taken to task. But when Trump’s (then) press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked about it, she concurred. ‘I don’t know that I’m going to get into debating the Civil War,’ she said. ‘But I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’s famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War.’

Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a sympathetic hearing to the notion of the ‘Lost Cause’. ‘Basically,’ Foote said at the start, ‘it was a failure on our part to find a way not to fight that war. It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is for compromising. Our whole government’s founded on it. And it failed.’

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Biden breaks through in 'mud wrestling' debate with Trump | National Catholic Reporter

Biden breaks through in 'mud wrestling' debate with Trump | National Catholic Reporter
by Michael Sean winters

President Donald Trump had a clear objective going into last night's debate: He needed to define Joe Biden as an unacceptable choice for the voters. His convention tried to do that, and failed. His barrage of tweets has tried to do that, and failed. He needed to make sure that at the end of the 90-minute debate, people saw Biden as a broken man incapable of leading the country.

Biden, like all challengers, needed to keep the focus on the incumbent, not least because of the dire straits in which the country finds itself. He needed to strike a most difficult balance between appealing to his base and appearing like a man who can unite a country divided and exhausted by Trump's antics.

Instead of a debate, the country witnessed the first ever debate that was not a debate at all, but a professional wrestling match in which the combatants happened to be wearing suits and ties. From the very beginning, the president kept interrupting Biden and within 20 minutes, the moderator, Fox News' Chris Wallace, was visibly and self-admittedly exasperated by the president's continued interruptions.

Halfway through the debacle, however, one sentence broke through the disjointed exchanges and countless interruptions. The president was asked about The New York Times' reporting on his federal income taxes. He denied the central claim of the Times' story and pivoted to allegations about Biden's son Hunter making millions of dollars from foreign corporations. Several minutes of mud wrestling ensued, but then Biden said something which may have won him the election. Looking into the camera, he said, "This is not about my family or his family. It is about your family."

I helped write the bishops’ first document on Catholics and voting. Here’s why I’m voting Biden, not Trump. | America Magazine

I helped write the bishops’ first document on Catholics and voting. Here’s why I’m voting Biden, not Trump. | America Magazine
by John Carr //Georgetown

For years, I have said that I often feel politically homeless as a pro-life, social justice, consistent-ethic Catholic. This is not a badge of honor. If we Catholics are politically homeless, it is because we have failed to build a home. Sometimes we cannot even find shelter.

Our homelessness has many causes. We have not persuaded others to share our commitment to protect all human life and promote the dignity of all God’s children. Powerful partisan factions and ideological interests have emphasized personal autonomy and freedom over community and solidarity. Our church too often proclaims positions, rather than listening and learning, engaging and dialoguing in a search for the common good.

Hillary Clinton tells Trump about taxes in 2016 debate

 

In 2016 Bill and Hillary Clinton paid $3.24 million in federal taxes.

Trump paid $750. He’s the #750dollars manpic.twitter.com/gRLnOWA6xn

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 28, 2020

Opinion | Are Republican Judges Putting Their Thumbs on the Electoral Scale? - The New York Times

Opinion | Are Republican Judges Putting Their Thumbs on the Electoral Scale? - The New York Times  Answer: It seems so.
by Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean - UC Berkeley School of Law)

List of 7th Circuit opinions by Amy Coney Barrett - SCOTUSblog

List of 7th Circuit opinions by Amy Coney Barrett - SCOTUSblog

Amy Barrett: OK to bar aliens who may need government help

Amy Coney Barrett issued an exhaustive 40 page dissent in June endorsing the Trump administration's anti-immigrant "public charge" rule.  The effort was hardly necessary.   The die was already cast. Two weeks before the February oral argument in her court the United States Supreme Court (5-4), over a powerful Sotomayor dissent, had stayed the preliminary injunction granted to Illinois by a United States District Court judge.
Barrett's dissent is evidence of powerful motivation to gain the nomination which she yesterday delightedly accepted from the President who won his position largely on his crude and bitter opposition to those who would seek refuge on our shores.

Chief Judge Diane P. Wood and her colleague Ilana Rovner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction against the Trump administration rule that bars from entry to the United States any alien it deems likely to turn to public benefits that Congress has permitted such as "subsidized health insurance, supplemental nutrition benefits (food stamps), and housing assistance".  Rovner, the first woman to serve on the Seventh Circuit, as an infant fled Latvia in 1938 to escape the Nazis.

