James.galbraith

DocuSign CEO Dan Springer is stepping down, the company announced Tuesday. The decision comes after the e-signature software maker lost more than 60% of its value year to date. From a report: The company didn't provide a reason for his departure but said Springer "has agreed to step aside," effective immediately. Chairman of the Board Maggie Wilderotter will serve as interim CEO as the company begins its search for the next executive. Shares were up about 1% when markets opened. Springer took on the role of chief executive in 2017 and took the company public in 2018. DocuSign was able to capitalize on the Covid-19 pandemic as more consumers shifted to online transactions and deals. But its business has been slowing in recent quarters, especially as it faces tough comparisons to its dramatic growth in 2020 and early 2021. The deteriorating macro environment has also impacted the company. Shares were off 80% from their 52-week high as of Friday's close.

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Carson v. Makin is a serious, but not fatal, blow to the wall separating church and state.

The Supreme Court held on Tuesday that Maine must fund religious education as part of a school voucher program that pays tuition for students in rural parts of the state. In the process, the Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin tears down one of the foundational rules separating church from state.

The decision was 6-3, along partisan lines.

The specific program at issue in Carson is unusual to Maine. About 5,000 students in Maine’s most rural areas, where it is not cost-efficient for the state to operate a public school, receive tuition vouchers that can be used to pay for private education. Maine law provides that these vouchers may only be used at “nonsectarian” schools, not religious ones.

Carson struck down this law excluding religious schools from the Maine voucher program, and that decision could have broad implications far beyond the few thousand students in Maine who benefit from these tuition subsidies.

Not that long ago, the Court required the government to remain neutral on questions of religion — a requirement that flowed from the First Amendment’s command that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” In practice, that meant that the government could neither impose burdens on religious institutions that it didn’t impose on others, nor could it actively subsidize religion.

Carson turns this neutrality rule on its head, holding that government benefit programs that exclude religious institutions engage in “discrimination against religion” that violates the Constitution.

At the same time, however, Carson also contains significant language confining the scope of this new rule. If the government cannot create benefit programs that exclude religion, then under the most extreme version of this argument, it is unclear why traditional public schools — which provide secular but not religious education — are constitutional. Secular public schools, after all, are government institutions that maintain neutrality toward religion. And, under the new rule announced in Carson, neutrality is unconstitutional discrimination.

But Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in Carson states explicitly that “Maine may provide a strictly secular education in its public schools.” And it reaffirms the Court’s holding in a 2020 decision that “a State need not subsidize private education.” That means that most students who receive a state-subsidized education will not be indoctrinated into a faith.

Nevertheless, one upshot of the Carson decision is that Maine’s taxpayers will be forced to pay for education that many of them will view as offensive. As the state explained in its brief, the plaintiff families in this case want the state to pay at least part of the tuition at private schools that discriminate against LGBTQ teachers and students. One of these schools allegedly requires teachers to agree that “the Bible says that ‘God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted’” and that “[s]uch deviation from Scriptural standards is grounds for termination.’”

After Tuesday’s decision, these families are all but certain to get their wish — Maine would have to significantly rework its education policies to avoid such an outcome — and Maine’s taxpayers will soon have to fund education at schools with outlandish or even bigoted worldviews.

Maine’s school voucher program, briefly explained

Carson arises out of an unusual tuition voucher program that Maine uses to educate students in its most sparsely populated areas. As Roberts explains in the Court’s majority opinion, “Maine is the most rural State in the Union.” And that makes it impractical for the state to provide traditional public schools in areas where the few school-age residents live very far apart.

Rather than offer these students a traditional public education at a state-run school, Maine offers many of them a voucher that will pay up to a certain amount of tuition “at the public school or the approved private school of the parent’s choice at which the student is accepted.”

Prior to the Court’s decision in Carson, however, these vouchers could only pay for tuition at “nonsectarian” schools. A school that promotes a “faith or belief system” or “presents the material taught through the lens of this faith” was not eligible to receive state subsidies.

Carson strikes down this requirement that state subsidies for private education only go to secular schools. And it does so by significantly reworking the Constitution’s approach to religion more broadly.

The Court’s Republican appointees view neutrality toward religion as a form of discrimination

Two decades ago, there was a serious constitutional debate about whether the government is even permitted to fund religious education. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Court declared that “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” That seemed to rule out government programs that fund religious education altogether.

In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), however, a 5-4 Court abandoned Everson’s strict rule against government funding of religion. But Zelman merely established that states could offer tuition vouchers that fund private religious education if they choose to do so. Nothing in Zelman prohibited states from maintaining a neutral posture on religion — funding secular education but not religious education, as Maine did for several decades. It simply left the matter up to each state’s legislators.

The Court’s new decision in Carson inverts the rule established in Everson, holding that it is now a constitutional violation for the government to subsidize secular private education but not religious education. Maine’s program, Roberts writes, “pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious.” That, he claims, “is discrimination against religion.”

Roberts’s opinion also rejects a distinction between government programs that exclude groups because of their religious “status” and programs that exclude groups because of their religious “use.”

In Locke v. Davey (2004), the Supreme Court upheld a Washington state scholarship program that funded education at both secular and religious colleges, but that did not provide scholarships to students who wished to study “devotional theology.” Subsequent court cases, including the lower court decision in Carson, interpreted Locke to permit state programs that do not fund instruction on religion.

More broadly, this interpretation of Locke suggested that states could not deny funding to an organization strictly because it had a religious identity. But they could deny funding if that organization was going to use government funds to pay for a religious activity.

Think of it this way: Suppose that a state provides grants to help private institutions set up food banks and soup kitchens. If a church sought one of these grants, it could not be denied because of its Christian identity. But the state could require the church to spend 100 percent of the grant money it receives on secular activities such as feeding the poor, and not on religious activity such as distributing Bibles to the needy.

Carson effectively eliminates this distinction between organizations that have a religious identity, and organizations that want to use government funds for religious purposes. After Carson, a private school may not only receive a government tuition subsidy, it may also use that subsidy to fund explicitly religious instruction.

Traditional public schools probably are not endangered by Carson

The one silver lining in Carson, for anyone who cares about the separation of church and state, is that Roberts’s opinion explicitly preserves the government’s ability to operate traditional public schools that offer an entirely secular education. And Carson does not require states to operate a Maine-style voucher system as an alternative to traditional public education.

“The differences between private schools eligible to receive tuition assistance under Maine’s program and a Maine public school are numerous and important,” Roberts writes. Most notably, private schools that benefit from Maine’s tuition vouchers are largely not required to comply with Maine’s curriculum for public schools. For the most part, private school students do not need to take the same standardized tests offered to Maine public school students. And private school teachers do not need to be certified by the state, as public school teachers are in Maine.

This suggests that a state may provide a public education in which it comprehensively regulates what is taught, how students are assessed, and who is allowed to teach. And the state may offer such a public education to the exclusion of all other education benefits — that is, a state may tell families that if they want a state-funded education, their children must attend a secular public school.

But if a state does subsidize private education that is not comprehensively regulated by the state, then these subsidies must be available to religious schools — even if those schools seek to indoctrinate students into religious beliefs that many residents of the state find abhorrent.

According to reporting from Rolling Stone, former President Donald Trump and friends are preparing to feed conservative attorney John Eastman to the wolves.

Eastman and his “coup memo” have brought way too much heat on Trump following the House’s Jan. 6 committee hearings, outlining his role in assisting the former president’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election and making the legal case for former Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of the Electoral College.

One of three primary sources with direct information on the topic told Rolling Stone, “It has been repeatedly communicated to the [former] president that he should not even bring up Johnny Eastman’s name because he is maybe the most radioactive person [involved in this] when it comes to … any so-called criminal exposure.”

RELATED STORY: DOJ wants details on Proud Boys interviews from House panel, but Jan. 6 committee won’t give them up

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Rolling Stone reports that Trump has decided not to defend or even talk about Eastman, has instructed his team not to discuss him, and has said privately that he “hardly” or “barely” knows him. As Trump's social media platform Truth Social shows, as much talking as he does, Eastman’s name has been almost nonexistent.

Before turning to conservative constitutional law, Eastman worked as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.  

