When I covered Trump's tariffs, I discovered that orange crops have cratered in FL.
This explains all the reasons--disease, climate change, overspraying, finance--why.
slate.com/business/202...
A really important column.
I would explicitly name the Posbiecs too. Jack has been riling up hatred since he perfected doing so with a Nazi in 2016, and his lies ginned up PizzaGate which turned into QAnon which played a central role in launching the January 6 insurrection.
A new report shows that Trump appears to support medical fraud, as long as corporate executives and other elites are the ones committing it. buff.ly/cn3eT0r
This is something I've been hoping Dems do for some time. Hold the Senate GOP accountable for every incompetent the confirmed, and the destruction of American lives that resulted, but also for the oversight not exercised, especially over Iran.
INTRODUCTION United States v. Munsingwear.1 As Nina Totenberg has noted, “Munsingwear vacatur sounds like a disease.”2 Few scholars, even those immersed in the worlds of civil procedure and Supreme Court practice, can correctly define it. But this trend is changing. More and more Court watchers are starting to monitor Munsingwear,3 likely because, since 2017 and especially since 2021, the Court has been using it to vacate lower court decisions that favor progressives at an alarming rate.4 The Court is effectively removing precedent with one-line orders rather than choosing the more moderate path of denying certiorari. The political importance of this trend cannot be overstated. The merits of these cases go to the very heart of ideological battles. Relying on Munsingwear, the Court (or at least five Justices of the Court) has wiped away critically important decisions that counter key Republican objectives. Two lower court rulings granted standing to plaintiffs suing former President Donald J. Trump for violations of the Emoluments Clause.5 Gone. One ruling allowed the House Committee on the Judiciary to review grand jury materials in the Trump impeachment.6 Gone. Another ruling invalidated a Tennessee gubernatorial order that halted abortions during COVID.7
Gone. Two rulings invalidated work requirements to receive Medicaid imposed by the Trump Administration.8 Gone. One ruling held that President Trump could not ban followers from his Twitter account.9 Gone. One ruling allowed individuals to sue states directly pursuant to the Voting Rights Act.10 Gone. One ruling upheld the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to extend mail ballot receipt deadlines during COVID.11 Gone. One ruling held that undated ballots could be counted during a Pennsylvania election.12 Gone. One ruling held that the House of Representatives had standing to sue the executive branch for violations of its appropriations power in connection with President Trump’s border wall.13 Gone. One ruling prohibited the Trump Administration from returning asylum seekers to Mexico under its “Migrant Protection Protocols.”14 Gone. All these appellate court decisions are now uncitable, and future actions previously held unlawful must be litigated anew. The Court vacated as many cases between 2017 and the winter of 2023 as it did between 1994 and 2016.15 In most of these recent cases, a party claimed that the case had become moot on appeal because (1) President Trump lost the 2020 election and the Biden Administration thereby abandoned the policies; (2) the policies expired by their own terms; or (3) the particular election at issue came and went. And
admittedly, COVID and the Trump Administration spawned many lawsuits that pertained solely to those (temporary) conditions. Nevertheless, the uptick in Munsingwear vacatur appears to almost entirely favor one set of ideological interests over another—a claim that we empirically test in this Article. In only one of the Munsingwear GVRs—“grant, vacate, remand”—that we identified since 2021 did liberal interests associated with the Democratic Party lose in the court below.16 In that same period, the Court’s orders nullified liberal victories below in eleven cases.17 And the vacation of these decisions is not merely important because the decisions themselves have been wiped off the books. Their elimination is noteworthy because no law is left in their stead; precedent has literally been erased. The same issues are now ripe for relitigation, perhaps before different judges, perhaps with different results that will set different precedent, and now without prior precedent or circuit split in the vacuum. Litigants who watch the Court have begun to perceive the Court’s signals that, if a lower court case does not turn out as anticipated or desired, there may well be a second bite at the apple. This pernicious turn of procedure may seem minor until examined in light of the big picture of issues such as voting rights, immigration rights, and executive power, in which the butterfly effect of one vacated case could lead to entirely new and different branches of law made for generations. Some may ask what harm comes from these vacaturs given that the same judges granting them might likely reverse them on the merits. First, the lack of transparency and deliberation is a harm in itself both to the system and the gaming it invites. Second, the Court is unlikely to grant certiorari and review every single case, and, even if it did, it may well uphold some of the clearer cases on the merits upon full briefing. Third, if the Court simply denied cert, it would allow the circuit courts e…