But Amy Coney Barrett was having none of that.  Despite her reportedly estimable kindness she penned a vigorous and detailed 40 page defense of the Trump administration's rejection of a 1999 Guidance that barred from admission only those deemed likely to be "primarily dependent" on public benefits.  

But  we no longer welcome the tired, sick and poor, only those who can and surely will take care of themselves.
Justice Sotomayor was particularly alarmed that the high court has become quick to stay orders of courts below before the matter has gone through the usual appeals and briefing.  With Amy Coney Barrett bringing prodigious energy to advancing her agenda Justice Sotomayor will miss her colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg more than even the Bronx born justice could have fully appreciated.

- GWC
Cook County v. Wolf, Secretary DHS, June 10, 2020
Wood, Chief Judge, 7th Circuit Court of Appeals
Like most people, immigrants to the United States would like greater prosperity for themselves and their families. Nonetheless, it can take time to achieve the American Dream, and the path is not always smooth. Recognizing this, Congress has chosen to make immigrants eligible for various public benefits...
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a new rule designed to prevent immigrants whom the Executive Branch deems likely to receive public assistance in any amount, at any point in the future, from entering the country or adjusting their immigration status. The Rule purports to implement the “public-charge” provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(4). States, cities, and nonprofit groups across the country have filed suits seeking to overturn the Rule.
***
DHS also never explains why it chose not to take into account the possibility that an immigrant might, at some point in the future, be able to repay the value of public benefits received. Someone who seeks to adjust status will be penalized for having previously received public benefits without being given the opportunity to refund the government the cost of those benefits. This is new: the regulations governing deportation on public-charge grounds require a demand and a failure to pay. See 64 Fed. Reg. at 28691.
All of this convinces us that this Rule is likely to fail the “arbitrary and capricious” standard. The Rule has numerous unexplained serious flaws: DHS did not adequately consider the reliance interests of state and local governments; did not acknowledge or address the significant, predictable collateral consequences of the Rule; incorporated into the term “public charge” an understanding of self-sufficiency that has no basis in the statute it supposedly interprets; and failed to address critical issues such as the relevance of the five-year waiting period for immigrant eligibility for most federal benefits...

Confirmed Fears: The Judicial Record of Amy Coney Barrett - People For the American Way

Confirmed Fears: The Judicial Record of Amy Coney Barrett - People For the American Way

Ashish Jha, MD, MPh - Post Labor Day surge of Covid

 

Brown University School of Public Health Dean Ashish Zha, MD, MPh warns us:

Hi! the unroll you asked for: @ashishkjha: Its been nearly 3 weeks since Labor Day We were all worried about surge after holiday Has it happened?… https://t.co/ddqYAIVoGp Have a good day. 🤖

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) September 27, 2020

Judges Express Skepticism Over Trump’s Bid to Block Tax Return Subpoena - The New York Times

Judges Express Skepticism Over Trump’s Bid to Block Tax Return Subpoena - The New York Times
By Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum

Judges on a federal appeals panel expressed skepticism at a hearing on Friday about President Trump’s arguments that a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney seeking eight years of the president’s tax returns was overbroad and issued in bad faith.

The three judges challenged a central argument from Mr. Trump, who has been fighting the subpoena for more than a year. Lawyers for the president have argued that the demand was a politically motivated “fishing expedition,” looking to vacuum up documents related to business dealings far beyond the authority of the Manhattan prosecutor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

Pointedly questioning a lawyer for the president, the judges suggested that the subpoena could be justified because — even though the president has extensive financial dealings and real estate projects around the world — his company is based in New York and his tax returns have been filed there.

D.C. Circuit: House challenge to Trump wall spending to proceed

Senior Judge David B. Sentelle
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has decided that the House of Representatives has standing to challenge the Trump administration's diversion of fund appropriated for other purposes to the construction of Trump's iconic wall on the Mexican Border.
The conservative Senior Circuit Judge David Sentelle, in House of Representatives v. Mnuchin concludes that "The ironclad constitutional rule is that the Executive Branch cannot spend until both the House and the Senate say so." - gwc