“Johnny does not have many friends in [the upper crust of] Trumpworld left, and most people loyal to the [former] president are fine with him being left out on his own, to deal with whatever consequences he may or may not face,” a source said.

Last Thursday, during the public Congressional hearings, Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House attorney, said that following the insurrection, he told Eastman to “get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer” because “you’re going to need it.” Eastman then infamously emailed Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to say, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list if that is still in the works.”

As Rolling Stone reports, the idea of Eastman as a patsy has become a common conversation.

Last week, Mark Levin, a Fox News and radio host, said:

“How many lawyers did Trump have? He had several … And John Eastman has turned into the fall guy. … He’s a lawyer, he’s an advocate for the [former] president. Whether you agree with his legal judgment, his legal findings, or not, it’s what lawyers do.”

We talk to expert Brandi Buchman about everything you need to know for the Jan. 6 committee, hearings, and investigation on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast

When we hear “emancipation” we think “Juneteenth” — the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Texas, the last Confederate state with institutional slavery, received word they were free. But another important Emancipation Day took place in April 1862, 160 years ago and three years before Juneteenth, when Congress passed the law to free all the enslaved Black people in Washington, D.C.

Barely a year after the start of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress intended to set an antislavery example in the nation’s capital — a slave-holding city on the border of the slave-holding Confederate South. In 1849, as a young congressman from Illinois, Lincoln had already unsuccessfully proposed an emancipation plan for Washington D.C. Then, in 1861, as wartime president, he made a failed attempt to usher in emancipation in the border state of Delaware.

By spring 1862, Lincoln and members of Congress took decisive steps to enact the U.S. federal government’s first general emancipation of enslaved people in the only district, without a state legislature, where they had direct power to do so. Championed by Lincoln and Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, the proposal to end slavery in the nation’s capital was passed by decisive majorities in the House and Senate, before being signed into law by Lincoln on April 16.

In many ways, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act achieved in miniature what would later take place on an epic national scale during the great Emancipation that rolled across the Southern states from March to December 1865 — especially in its troubling execution, which would continue to hinder racial progress in decades and centuries to come.

In particular, in Washington, D.C., as in every single emancipation process that occurred in the Western world from Pennsylvania in the 1780s, to the U.S. South in the 1860s, to Brazil in the 1880s, former enslavers were seen as the aggrieved party. In D.C.’s emancipation, enslavers were paid significant compensation for their “lost property” in enslaved African-American people. The freed Black people not only received no reparations, but also experienced ongoing governmental neglect and exclusions. This racist process of emancipation led to policy choices that would ensure that the disadvantages of slavery would continue to be passed down, not ended, after slavery’s end.

The District of Columbia Compensation Act, signed by Lincoln, allocated $1 million dollars from the U.S. Treasury to pay off enslavers. If calculated as a proportion of total federal expenditure, this would amount to a staggering $12 billion today. The act also appropriated $100,000 from the federal budget (about $1.2 billion today, if calculated as percentage of total federal spending) to promote the relocation of freed black people from Washington, D.C., to Liberia, the American colony in Africa, and to Haiti. This plan remained unrealized, but fundamentally stemmed from the widespread belief among American antislavery proponents, including Lincoln, that civic peace for whites required the departure of most freed Black people to distant places. Lincoln began changing his views on colonization only in late 1862, as he came to recognize the role that African Americans were playing, and would continue to play, in winning the Civil War.

In Washington, D.C., mainly over the course of more than three months in 1862 — in fact, claims continued to be paid well into 1863 — some 966 Washington enslavers filed their claims before the three-person Commission for the Emancipation of Slaves and received a huge reparations payment for the release of almost 3,100 captive Black people. The names of the enslavers who received cash payments are listed on this University of Nebraska website, in a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The list reveals an unexpected fact: Women played a surprisingly conspicuous role as enslavers. At the time of emancipation, about 40 percent of D.C. enslavers were white women. Urban slave-holding families often entrusted mobile “chattel property” in enslaved people to women, whereas titles to land property were patriarchally passed down to men. For example, in 1862, the fourth-largest enslaver in Washington was Ann Bisco, a 63-year-old widow. Meanwhile, a group of nuns, the Sisters of the Visitation in Georgetown, was one of the larger beneficiaries of enslaver compensation, for the 11 people they held captive; the nuns enslaved some 120 people in total since their founding in 1800.

And what about the enslaved? Washington D.C.’s first Emancipation Day was certainly a day of rejoicing, yet Black people received the news reservedly, unsure of the safety of public celebration, or even of what the scope of the new freedom really entailed.

I started a participatory archiving project, open to the public, to reenvision the Compensated Emancipation records from the perspective of the enslaved, instead of the enslavers. In reviewing Washington, D.C.’s emancipation documents, it’s clear that the freedom process perpetuated the dehumanization and objectification of slavery itself. During the D.C. compensation process, modeled on the British emancipation of the 1830s, enslaved people were inventoried like property. As on the existing registers of enslaved people, enslavers listed out names, gender assignments, ages, heights, skin colors and work capacities of captive people on government forms. The U.S. government actually hired a slave dealer from Baltimore, Bernard Campbell, to certify and record the property value of each of Washington’s enslaved. Black people were categorized by skin tone, scaled according to slavery’s one-drop rule. Enslavers listed the bodily features of their captives: “slight tumor on the side,” “small feet,” “bad hands.” In order to be freed, the enslaved were priced out like pieces of human property. Enslavers concluded their inventory lists by confirming, “[my slaves are] fully worth to me the amounts [as] they are appraised.”

Not only did the freed people receive no compensation or redress, they were subjected to ongoing oppression and intimidation during the process of emancipation, and in the period after. They were forced into segregated neighborhoods, subjected to terrorization and denied legal protections offered to whites. The number of Black people in Washington, D.C., grew drastically in the years after emancipation — with more Black people per capita than any other U.S. city by 1865 — especially as Black soldiers streamed into Union’s newly established regiments of Colored Troops, and as the city became a destination for fugitive people escaping slavery in Maryland and Virginia. Black soldiers collected in Washington, D.C., and helped to win the Civil War. Meanwhile, Black fugitives from slavery in nearby states could legally be captured in the city and returned to enslavers as late as 1864.

After April 16, more than 150 D.C. enslavers still refused to let go of the enslaved people they held as captives. As of June 1862, Congress passed a Supplemental Act that allowed enslaved people to directly petition the commission for their freedom or for that of family members. Freed people sent impassioned petitions to the commissioners in hopes of rescuing their loved ones from enslavers. The majority of these petitions were granted, but around 14 percent were not. As historian Tera Hunter showed, freedom from bondage was always a struggle for Black family reunion. So, for example, John and Emeline Brown successfully petitioned in July to free their 11-year-old daughter, who was still held captive by enslaver Benjamin Hunt. Eliza Hall petitioned for the release of her brother, William Hall, from confinement by enslaver Eliza Griffith. And Basil Patterson petitioned for the freedom of his cousin, Caroline Patterson, and her 1-year-old daughter. Through petitions, people fought for the freedom of their people.

Everywhere in the Washington, D.C., records, like a pattern woven against the grain of the inventories and enslaver appraisals, is a story of Black family love. Many family groups — although torn and tangled by human trafficking — entered freedom together after April 16. Thousands of cooks, coachmen, seamstresses, carpenters and nurses crossed the threshold into freedom holding the hands of their children.

Washington’s emancipation in 1862 set the stage for the troubled general emancipation to come. Even though no cash reparations were paid to enslavers at the end of the Civil War, the idea of enslavers as the aggrieved party deserving of amends and appeasement, structured the trajectory of what would follow. This included President Andrew Johnson’s restitution of lands to enslavers in 1865, and the compromise that eventually ended Reconstruction in 1877 by giving back control over taxation, the electoral process and property ownership across the South to the old plantocracy.

When we hear the word “emancipation,” our minds go too quickly to the vision of slavery’s end. But the 1862 emancipation in Washington occurred amid the continuation of American slavery. In fact, the messiness of the Washington, D.C., emancipation — with its huge enslaver reparations, its proposed “colonization” plan for African Americans and its many examples of ongoing confinement after Freedom Day — was a portrait of the troubling character of American emancipation on a national scale. In both cases, we can point to “Emancipation Days” — but both are merely beginnings of a long, messy process that continues today.