to lower courts. We lay out an empirical analysis of the Court’s current Munsingwear practice, in which we show that the Court has long disfavored vacated liberal cases at a higher rate, that it is doing so much more often now, and that it is not treating like circumstances alike. This Article contains six parts. In Part I, we explain the procedure the Supreme Court uses to GVR in cases that have become moot on their way to the Court. We then explain Munsingwear and U.S. Bancorp v. Bonner Mall,18 the two cases that comprise the heart of the doctrine. In Part II, we describe one of the most recent cases in which the Court has granted Munsingwear vacatur, a fascinating toe-to-toe about voters’ rights. This case provides a helpful vehicle for understanding the detrimental impact of Munsingwear vacatur on lower court precedent. In Part III, we review the scant literature on the Court’s use of Munsingwear vacatur. In Part IV, we introduce our empirical study, lay out our study methodology, and provide a qualitative review of our results. In Part V, we report our results and explain why they are significant in terms of understanding the Court’s current practice and hidden agendas. In Part VI, we discuss implications and questions raised by our findings.
Here's the intro to the Tucker/Risch piece on the Roberts Court and Munsingwear vacatur, which won the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers' annual prize for article of the year. You'll want to read the whole thing to learn about this *other* procedural maneuver they're using. 2/2
The rise of the shadow docket in 2016 was followed in 2017 by another procedural trick from the Roberts Court, known as "Munsingwear vacatur," which they weaponized to wipe out progressive precedent without having to explain why. Profs. Lisa Tucker (my wife) and Michael Risch (he's not) explain. 1/2
Rereading Bujold's Penric Saga and I was struck by a phrase in Penric's Fox (I think): The Testimony of Mute Things. Such an elegant phrase. 😏
Three good questions along these lines for these pretentious pundits may be:
1. How did Lincoln defy the Taney Court?
2. Was what he did unconstitutional? And why?
I'm more optimistic about future SCOTUS expansion/jurisdiction stripping/etc., but:
This is a good reminder that too many pundits view "rule of law" as a purely procedural commitment, so the substance of what executive defiance is over is largely irrelevant.
Ok, you've convinced me to read it. 😏
Serious point - if every public aspect of Trump isn’t eradicated, America will be forever Trump. The Germans know. And Trump knows.
“At 250 feet tall, Trump's arch would be the biggest such structure in the world. Asked last fall what this modern-day arch was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.””
If Democrats aren’t booking the demolition crews now, what are they even doing.
The oldest known image of Keith Richards, published around 1140 AD ...
Ah, the middle bit of his career
You’ve read your chair’s namesake’s dissent in Williams-Yulee right
cage match
In 2004, a teenager in Garner, NC was killed while walking in his neighborhood. No explanation has ever been offered. It now seems like he was probably killed by a cop.
@gregdoucette.bsky.social say the thing
my angry post about this case this morning is now an angry article
Roy Anthony Scott was in a mental health crisis and called 911 asking for help
Cops came and killed him, & now the Court is casting doubt on whether the cops can be held accountable for his death
ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/smith...
There is a reason all my cousins and close friends know not to ever call the police for a wellness check on me.
A museum exhibit demonstrating the greenhouse effect as it relates to climate change
Just visited the Air & Space Museum, and can't get over the excellent presentation of scientific facts. Which the government it's nominally part of then turns around, denies and exacerbates as part of its genuinely evil program of destruction and theft.
"6 ... it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." - Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
American conservatives have long criticized Lionel Trilling for saying this, and yet every day they keep saying and doing things that confirm his point.
16 years ago, Newt Gingrich convinced the Tea Party era GOP that they should double down in their fight against the (entirely imaginary) efforts to impose Sharia Law on the US.
Unconditional basic income works. We have the studies. We have the data. What we don't have yet is the will. I think we can build it. I know we have to try. I know we have to fight for it. It's certainly not going to be handed to us by those who will definitely pay more in taxes as part of the deal.
In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH.
But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔
NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards.
Here are funding curves for each.🧵