D.C. Circuit: House challenge to Trump wall spending to proceed
Sentelle, for the court
***To put it simply, the Appropriations Clause requires two keys to unlock the Treasury, and the House holds one of those keys. The Executive Branch has, in a word, snatched the House’s key out of its hands. That is the injury over which the House is suing. That injury—the snatched key—fits squarely within the Lujan mold because it is not a generalized interest in the power to legislate. Rather, the injury is concrete and particularized to the House and the House alone.
The alleged Executive Branch action cuts the House out of the appropriations process, rendering for naught its vote withholding the Executive’s desired border wall funding and carefully calibrating what type of border security investments could be made.
The injury, in other words, “zeroe[s] in” on the House. Arizona State Legislature, 576 U.S. at 802; see also I.N.S. v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919, 946 (1983) (“These provisions of Art. I are integral parts of the constitutional design for the separation of powers.”). Applying the “especially rigorous” standing analysis that the Supreme Court requires in cases like this, Arizona State Legislature, 576 U.S. at 803 n.12, reinforces the House’s injury in fact. To hold that the House is not injured or that courts cannot recognize that injury would rewrite the Appropriations Clause.
That Clause has long been understood to check the power of the Executive Branch by allowing it to expend funds only as specifically authorized. As then-Judge Kavanaugh wrote for this court, the Appropriations Clause is “a bulwark of the Constitution’s separation of powers among the three branches of the National Government,” and it “is particularly important as a restraint on Executive Branch officers.” U.S. Dep’t of Navy v. Fed. Lab. Rel. Auth., 665 F.3d 1339, 1347 (D.C. Cir. 2012).
The ironclad constitutional rule is that the Executive Branch cannot spend until both the House and the Senate say so. (emph. added. - gwc)

Utah Supreme Court approves Rocket Lawyer and other entities to participate in regulatory “sandbox” | Lawyer Ethics Alert Blogs

Utah Supreme Court approves Rocket Lawyer and other entities to participate in regulatory “sandbox” | Lawyer Ethics Alert Blogs

Hello everyone and welcome to this Ethics Alert, which will discuss recent approval of Rocket lawyer and other entities to participate in Utah’s pilot regulatory “sandbox program. 

On September 8, 2020, Rocket Lawyer announced that it was one of the first entities approved by the Utah Supreme Court to participate in the regulatory “sandbox” program permitting, inter alia, nontraditional legal service providers.  Rocket Lawyer’s website is here:  https://www.rocketlawyer.com/ 

As I previously blogged here: https://jcorsmeier.wordpress.com/2020/08/18/utah-supreme-court-authorizes-pilot-program-which-inter-alia-permits-non-lawyers-to-own-law-firms-and-share-fees-with-lawyers/, the Utah Supreme Court approved the regulatory “sandbox” pilot program as the primary part of a regulatory reform package which was designed to allow the testing of innovative approaches to serving legal consumers will ultimately improve the public’s access to justice.  The Court’s August 14, 2020 Standing Order is here: http://www.utcourts.gov/utc/rules-approved/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/08/FINAL-Utah-Supreme-Court-Standing-Order-No.-15.pdf   

A total of five entities were approved for participation in the sandbox program.  The other approved applicants were:

1. LawHQ: A Salt Lake City law firm which plans to offer equity ownership to certain software developers in the firm and a software application called CallerHQ, which is...

Blame the law for no charges in Breonna Taylor case - Barbara McQuade

 As is usually the case when cops who kill go free you can blame the Supreme Court of the United States.

Barbara McQuade explains how the cops who killed Breonna Taylor in her bedroom at midnight walk.

- GWC

Breonna Taylor Grand Jury Charges Show That the Law Isn’t Always the Same Thing as Justice - Barbara MacQuade
The best thing I've seen on the Breonna Taylor crim chargeshttps://t.co/mjnok5kdpG via @thedailybeast

— George Conk (@GeorgeConk) September 25, 2020

Less Covid, more hunting? No! Gov. Kristi Noem - MORE Covid, less hunting in South Dakota

 Here's another reason why creating South Dakota and giving them two Senators was a bad idea.  After the Sturgis super spreader motorcycle rally cases have gone from 50 or sixty to four hundred or more.  But she likes to kill, so there's that.

"Less Covid, more hunting, this is how we do social distancing." This bloody fool and liar from Sturgis land doesn't tell you that July 23 there was a lot less Covid (66) and September 23 (445). https://t.co/mqh69pLQyU

— George Conk (@GeorgeConk) September 25, 2020

What happens to the Supreme Court with Ruth Bader Ginsburg gone? - Vox

What happens to the Supreme Court with Ruth Bader Ginsburg gone? - Vox
by Ian Millhiser

Barring a miracle or an asteroid strike, the Supreme Court is likely to have a 6-3 Republican majority very soon.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has signaled he intends to back his party’s plan to swiftly confirm a yet-to-be-named replacement for Justice Ruth Bade Ginsburg — and it’s exceedingly unlikely that Democrats can block Trump’s nominee without Romney’s vote.