By now, it seems trite to say that every time we learn anything new about the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, the situation regarding police action there looks worse. But … it’s worse. It’s so much worse.

As the Texas Tribune reported on Monday, almost an hour before members of the Border Patrol finally opened the door to the classroom where the shooter had enclosed himself with fourth-graders and two teachers—a door that we now know was never locked in the first place—officers were on the scene with AR-15 rifles of their own and not only body armor, but at least one “ballistic shield” designed precisely for the situation they were facing.

Police from multiple departments and agencies were there in numbers. They had every possible piece of kit to protect them from harm if they tried to enter the classroom. There were no obstacles in their way. And still, “during most of those 77 minutes, despite the urgent pleas from officers and parents amassed outside, officers stayed put outside rooms 111 and 112, stationed on either end of a wide hallway with sky blue and green walls and bulletin boards displaying children’s artwork.”

Inside the room, the shooter fired off at least four bursts of shots, executing children while they waited.

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Included in the latest round of ever-more-disgusting revelations is that when an agent from the Texas Department of Public Safety arrived 20 minutes into the shooting, the officers waiting outside the door claimed they didn’t know if there were children inside.

“If there is, then they just need to go in,” the agent said.

Another officer answered, “It is unknown at this time.”

The agent shot back, “Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?” He added, “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there.”

“Whoever is in charge will determine that,” came the reply.

The inaction appeared too much for the special agent. He noted that there were still children in other classrooms within the school who needed to be evacuated.

“Well, there’s kids over here,” he said. “So I’m getting kids out.”

That agent left the hallway in disgust and helped evacuate children from other classrooms. The officers in the hallway … stood there outside the door.

The door they didn’t test. The door beyond which were two fourth-grade classrooms. The classrooms from which they were getting phone calls begging for help, including the wife of one of those officers who called her police officer husband as she was bleeding to death in that room. 

When those police officers claimed they didn’t know if there were kids in the room, this is who they were failing to protect.

It wasn’t just one phone call, it wasn’t two. Both teacher Eva Mireless, who had already been wounded, and multiple other children called 911 begging for those men outside the door to come in. 

Pete Arredondo, police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, has claimed he “did not receive those calls.” That Arredondo wasn’t actually on the other end of the phone for those children and teachers is perfectly believable. That the men in that hallway didn’t know there were children inside, and that they were being killed, is absolutely not believable. 

The cowardice and incompetence on display get more staggering with every revelation. At this point, it’s safe to say that anyone—anyone—with the available equipment and information would have opened that door and tried to save those kids. Anyone except the men who stood around and listened to them die.

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Belief in God among Americans dipped to a new low, Gallup's latest poll shows. While the majority of adults in the U.S. believe in God, belief has dropped to 81% -- the lowest ever recorded by Gallup -- and is down from 87% in 2017. From a report: Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God, Gallup reported. Younger, liberal Americans are the least likely to believe in God, according to Gallup's May 2-22 values and beliefs poll results released Friday. Political conservatives and married adults had little change when comparing 2022 data to an average of polls from 2013 to 2017. The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62% of whom believe in God), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%), while belief in God is highest among conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%). The poll also found that slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans say they believe God hears prayers and can intervene, as well as 32% of Democrats, 25% of liberals and 30% of young adults.

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Even a Wall Street-endorsed climate rule is facing serious headwinds.

As drought spreads and sea levels rise, the economic impacts of climate change will run in the trillions of dollars. The insurance firm Swiss Re projects climate disasters would cost the world as much as $23 trillion by 2050, bigger than the impact from the pandemic and the Great Recession of 2009 combined.

It’s reasonable business planning to account for all this foreseeable risk — just like planning for cyberattacks or business disruptions from a pandemic. Last year, for instance, the US had to spend $145 billion dealing with floods, fires, and other climate-related disasters.

Yet somehow, climate change has fallen through the cracks of US financial regulation. Publicly traded companies are required to disclose information about “material” risks that affect their company regardless of their cause, from sanctions to supply chain chaos. But there are no uniform standards for disclosing how much fossil fuel pollution they generate or the impact that climate change could have on their future growth. Instead, companies have been left free to inflate their environmental progress, all with little scrutiny from the public.

This kind of information is, in theory, essential to a functioning free market, so investors can make decisions based on complete information. But fossil fuel interests, conservative ideologues, and corporate trade groups are striving to keep shareholders in the dark on climate risks.

The Biden administration is trying to make companies more publicly accountable for the risk of the climate crisis. A linchpin of Biden’s plan is a draft rule the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed in March. Over 500 pages, the SEC rule proposes that publicly traded companies disclose how climate change affects their business outlook and identify a board member or board committee to focus on climate-related risks.

Once the rule is finalized, companies will have to disclose how their operations are affected by extreme weather events and the impact of climate change on the short- and medium-term business outlook. They’ll also have to report the emissions both from their company’s operations and from how their products are used. This is particularly bad news for fossil fuel companies with business models predicated on selling pollution. Until this rule, they haven’t had to fully account for the environmental impact from things like selling gas that’s burned by consumers’ cars.

“This is a rule, in other words, that helps the free market act like the free market, giving investors exactly the information they need to make the decisions,” Emory University business law expert George Georgiev said.

As the draft rule’s comment period came to a close, it’s clear any regulation on climate change faces serious headwinds. The loudest protests have come from right-wing groups and corporate-aligned nonprofits that have flooded the public comments with previews of the argument they’ll take to courts.

Plenty of businesses in the financial sector stand to benefit from this rule, like the investing giant BlackRock, which has pledged to align its assets with climate goals. But some could be hurt. The companies that benefit from greenwashing their climate commitments are doing everything they can to protect the chaotic status quo.

Financial transparency on climate change is hardly a radical idea

The SEC has required and standardized public company disclosures since 1933. In recent decades, the SEC has issued nonbinding guidance on how publicly traded companies should consider Covid-19 disruptions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even a feared “Y2K” meltdown at the turn of the 21st century, so the companies would meet their fiduciary duty.

But the SEC has been painfully slow on climate change. Right now, businesses disclose the risks and costs of their business on the climate on a voluntary, patchy basis with no clear standardization.

A 2020 Government Accountability Office surveyed 32 midsize and large publicly traded companies and found little consistency. Airlines, for example, used years anywhere between 1990 and 2017 as the baseline for calculating their climate footprint. Water companies have used completely different measurements for reporting water extraction. Some companies would just report carbon emissions, while others would report total greenhouse gas emissions (including sources like methane).

The proposed SEC rule cites other evidence of companies not paying attention to this risk, like an internal survey of climate-related keywords in companies’ 10-Ks between June 2019 and December 2020. They found only 31 percent mentioned climate change at all.

This information is not just to benefit climate change efforts; it is also useful to investors. It makes clearer, for instance, that a retail company’s warehouses might be threatened by increased flooding, that an airline company might have to ground more flights because of rising heat waves, or that a bank’s backing of major fossil fuel expansion has the strong chance of backfiring in a world that transitions to renewables. Without any regulation and standardization, companies will just continue to try to outshine one another on their environmental and social commitments without hard data to back it. This mismatch will become an existential risk to financial instability if, for example, extreme weather pummels a business that did not prepare accordingly.

Environmental activists have pushed for more from companies by proposing shareholder resolutions at annual meetings that ask for more transparency, but have met with mixed success in shareholder votes that don’t bind the company to taking action.

In this regulatory vacuum, voluntary global affiliations have cropped up, including the Net Zero Assets Managers Initiative, representing some $43 trillion in assets, and Climate Action 100+, representing more than $60 trillion. Another of these groups is run out of the Financial Stability Board as a Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), a voluntary system that has grown to more than 3,000 companies. The task force’s recommendations tell companies to consider the short-, medium-, and long-term climate impacts, emissions that result from investment decisions, and their operations’ pollution, and account for the changing climate’s consequences for the business. The hundreds of companies that voluntarily comply with these standards aren’t necessarily green or good for the environment, but it’s an extra gold star for their sustainability transparency.

Eight countries, including the UK, have passed laws that will mirror the TFCD’s recommendations, but the US would remain an outlier without the SEC rule. “Investors put their money where they think there’s a good opportunity and good information,” said Seth Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets. “If we don’t have good information, we run the risk of falling behind internationally.”

The SEC’s rule is basically the US playing catch-up, based on standards the mainstream corporate community aligned with TFCD have already backed.

Initially, companies will have to spend extra to comply with the rule — up to $530,000 a year for larger companies by the SEC’s estimate, but it will vary depending on how much companies are doing already on climate disclosure. Typically, the costs of rules shrink over time. Otherwise, the rule itself is quite modest. The SEC is “not saying you should or shouldn’t invest in climate products,” said Rothstein. “They’re just saying, tell investors what you’re doing and do it in a consistent way.”

Environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers argue the SEC could be doing even more. The SEC does not change how companies disclose climate-related activities like PR campaigns and political influence, the kind of activities that tend to be outsourced to nonprofits that shield their activities from the public. In March, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called it a “failure of nerve that shies away from a perfectly legal, necessary response to the climate danger we face” because political efforts remain “the single most material disclosures a company could make to achieve climate safety.”

Right-wing groups claim financial transparency is an attack on free speech

Unsurprisingly, the SEC is facing immense pressure to withdraw this rule because of the same shadowy political spending that companies don’t have to disclose in the first place. Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Americans for Prosperity, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have flooded the SEC with comments that argue company free speech would be violated.

Trade groups and right-wing think tanks have argued that requiring companies to report these emissions is akin to violating their First Amendment rights of free speech, pointing to a court case that ruled a regulation requiring the disclosure of conflict-zone minerals would amount to “compelled speech” and violated the companies’ rights.

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry lobby, has argued the rule “could raise serious First Amendment issues under recent applying strict scrutiny to content-based laws compelling speech.”

The argument has found purchase with conservative lawmakers, like West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who picked up the argument in his 2021 letter to Treasury last year. In Congress, 19 Republican senators argued in their submitted comments that the rule is “not within the SEC’s mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Another 40 Republican representatives wrote that the rule will act to “undermine and shame public companies,” while Republican attorneys general describes the rule as a “total reordering of [the SEC’s] present disclosure regime.”

The attack on regulation under the guise of First Amendment rights has become more familiar in recent years. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has been steadily giving corporations more and more leeway, more and more rights,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a corporate law expert who has published several books on corporate speech.

The court also opened the door to more of these lawsuits, striking down a California law that required nonprofits to disclose their donors, siding with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s argument against disclosing their donors and providing IRS 990 forms to the state. Other legal challenges to campaign finance laws and unions have used the First Amendment.

Legal experts supportive of the SEC rule consider the argument a long shot in courts. “I think that argument is really far-fetched,” Emory’s Georgiev said.

But it’s still worrisome. If it succeeds, whether in courts or as a scare tactic to get the SEC to backtrack, it sets a dangerous precedent for the financial system at large. “If this climate rule is violating the First Amendment, it’s been all nine decades [the SEC has been] violating the First Amendment,” Georgiev said. “They will definitely try it out in courts. At the end of the day, a lot of far-fetched arguments succeed in courts.”

These no-longer-young white people have some extremely good advice for activists in any movement involving direct action or interactions with the police:

Woman: Oh hello!

Man: We were just talking about you kids.

Woman: I’m Denise Heberle ...

Man: … and I’m Bill Goodman.

D: Together, we’ve been fighting fascism for over 50 years …

B: … and so much has changed over those 50 years, such as the ingredients to a successful firebomb …

D: … and the glass that bank windows are made of.

B: But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed over 50 years, something that is so important to tell you kids who are new to this movement.

Both: Shut the fuck up.

D: You’re sitting in the police transport van after a protest.

B: Shut the fuck up.

B: In a holding cell with your comrades. 

D: Shut the fuck up.

D: Cop knocks on your door.

B: Shut the fuck up.

D: Texting on an unsecured device.

B: Shut the fuck up.

B: Pulled over by the cops after a protest.

D: Shut the fuck up.

D: Cop just asking about your day. 

B: Shut the fuck up.

B: Feds call your mom?

D: Tell your mother to shut the fuck up.

B: Now, repeat after me: when the cops come calling, what do you do?

Group of younger people: Shut the fuck up.

The video was brought to us as a public service announcement by the National Lawyers Guild Detroit & Michigan Chapter. Share it with your friends.

Texas Republicans give away the game on voter suppression.

The Los Angeles Times reports on "a massive surge of criminal fraud that has been pummeling crypto users with unknown billions of dollars in losses with little relief in sight." The growth in crypto fraud has turned exponential in recent years. The reported losses from crypto scams in 2021 were 60 times larger than in 2018, the Federal Trade Commission reported earlier this month, with crypto now accounting for 1 out of every 4 dollars lost to fraud in the reports monitored by the agency. Over 46,000 people lost more than $1 billion in crypto to scams since 2021, but the real sum of losses is likely vastly larger because most frauds are not reported, the agency said.... "Since 2021, $575 million of all crypto fraud losses reported to the FTC were about bogus investment opportunities, far more than any other fraud type," the agency reported. Financial losses specifically from NFT crimes just through May this year were already more than 600% higher than for all of 2021, with the space seeing twice as many hacks and bigger and bigger heists, according to analysis from digital privacy firm Top10VPN. For many victims, there's little hope of getting their lost art back. The marketplaces where NFTs get sold — crypto exchanges — can't cancel or reverse fraudulent transactions the way a traditional bank or credit card company might; the whole point of crypto was to cut out these sorts of financial middlemen, which many crypto fans greatly distrust. Crypto technology was built out of a "libertarian ethos" in which "there's no nanny state that's going to take care of you," said Jeremy Goldman, an intellectual property attorney who specializes in legal issues involving crypto assets. "These are the consequences when there's a mistake ... there's no one to unwind it, you can't call customer service, you can't go back to the mothership, you can't go back to the bank." But at the same time, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have also shown a growing willingness and ability to mount sophisticated investigations into crypto fraud.... [I]n March, federal agents sought a court order to seize roughly $165,000 worth of Ethereum in a digital Binance.US wallet. Officials said the cryptocurrency had been stolen from an Orange County investor, nicknamed "P.M.," who got tricked into giving up his coins by an fraudster pretending to be a Coinbase technical support representative. On the bright side, BuzzFeed notes that actor Seth Green has recovered his prized Bored Ape NFT from "Mr Cheese" for $297,000 worth of Ether. But the Los Angeles Times points out that another victim of a Bored Ape heist has sued the creators of Bored Apes. Their lawyer argues the company "refuses to police their own community. They're the gatekeepers, they can lock out the thieves if they wanted to, and they won't do it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are few reasons to admire Sen. Lindsey Graham. Actually, that’s not quite right. There are no reasons to admire Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Still, every now and then, just by accident, Graham gets something exactly right, and at the “Faith and Freedom Coalition” meeting held this week in Nashville, Graham managed to do something that might even seem amazing. In just two sentences, Graham deftly defined the difference between Democrats and Republicans. 

He did it without mentioning a single policy. He did it without talking about the price of gas, or attacking LGBTQ people, or suggesting there should be a law allowing officials to peek under the skirts of teenage girls. He didn’t even mention “faith” or “freedom,” which was supposed to be the theme of the day. But he did it very effectively, and in a way that everyone can understand.

At the podium, Graham made it clear what he really missed about Trump — the bullying. “You know what I like about Trump?” Graham asks the audience, before providing the answer. “Everybody was afraid of him.” He then waits for — and collects — applause for this insight before jumping in to express how terrified he was of his own leader.

It’s true. Everyone was afraid of Trump. I woke up every morning concerned that he might launch a military attack  to distract from his latest scandal, or destroy a diplomatic alliance to fit some twisted narrative, or finger some group of Americans as the source of all the nation’s ills, or ruin he environment just because he could. There were good reasons to fear all those things. Because they all happened.

Trump was, and is, an erratic, logic-free id storm whose tantrums often call for his followers to rain down abuse on anyone he deems a critic. He’s a guy who thinks his ability to hate powerfully, is his best quality. He may even be right.