So the small but significant check Chief Justice John Roberts previously placed on his Republican colleagues will likely soon be gone.

Roberts, frequently the median vote on the current Supreme Court, is very conservative, but he is both less partisan and less aligned with movement conservatism than his fellow Republican justices. He sometimes rejects conservative legal arguments that are poorly reasoned or transparently partisan, or that ask him to move the law to the right faster than he is willing to go. 

With a sixth Republican on the Court, however, this limit on Republican power is likely to disappear. Trump spent the past three and a half years filling federal appellate courts with staunch conservatives, often with the guidance of conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society. That gives him a deep bench of potential Supreme Court nominees who are unlikely to disappoint the GOP in the future.

The Court has already moved significantly to the right since it handed down some decisions protecting LGBTQ rights, limiting police surveillance, and preserving most of Obamacare, among many other things. If Trump fills Ginsburg’s seat, those decisions could be in grave danger.

The Media Learned Nothing From 2016 - The Atlantic

The Media Learned Nothing From 2016 - The Atlantic

 by James Fallows

We’re seeing a huge error, and a potential tragedy, unfold in real time.

That’s a sentence that could apply to countless aspects of economic, medical, governmental, and environmental life at the moment. What I have in mind, though, is the almost unbelievable failure of much of the press to respond to the realities of the Trump age.

Many of our most influential editors and reporters are acting as if the rules that prevailed under previous American presidents are still in effect. But this president is different; the rules are different; and if it doesn’t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure.

In some important ways, media outlets are repeating the mistake made by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In his book about the Mueller investigation, True Crimes and Misdemeanors (and in a New Yorker article), Jeffrey Toobin argues that Mueller’s tragic flaw was a kind of anachronistic idealism—which had the same effect as naivete. Mueller knew the ethical standards he would maintain for himself and insist on from his team. He didn’t understand that the people he was dealing with thought standards were for chumps. Mueller didn’t imagine that a sitting attorney general would intentionally misrepresent his report, which is of course what Bill Barr did. Mueller wanted to avoid an unseemly showdown, or the appearance of a “fishing expedition” inquiry, that would come from seeking a grand-jury subpoena for Donald Trump’s testimony, so he never spoke with Trump under oath, or at all. Trump, Barr, and their team viewed this decorousness as a sign of weakness, which they could exploit.

A portrait of an extraordinary life - SCOTUSblog

A portrait of an extraordinary life - SCOTUSblog

Ruthanne Deutsch is a founding partner at Deutsch Hunt PLLC. She clerked for Ginsburg during the 2007-08 term.

I remember my clerkship interview with Justice Ginsburg as if it were yesterday. I arrived with instructions from helpful former clerks to count to “3 Mississippi” after her pauses, to be sure she had finished saying what she wanted. A high school friend encouraged me to think of her as my Bubba from Brooklyn. The justice was formal (and formidable). But she also was warm, engaged and appreciative of my having attended law school as the mother of two young children. “Two is something,” she gracefully noted. “I only had to care for one child during law school.” Of course she neglected to add that when she was in law school, she also cared for a husband undergoing cancer treatments — essentially taking his classes as well as her own — all while performing at the very top of her class.

As the interview came to its close, we spent some time walking through her chambers looking at the many photographs lining her bookshelves. She paused before her favorite, a picture of her son-in-law with two of her grandchildren, taken when they were small. “This,” she said, “is hope for the future.” What she meant was a world where we all can realize our full potential as human beings, not relegated to the confines of socially (or legally) imposed gender roles. Men can be caregivers just as women can be breadwinners. And the law should pose no obstacle to the full range of life choices and opportunities for anyone, regardless of their gender (or race, or sexual orientation). No surprise that one of her favorite cases from her storied career fighting for gender equality was Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975). There, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a gender-based distinction under the Social Security Act that permitted widows but not widowers to collect special benefits while caring for minor children.

keep reading - link above - it gets better

Fauci closes the door on Rand Paul and `herd immunity'

 

Dr. Rand Paul spreading dangerous and harmful public health misinformation. Disgraceful. https://t.co/V6fBtuTbqu

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) September 23, 2020

California Supreme Court rejects `diploma privilege' will have online exam October 5 - Bloomberg

Law school graduates looking to practice in California will not be able to completely skip the bar exam, the state’s highest court said. The California Supreme Court on Wednesday shot down a request to grant “diploma privilege,” which would allow grads to work as attorneys immediately without passing the biannual bar exam. The court has, however, already directed the state bar to establish a provisional licensing program for 2020 law school graduates, which would allow them a limited right to practice law under the supervision of a licensed attorney. 