The difference is … Republicans like it. They like being afraid. They want that bully at the bully pulpit. They want a “strong man” to tell them what to do, to yell at anyone who strays from the course, and to threaten everyone who refuses to go along with the fascistic flow. They don’t want to have to deal with facts and reason, much less justice and fairness. 

Republicans like being afraid of Trump. It’s no wonder that they are always making paintings and posters in which Trump is some muscle-bound action hero. Because admitting they enjoy being bullied by the actual Trump … is simply pathetic.

CNN reports: "The price of bitcoin breached $19,000," reports CNN, "and ethereum fell below $1,000 Saturday morning, extending the brutal crypto bear market to new lows." Bitcoin plunged nearly 10% in less than 24 hours, adding to a series of sustained losses over the last several months. It now sits below $20,000 for the first time since November 2020, down more than 70% from an all-time high of $68,000 per coin in November 2021. Bitcoin has lost $900 billion in value since that peak. Ether is also experiencing a so-called crypto winter. The second-largest digital token plummeted 10% on Saturday to $975, its lowest level since January 2021. The coin has lost 80% of its value from its record high last November.... The crypto world is reeling from the $60 billion collapse last month of two other major tokens, Terra-Luna and Celsius. Those losses have increased doubts about the general stability of digital currency.... Still, even at $20,000, about half of all bitcoin wallets are still sitting on profits, according to an analysis by the Columbia Business School cited by The New York Times. The study also found that 61% of bitcoin addresses had not sold anything in the last 12 months, suggesting that a total run on crypto may be avoidable. Bitcoin has now lost more than 70% of its value in about seven months. But CBS News notes that even then, "many in the industry had believed it would not fall under $20,000." The overall market value of cryptocurrency assets has fallen from $3 trillion to below $1 trillion, according to coinmarketcap.com, a company that tracks crypto prices. A spate of crypto meltdowns has erased tens of billions of dollars of value from the currencies and sparked urgent calls to regulate the freewheeling industry. Last week, bipartisan legislation was introduced in the U.S. Senate to regulate the digital assets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The lady angrily screaming teach us was at first drawn that way by accident.

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In 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld strong legal protections for abortion in the state constitution. In 2019, the Republican-led Iowa legislature passed a new law giving the state’s governor the power to steer the state Supreme Court to the right by giving her the power to appoint a majority of the judicial nomination commission.

That’s exactly what happened to the court, the result of which basically spells the end of abortion protections in the state of Iowa. The reconstituted Republican state Supreme Court overturned itself, leaving the legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds the ability to ban abortion. That’s exactly what the legislature intended when it set this ruling up in 2020 by passing a new law imposing a 24-hour waiting period for people seeking an abortion. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland sued, and a lower court judge blocked the law on two grounds: It violated both the 2018 ruling from the state’s highest court and the state constitution’s single-subject rule, since it passed as an amendment to an unrelated bill.

On Friday, the court reversed district Judge Mitchell Turner, ruling that there is no constitutional right to an abortion in the state, overturning the 2018 decision. It did not put the waiting period into effect as of now, instead sending it back to the lower court to review based on their decision. The court relied on the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t yet overturned abortion rights at the federal level, so the “undue burden” standard is still in effect, so the lower court would have to decide if the waiting period is a “substantial obstacle” to obtaining an abortion.

“Although we overrule (the 2018 precedent), and thus reject the proposition that there is a fundamental right to an abortion in Iowa’s Constitution subjecting abortion regulation to strict scrutiny, we do not at this time decide what constitutional standard should replace it,” the Iowa Supreme Court Justice Edward Mansfield wrote in the decision.

That’s just semantics from the justice, who expects—along with the rest of the legal community—that the U.S. Supreme will make it entirely moot in a number of days when it tosses federal abortion protections.

What this all means is that as soon as that ruling comes down, Iowa’s Republican-led legislature and Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds will end abortion protections in the state. That’s part of the larger plan by Republicans nationally.

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Let's not build statues to the few people who did their jobs with a modicum of integrity.

Maybe you’ve heard about how richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, is buying Twitter because something-something “free speech.” Whether this sale will be finalized remains to be seen. Musk, in part because he’s a billionaire and by nature of that position is a narcissist, and in part because he’s always sort of been a two-dimensionally crap dude, cannot stop himself from openly attacking the employees of the company he has yet to officially buy. In late March, Elon tweeted out a poll, writing “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

On Thursday, Musk’s spaceship-building company, SpaceX, made news as some employees wrote an open letter and circulated it throughout the workplace. That letter criticized SpaceX CEO Elon Musk for his “behavior in the public sphere,” calling it a “frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” for the company. SpaceX is a private company with no union representation. But then again, so is Twitter.

On Friday, the The New York Times reports that free-speech warrior Musk promptly fired those very same employees for speaking against him. 

According to the Times, SpaceX management said that the letter included the option for people to sign their names to it, and some employees, according to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, felt “uncomfortable, intimidated, and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views.” More importantly, Shotwell wrote, “We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.” How many employees were fired is not known as of the writing of this article.

In an unrelated story, the day before SpaceX was being a terrible employer, Elon Musk was out in the public sphere writing this about how he was now a Republican:

You might also remember how, back in March, Elon was professing himself to be a “free speech absolutist.” Absolutely full of shit? [Rim shot]. As Judd Legum reported in April, Musk’s “free speech” act is one of two things: the lies of a man who is simply trying to consciously manipulate himself into more and more power; the lies of a man who has smelled his own farts so much that his ability to distinguish between words, ideas, and what any of them mean has been irrevocably compromised.

For someone who pretends that by buying the social media site he will be able to usher in a new and illustrious age of “freedom,” Musk seems either too unintelligent to understand, or (more likely) is not particularly interested in how the power of his wealth means that mostly only Elon Musk has unfettered freedom of everything.

“The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%.”

“An abuser’s access to a firearm increases the risk of femicide by 1,000%.”

That’s from data  compiled by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV). The NCADV applauded “the bipartisan group of Senators negotiating the gun violence prevention framework for including provisions relating to firearm access by adjudicated abusers.” That was earlier this week, when there was premature news of an agreement on a framework for legislation at least nodding at gun safety.

According to their statistics, “most intimate partner homicides are committed by dating partners.” But they point out current federal law restricting gun ownership by convicted abusers “applies only to current/former spouses, cohabitants, and people who share a child in common: it leaves out people in dating relationships.” Senate Republicans, supposedly negotiating in good faith with Democrats on gun safety, apparently want to keep it that way. As The New York Times puts it, they’re arguing over “What counts as a boyfriend?”

RELATED STORY: Most Americans say gun violence is a 'crisis' as support for stricter gun laws grows

“The surface explanation seems like it would be fairly simple, but I know that as they try to reduce it to legislative text, I think it’s gotten a little bit more uncomfortable,” said Sen. John Thune, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s number two man. Thune is not one of the negotiators, but is clearly speaking for leadership. It really should be that simple, because we are talking about someone who has been convicted of violence against an intimate partner. Being convicted of violence should be enough in any context whatsoever to prevent someone from getting their hands on a gun.

With the prevalence of homicide by intimate partners, not to mention stalkers, it really shouldn’t be hard. After all, senators have been talking on this issue for years: The so-called boyfriend loophole kept the Violence Against Women Act from being reauthorized for over three years. It expired in December 2018 and was finally reauthorized this spring, when Democrats just let the gun loophole issue go.

The current stalemate suggests that the issue is far less about the difficulty of crafting the language than the “Cornyn Con” in action.

Republicans don’t want this provision—which is opposed by the NRA—to pass this time around, either. So they’re using the tactic McConnell and Texas Sen. John Cornyn have relied upon for years: Take an issue that’s extremely popular with the public—comprehensive immigration reform, for example—and put Cornyn in the lead on negotiating because he has credibility with Democrats and traditional media. God knows why.

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Then let him slowly whittle away at whatever “agreement” was ostensibly made at the beginning of the negotiations—blaming Democrats all the while for refusing to compromise—until it’s done. And everyone can throw up their hands and blame “partisan gridlock.”

One Republican familiar with the talks is being far less cagey than Cornyn. Take it or leave it, they told a Politico reporter. “[E]ither the [D]emocrats accept what the Republicans are asking for on boyfriend loophole, or it will be dropped entirely.” Another tried to back away from that, saying that it’s still “under discussion.” The ultimatum part of the Cornyn Con doesn’t come quite yet in the negotiating sequence.

It’s worth remembering that 10 Republicans signed onto the agreement that was announced Sunday. They agreed in principle to the inclusion of his provision. Then Cornyn moved the goalposts, saying he wanted at least 20 Republicans on board. He’s moved the goalposts and he’s moved the deadlines—every week since the shooting, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised a floor vote by the end of the week. 

Now with the Senate gone on a long weekend for the Juneteenth holiday, the Senate would have to work like lightning to get legislative language written and a bill on the floor by next week. Then they would have in essence three days to pass it before heading off for another two-week recess for the Fourth of July holiday. It’s happened before in the Senate, moving with that kind of alacrity. They did it to protect Supreme Court justices because Republicans wanted it. But it won’t happen to protect thousands of innocent lives.

At this point, Democrats should call the negotiations off. Schumer should bring the bill passed by the House to the floor first thing next week. Then he should follow up with votes on an assault-style rifle ban, universal background checks, and high-capacity magazine bans. He should make Republicans vote against every single thing American voters want.

RELATED STORIES:

By Brad Reed A Jesuit school in Worcester, Massachusetts can no longer identify as a Catholic institution due to its display of a rainbow “Pride” flag and a “Black Lives Matter” flag. Boston 25 News reports that the Diocese of Worcester has stripped the local Nativity School of its Catholic status over the display of both flags, which it says go against Catholic teachings. “These symbols embody specific agendas or ideologies [that] contradict Catholic social and moral teaching,” Bishop Robert McManus said in justifying his decision. “It is my contention that the ‘Gay Pride’ flag represents sup…

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Why the GOP reaction to the Jan. 6 hearings may put us at a dangerous crossroads.

On May 4, two days after Politico rocked Washington by revealing the draft of a Supreme Court decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, California Governor Gavin Newsom delivered remarks at a Los Angeles Planned Parenthood office—and triggered a small earthquake of his own.

Newsom pledged that, however the Court ruled, California would ensure legal access to abortion. But it was something else he said that really stood out: Republican-controlled states are moving not only to restrict or outlaw abortion if the Court allows it, he said, but also to ban books, restrict how teachers can talk about race, make voting more difficult, and target LGBTQ rights through measures like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In a sudden geyser of frustration, Newsom asked why Democrats at every level were not doing more to combat, or even call attention to, this sweeping offensive.

“Where the hell is my party? Where’s the Democratic Party? You guys paying attention to what’s going on?” he asked. “Why aren’t we standing up more firmly, more resolutely? Why aren’t we calling this out? This is a concerted, coordinated effort. And, yes, they’re winning. They are. They have been. Let’s acknowledge that. We need to stand up. Where’s the counteroffensive?”

In an interview at his office in Sacramento on Tuesday, Newsom told me he was surprised at how “resonant” a response he received from Democrats around the country to viral video clips of that moment. But several Democratic strategists I talked with this week said the governor should not have been shocked. The reaction, they said, reflects the anxiety mounting within the Democratic coalition over the ever bolder effort by red states, with crucial support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court and Republican U.S. senators wielding the filibuster, to rescind or restrict seemingly long-settled rights.

[Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution]

That unease has created, in effect, a job opening in the Democratic Party—a vacancy for a leader to formulate a comprehensive case against the rights rollback in the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and the state legislature. For “any politician who wanted to gain a national platform, that message is really resonating with where our voters are,” says Sean McElwee, a progressive pollster.

This is not a job that President Joe Biden, by temperament or inclination, is well positioned to fill. The party’s senior congressional leadership is otherwise engaged and, as a collection of political veterans mostly in their 70s, is not particularly well suited to the task, either. Newsom isn’t the only Democrat who could step into the void. But he is perhaps the best person to do so, and he has one distinct advantage over the alternatives: There might be no one in the Democratic Party who is itching more for a fight with the Republican governors leading the red-state charge.

The rights rollback is advancing “like a wildfire,” Newsom told me. “That was kind of the point I was making [at Planned Parenthood]: Is anyone paying attention to what’s going on? It’s happening in real-time. Literally the progress of … at least the last half century is being wiped out in the last 15 months.”

The new red-state laws have rapidly diffused across the country, often becoming more extreme along the way. The Ohio House of Representatives, for instance, recently passed legislation requiring participants in school sports who are “accused” of being transgender to undergo a genital exam. Many states acting to limit or ban abortion have removed once-common exemptions for victims of rape or incest. Taken in sum, these laws amount to an attempt to reverse the “rights revolution” of the past 60 years, through which Congress and the Supreme Court created a robust baseline of guaranteed national rights and limited state’s abilities to curtail those rights.

[Read: The GOP’s strange turn against rape exceptions]

Newsom isn’t the only Democrat who has tried to sound this alarm. Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow rocketed to national attention with a speech in April in which she rebutted a Republican colleague who had accused her of “grooming” children for sexual abuse because she supported LGBTQ rights—a now-common slur. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker also received a strong response, the day before Newsom’s Planned Parenthood speech, when he appeared alongside a crowd of mostly female state legislators and promised he would “fight like hell, not just for the women of Illinois, but for every person in our state and every person across this nation who believes not in limiting civil rights and human rights, but in expanding them.” Governors Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Kathy Hochul in New York also have moved decisively to protect abortion rights in their states.

But Newsom, 54, who handily defeated a Republican-led recall drive against him last fall and is now cruising toward reelection for a second term in November, might be uniquely positioned to provide national leadership on these culture-war issues. As the governor of the nation’s most populous state and one of its most diverse, Newsom offers a logical point of comparison to Governors Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas, the most visible proponents of the Republican-led rights reversal. He already has a history of sparring with Abbott and DeSantis (whose name Newsom habitually mispronounces as “DeSan-tos) over their approaches to the economy, education, health care, and the pandemic.

Newsom very consciously has worked to define California as an alternative to the lower-tax, lower-services models of Florida, Texas, and most other Republican-controlled states. If the even more fundamental divide in modern American politics is between those who welcome and those who fear the way the country is changing demographically and culturally, as I believe it is, then the political leadership in California stands clearly on the other side of that chasm from leaders in Texas, Florida, and other big Sun Belt states who are working to lock into law the preferences of their predominantly white, Christian, Republican coalition.

In most circumstances, Democrats might consider a president from their own party to be the most logical choice to call out this important national shift on rights. And since Newsom delivered his cri de coeur last month, he has been inundated with questions about whether he was criticizing Biden or the Democratic congressional leadership. “I have such deep admiration and respect for Joe Biden … I would stand up for him for anything,” Newsom told me when we spoke. “This is not about Joe Biden.” He likewise said he didn’t think it was a responsibility of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to take the lead in calling out the red states. Newsom’s view is that Democrats everywhere—in local, state, and federal office and in all of the party committees—need to shine more attention on what’s happening.

Yet Newsom agreed with me when I suggested that leading the fight on these issues was not exactly in Biden’s comfort zone. Biden has criticized restrictions on abortion and voting, as well as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But his political theory for his presidency has always been to focus on delivering benefits to working-class families while limiting his personal engagement in polarizing cultural disputes. As a 79-year-old white Catholic who once opposed school busing for desegregation and initially supported a constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn Roe v. Wade, Biden is not likely to fill the role of the inspirational defender of an inclusive, multiracial, multicultural society. The Justice Department has filed or joined legal suits against Republican-controlled states on issues including abortion, voting rights, bans on transgender girls participating in sports, and heightened penalties for public protest. But Attorney General Merrick Garland is a 69-year-old former judge whose moderate and institutionalist instincts likewise leave him ill-suited to galvanize the public against this rollback. Vice President Kamala Harris, in background and temperament, offers a better fit, but the administration generally hasn’t deployed her to deliver important political messages.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategist at Way to Win, which funds campaigns and organizations focusing on voters of color, says Democrats haven’t responded more forcefully for a reason. Many Democratic strategists, she notes, operate on the belief that voters with conservative social views are more likely to vote on those views than voters with liberal social attitudes. Among Democrats, “there’s a fear that if I start talking about this, then are people going to think this is all I care about, and they won’t think I care about kitchen-table issues,” Fernandez Ancona told me. With so little sustained attention, Democrats have failed to articulate “the connection between all of these issues,” she continued, and created a politically fraught situation “like a Whac-A-Mole: One day you are talking about LGBT, one day abortion, one day about trans, one day about critical race theory and education in the schools.”