 California is set to hold an online version of the test Oct. 5-6. The exam was previously delayed from July and moved online in response to health concerns stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, though there have been concerns voiced over how fair and effective an online test would be. Leaders of the group United for Diploma Privilege filed an emergency petition Sept. 9 to the California Supreme Court, urging justices to waive the state’s bar exam requirement. 

 “What this appears to mean is that our concerns and issues that we’ve reported, are being largely ignored by the court,” said Vincent Bezares, a diploma privilege activist, said in a message to Bloomberg Law. “The lack is response is in keeping with the other state supreme courts throughout the nation,” he added.

 University of California Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky was one of the law school leaders in the state who recently requested that California make its online exam “open book.” “I am not surprised that the California Supreme Court rejected the request for diploma privilege in that they did so earlier in the summer. It means that there will be a test on October 5-6. I hope that they will decide to have an open-book exam without remote proctoring,” said Chemerinsky in an email to Bloomberg Law.

‘It’s for RBG’ - Commonweal

‘It’s for RBG’
by Domic Preziosi, Editor, Commonweal

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg  died Sept. 18, 2020 . 

On the afternoon of September 19, a couple of dozen people gathered outside a Brooklyn apartment building, eyes raised to the top-floor fire escape. Music came from a huge arena-style speaker partially hidden by an American flag. Asked what was going on, a white-haired woman answered from behind her mask: “It’s for RBG.” 
News of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had come the night before. Now came this small and impromptu memorial service. The opening strains of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” filled the street: Ginsburg famously loved opera. Up and down the block, people leaned from their windows to listen. The aria rose to its soaring climax, then yielded seamlessly to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”—a perfect choice, for obvious reasons.

But the mood was solemn and weighted with anxiety: What would Ginsburg’s passing portend for the country, not just in the days ahead, but also in the decades to come? Ginsburg had expressed her wish to live long enough for a new president to choose her replacement on the court; millions of other Americans hoped, maybe prayed, for the same. It was not to be. 
So this president will get his say, and the Republican-led Senate is likely to ram through his choice before the election or in the lame-duck session to follow. It would cement a conservative majority for a generation or more. More immediately, a rushed vote could cast doubt on the legitimacy of the court and worsen our already embattled politics.

The mood was solemn and weighted with anxiety: What would Ginsburg’s passing portend for the country, not just in the days ahead, but also in the decades to come?

As the de facto leader of the court’s liberal minority, Ginsburg developed a reputation for pointed dissents. When she read from the bench, her voice lent additional, no-nonsense moral gravity to her precisely written opinions, composed with the attention to word choice and image her college writing instructor—Vladimir Nabokov—had emphasized. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” she wrote in her [1]Shelby County v. Holder [1] dissent [1] in 2013, evocatively disdaining the majority’s claim that key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act could be eliminated because racist voter suppression was a thing of the past. “When a justice is of the firm view that the majority got it wrong, she is free to say so in dissent,” she wrote later. “I take advantage of that prerogative, when I think it is important, as do my colleagues.”

As a young lawyer, Ginsburg brought about changes that played a role in her appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993 as only the second female justice. Denied academic jobs and clerkships on the basis of her sex—no matter her achievements at Harvard Law—she seized on the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection applied not just to racial discrimination, but also gender discrimination. 
In the 1970s, she won five such cases before the nine men of the high court. Her approach, she later explained, was to school male justices “who did not comprehend the differential  treatment of men and women...as in any sense burdensome to women.... To turn in a new direction, the court first had to gain an understanding that legislation apparently designed to benefit women could have the opposite effect.” 
This principle informed the majority opinion she wrote in 1996, ruling that the all-male Virginia Military Institute could no longer bar women. “Generalizations about ‘the way women are,’ estimates of what is appropriate for most women, no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.” She might have had herself in mind. There’s a reason Ginsburg was a hero to so many. Let her be an inspiration to countless more.