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

Jon Favreau, the former White House speechwriter for Barack Obama and now a co-host of the podcast Pod Save America, argues that Democrats don’t need to be “super-extreme” on cultural issues to counter a “super-extreme” Republican approach. “They have given up the entire broad middle,” Favreau says of the GOP. The real challenge for Democrats is to explain, “if we are going to be a multiracial democracy in the U.S., what does that look like? … No one has put it together in a story,” he says. “That’s where the vacuum is.”

Newsom doesn’t pretend he has divined the best approach to counter the red-state rights rollback, in terms of either tactics or message. He is open to reforming or eliminating the Senate filibuster, which Republicans have used to kill House-passed legislation on voting rights, LGBTQ equality, and abortion. But he is ambivalent at best about that idea. “I have mixed feelings because the minute we are no longer—which is a hot minute, potentially—in power, you better be ready to pay the price,” he told me.

He’s even more leery of another response to the rights rollback that many on the left are touting: enlarging the Supreme Court. Adding more justices, Newsom said only somewhat facetiously, would lead to a Supreme Court with 63 members, after the two sides leapfrogged each other with expansions each time they traded power in Washington. “One has to be careful about even having these conversations about stacking the Supreme Court, changing the rules,” he said, warning that they could alienate voters already inclined to think that Democrats “don’t have the respect” for American traditions.

In the near term, Newsom argues, blue states can try to compensate for the rights that red states are retrenching. He says he expects to sign a bill this year shielding transgender kids and their families who relocate to California from legal action in their home states. The California state legislature also is advancing a package of bills designed to help provide abortions to people from out of state. But he doesn’t see any of these policies as long-term solutions. “It’s a hell of a way to live,” Newsom told me. “We have abundance now and [could have] scarcity in a year and a half, when the effects of a recession are felt, and all of a sudden now we can’t accommodate these 33.6 million reproductive-age women from the 26 states that all want to descend on three or four blue states that were generous enough in the beginning but no longer can be as generous. I fear that.”

Besides, Newsom said, it’s dangerous for the core civil rights and liberties available in roughly half the states to diverge radically from those available in the other half. “Our capacity to live together, and advance together across our differences, is in peril,” he said. “That’s foundational in any civil society, and that’s why the illiberal impulses, the populist impulses, the nationalist impulses, which are not unique to America, are being exploited to great peril.”

The “existential” question, Newsom said, is how to preserve the rights that conservatives are targeting, which he believes will extend beyond the current list to same-sex marriage, contraception, and even interracial marriage. “I don’t have a great answer for it,” he admitted. An infinite list of practical questions is looming for Democrats and civil-rights advocates about how to respond to the GOP drive to rescind rights—a campaign that has included years of efforts to reshape the federal courts, solidify control of state legislatures, and encourage the spread of conservative ideas through groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council and Heritage Action. Democrats have spent years trying to develop responses, and they face years’ more work ahead. But the party’s urgent need now, Newsom seems to be arguing, is to clarify to the public that the fight is even happening, building awareness and rallying resistance. “We’re arguing about changing the rules,” he told me. “I’m arguing for changing our mindset and waking us up.”

Part of that effort, Newsom said, must be to encourage more engagement from business leaders, who might put out statements supporting reproductive or LGBTQ rights but who mostly have been “passive” and “complicit,” in his view. Newsom told me that at a recent dinner, he had pressed a group of 30 to 40 business leaders on their tepid responses to the red-state moves, particularly DeSantis’s punishment of Disney for opposing his policies. “I said, ‘Beware of what you wish for … Don’t think for a second [California] can’t play that same game.’” Newsom said he told the business leaders that he could just as easily demand that they “shut up on any piece of legislation” or else face rollbacks on “tax credits across the board, permits, zoning” and via his “bully pulpit.” His point wasn’t that he actually wanted to do such things; it was to confront the business leaders with the implications of their reticence. What DeSantis and other red-state governors are doing, Newsom said flatly, is “authoritarianism.”

[Sonny Bunch: No one has a position anymore]

Newsom has been voicing these complaints to his staff for months, but until his Planned Parenthood remarks, he had not expressed them much in public. He remains uncertain about how far to press this case, both because he realizes he doesn’t have all the answers and because he recognizes that, in taking these arguments to a national stage, he will inevitably face speculation that he’s running for president in 2024 or beyond. For the record, he told me, “I don’t know how many times you can say no in ways that others don’t say no.” One shouldn’t rule out the possibility of the governor of the nation’s largest state seeking the presidency someday, but for now Newsom does not seem interested in challenging Biden if he seeks a second term, or contesting Harris, a longtime ally, if Biden does not.

Fernandez Ancona said that building awareness of the rollback of seemingly settled rights will require a party-wide commitment that goes far beyond the effort of any one Democratic figure. “It’s going to take all of us beating this drum,” she noted. Newsom agrees, but he’s also clearly ready to turn up the volume on his own contribution. He is still debating whether the right time to speak out is during his general-election campaign this fall or after he (almost certainly) begins a second term. Either way, he appears ready to step forward. “I used to sort of feel like: ‘I am in my lane. I am just mayor of San Francisco. I am just lieutenant governor. I am just the governor,’” he told me, listing his previous offices in California. “I feel right now so frustrated that I feel like we need to amplify and express ourselves.”

DES MOINES, Iowa — The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for lawmakers to severely limit or even ban abortion in the state, reversing a decision by the court just four years ago that guaranteed the right to the procedure under the Iowa Constitution.

The court, now composed almost entirely of Republican appointees, concluded that a less conservative court wrongly decided that abortion is among the fundamental privacy rights guaranteed by the Iowa Constitution and federal law.

Friday’s ruling comes amid expectations that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Then Iowa lawmakers could ban abortion in the state without completing the lengthy process of amending the state constitution.

The Iowa decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed by abortion providers who challenged a 2020 law that required a 24-hour waiting period before a woman could get an abortion. A judge who struck down the law cited the state high court’s 2018 ruling. The judge also concluded the law violated rules prohibiting passage of bills with more than one subject.

The state Supreme Court returned the waiting period case to district court.

In its 2018 ruling, decided by a 5-2 vote, the court said “autonomy and dominion over one’s body go to the very heart of what it means to be free.”

The reversal of a decision after just four years reflects a dramatic change in the court’s makeup. Gov. Kim Reynolds has named four justices since 2017, so six of the seven people on the court have been appointed by Republican governors.

Reynolds, an outspoken opponent of abortion rights, and Republicans in the Legislature have repeatedly said they hoped the court would overturn the 2018 ruling. With that in mind, Reynolds and GOP lawmakers gave the governor more control over the panel that chooses which lawyers and judges are nominated for court positions.

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There's another philosophical problem solved. This is easy.

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. today officially introduced its N2 (2nm class) manufacturing technology, its first node that will use gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAAFETs), at its 2022 TSMC Technology Symposium. From a report: The new fabrication process will offer a full-now performance and power benefits, but when it comes to transistor density, it will barely impress in 2025 when it comes online. Being an all-new process technology platform, TSMC's N2 brings in two essential innovations: nanosheet transistors (which is what TSMC calls its GAAFETs) and backside power rail that both serve the same goal of increasing performance-per-watt characteristics of the node. GAA nanosheet transistors feature channels surrounded by gates on all four sides, which reduces leakage; furthermore, their channels can be widened to increase drive current and boost performance or shrunken to minimize power consumption and cost. To feed these nanosheet transistors with enough power and now waste any of it, TSMC's N2 uses backside power delivery, which the foundry considers to be among the best solutions to fight resistances in the back-end-of-line (BEOL). Indeed, when it comes to performance and power consumption, TSMC's nanosheet-based N2 node can boast of a 10% to 15% higher performance at the same power and complexity as well as a 25% to 30% lower power consumption at the same frequency and transistor count when compared to TSMC's N3E. However, the new node increases chip density by only around 1.1X compared to N3E. In general, TSMC's N3 does offer full-node performance increases and power consumption reductions. But density-wise, the new technology can hardly impress. For example, TSMC's N3E node offers a 1.3X chip density increase over N5, which is a substantial increase.

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The Senate Armed Services Committee has endorsed a $45 billion increase to President Joe Biden's military spending plans in its annual defense policy bill, blowing past the administration's Pentagon budget for a second straight year.

The rebuke of Biden's budget plans, which occurred during the panel's closed-door markup of the National Defense Authorization Act this week, comes after lawmakers added roughly $30 billion to the White House's previous defense spending proposal.

This week's boost brings the bill's topline budget figure to $847 billion, according to Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.). The goal, he said, is to counteract runaway inflation, aid Ukraine, replenish weapons sent into the fight against Russia, and fund military priorities left out of the Pentagon budget request.

The committee approved the defense policy bill Thursday morning, its second day of deliberations.

Senate Armed Services' increase is the highest bid so far for military spending for the coming fiscal year. The House is expected to make its own push to increase Pentagon spending. Still, the NDAA only authorizes spending and would need to be backed up by funding legislation produced by the House and Senate Appropriations panels.

Biden sought $813 billion for national defense in his fiscal 2023 budget — including $773 billion for the Pentagon. Roughly $10 billion of the $813 billion falls outside of Armed Services' jurisdiction.

But Republicans have been pushing for a substantial increase, arguing for a 3 to 5 percent increase from the current year's level above inflation. The current year's enacted level for the NDAA is $768 billion.

Reed told reporters Thursday that historic inflation was "the first consideration" in boosting the topline.

The committee chair had been negotiating a bipartisan topline deal with ranking Republican Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma ahead of the markup. Reed acknowledged that the bill's topline would likely have to be higher than Biden's request to account for high inflation, but that other needs could push that even higher.

"It's everything I hoped for," Inhofe said of the topline increase.

The House Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, this week sided with Biden's budget in its version of the bill, authorizing $773 billion for the Pentagon and $803 total for national defense programs that are in the panel's jurisdiction. Although the panel's chair, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said this week that he expects that number will grow.

Bigger topline: This marks the second budget of the Biden administration, and the second year in a row that Senate Democrats have joined Republicans to add billions to the request. Despite a progressive wing that has vowed to cut defense spending, the 50-50 split in the Senate means that the majority can't pass the NDAA without Republican help, which gives the GOP leverage to force higher budgets.

Pay raise: Despite the topline boost, senators stuck with the administration's request for a 4.6 percent pay increase next year for military personnel.

Stockpiling: The bill authorizes $1 billion for the National Defense Stockpile to shore up military access to critical materials.

Regional defense programs: Reed said the legislation "fully invests" in the Pentagon's Pacific Deterrence Initiative, aimed at building up the U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific to deter China, as well as the European Deterrence Initiative and the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

Honoring Inhofe: The bill is named for Inhofe, who is resigning from the Senate at the end of the 117th Congress. Inhofe has served as both chair and ranking member of the panel.

The most damning piece of evidence presented at today’s Select Committee hearing on the January 6 insurrection wasn’t a sound bite from a star witness, nor was it another never-before-seen video of the assault on the Capitol. The revelation amounted to a single highlighted sentence in an email sent days after the attack by one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, John Eastman, to another, Rudy Giuliani: “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”

Eastman, a conservative law professor, has long been a central figure in the January 6 saga: In memos and White House meetings, he first advanced and then sold Trump on the absurd legal theory that then–Vice President Mike Pence had the power to unilaterally reject electors from contested states. Based on Eastman’s arguments, Trump ceaselessly pressured Pence, in public and in private, to effectively overturn the will of voters and declare him the winner—a campaign that put the vice president’s life in danger on January 6 as a mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” descended on the Capitol.

What the committee established conclusively in its third public hearing, so neatly encapsulated by Eastman’s request for a pardon, was that Eastman knew that under the plan he’d devised, Trump was urging Pence to violate the law. And not just Eastman—everyone knew. The lawyers, aides, and assorted hangers-on who surrounded Trump in the crucial, ultimately tragic weeks between November 3 and January 6 all understood that what the defeated president was attempting was not merely contesting an election, but plotting to overturn its result.

Pence’s lawyer, Greg Jacob, testified that even as Eastman lobbied the vice president on Trump’s behalf, he repeatedly acknowledged during private conversations that his scheme for Pence to declare Trump the winner would violate the Electoral Count Act of 1887. In videotaped depositions, Pence aides said the same was true of Giuliani and Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff. Another White House attorney, Eric Herschmann, told the committee that when he pointed out to Eastman that such a move by Pence would spark widespread rioting in the streets, Eastman replied with “words to the effect of ‘There’s been violence in the history of our country in order to protect the democracy, or to protect the republic.’”

[Quinta Jurecic: The January 6 committee is not messing around]

The beginning of today’s hearing was notable for how unreservedly a committee created by and loaded with Democrats held up as a hero the former Republican vice president whose devotion to Trump the party once mocked and whose hostility to LGBTQ rights its leaders continue to revile. “We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage on January 6,” the committee chair, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said. “Thanks in part to Mike Pence, our democracy withstood Donald Trump’s scheme and the violence of January 6.” The praise seemed designed to create the illusion of bipartisanship, and to serve as an invitation for Pence himself to testify before the panel, an event that would capture public attention even more than the highly rated hearings already have. (Committee aides did not respond when I asked if they had asked him to appear.)

Yet the central significance remains the case against Trump and those who enabled his bid to remain in power. For all of Eastman’s apparent responsibility for January 6, he came across more sympathetically than the former president did today. Jacob testified that at one point in early January, Eastman recommended against having Pence reject the electors only to reverse himself, on Trump’s order, the very next day. Then, even after the horror of the Capitol siege, Herschmann said Eastman continued to press the Trump campaign to pursue its effort to overturn the results in key states, including Georgia. Herschmann said he erupted at Eastman and advised him to “get a great effing criminal-defense lawyer. You’re going to need it.” Eastman seemed to finally get the message. A few days later, Eastman emailed Giuliani with his request—which Trump never granted—for a presidential pardon.

Nolan Lawson, writing in a blogpost: Anyone who's worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. A legacy system exists: it's big, it's complex, and no one fully understands how it works. Architects are brought in to "fix" the system. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is... to add more boxes and arrows. Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds. This might go on for several years. At some point, though, an organizational shakeup probably occurs -- a merger, a reorg, the polite release of some senior executive to go focus on their painting hobby for a while. A new band of architects is brought in, and their solution to the "big diagram of boxes and arrows" problem is much simpler: draw a big red X through the whole thing. The old system is sunset or deprecated, the haggard veterans who worked on it either leave or are reshuffled to other projects, and a fresh-faced team is brought in to, blessedly, design a new system from scratch. As disappointing as it may be for those of us who might aspire to write the kind of software that is timeless and enduring, you have to admit that this system works. For all its wastefulness, inefficiency, and pure mendacity ("The old code works fine!" "No wait, the old code is terrible!"), this is the model that has sustained a lot of software companies over the past few decades. Will this cycle go on forever, though? I'm not so sure. Right now, the software industry has been in a nearly two-decade economic boom (with some fits and starts), but the one sure thing in economics is that booms eventually turn to busts. During the boom, software companies can keep hiring new headcount to manage their existing software (i.e. more engineers to understand more boxes and arrows), but if their labor force is forced to contract, then that same system may become unmaintainable. A rapid and permanent reduction in complexity may be the only long-term solution. One thing working in complexity's favor, though, is that engineers like complexity. Admit it: as much as we complain about other people's complexity, we love our own. We love sitting around and dreaming up new architectural diagrams that can comfortably sit inside our own heads -- it's only when these diagrams leave our heads, take shape in the real world, and outgrow the size of any one person's head that the problems begin. It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say "no" to new boxes and arrows. To say, "No, we won't solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven't imagined yet." Or to say, "Let's go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it." Or to just say, "Let's do less instead of more."

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