James.galbraith

How the controversy over Gen. Mark Milley illuminates the task ahead.

In the hours after former Minneapolis police offer Derek Chauvin was sentenced on Friday to 22.5 years in jail for murdering George Floyd, opinions about the punishment on social media seemed to fall in two categories. There were those who felt the sentence was too harsh, and those who thought it too lenient even while considering the rare sentence against a police officer a step in the right direction. I’m one of the latter. Chauvin, a public servant, was shown on viral video kneeling for nine minutes on the neck of a man accused of trying to use a counterfeit $20. The ex-cop’s words during sentencing were: “At this time, due to some additional legal matters at hand, I’m not able to give a full formal statement at this time, but very briefly though I do want to give my condolences to the Floyd family. There's going to be some other information in the future that would be of interest, and I hope things will give you some, some peace of mind.”

I would not deem it too harsh if he had to spend the rest of his life in prison.

When officers approached Floyd on May 25, 2020 outside of the Cup Foods corner store and they decided to arrest him, he tried repeatedly to explain he couldn't get into the back of their squad car because he had anxiety and claustrophobia. Police still deemed him to be resisting arrest. And when the situation escalated to officers piling on top of the 46-year-old Black father, he told them 27 times that he couldn't breathe, prosecutors said in closing statements of the murder trial. 

Floyd’s daughter, Gianna, who was allowed to give a victim impact statement virtually during sentencing, said she just wants to play with her father again. “We used to have dinner meals every single night before we went to bed,” she said. “My daddy always used to help me brush my teeth.”

When asked if she could say anything to her dad, she said it would be: “It would be I miss you and I love him.”

Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell said during closing statements this was a case so simple even a 9-year-old witness could understand it. "Get off of him," she had told police before Floyd's death."That's how simple it was. 'Get off of him.' Common sense,” the attorney said.

It’s just that simple for me too, but considering how long Chauvin should remain in prison required a greater degree of analysis. Brooklyn public defender Scott Hechinger questioned how it could even be an “unpopular opinion” that sentencing Chauvin to more than two decades in prison was harsh.

“And yes I know well that people are serving longer sentences for substantially less than murder,” the attorney said on Twitter. “That doesn’t make 22.5 years ‘lenient.’” He added that he gets concerned when we call for greater harshness for those we despise, like Derek Chauvin, because “I know that calls for greater harshness only further entrench the brutally harsh & violent criminal system that disproportionately targets & devastates people like George Floyd.”

Along the same lines, Keeanga Yamahtta, a Princeton University professor and contributing writer for The New Yorker tweeted: “Unpopular post...Only in America could anyone think that a prison sentence for more than twenty years is not harsh enough. If you know anything about prison, its utterly life destroying. I hope that we can move beyond the relentless desire for punishment. We need so much more.”

It’s a hope I share. But while I’m hoping, I also realize the reality of the current justice system and accompanying societal norms means only zeroing in on this idea of leniency for murderers when they are white.

Gwen Levi, a 76-year-old Black woman, didn't get such leniency, and she wasn’t convicted of murdering anyone. Levi served 16 years in federal prison for dealing heroin before she was allowed to finish her 24-year sentence in home confinement, The Washington Post reported. But even that came to an end because she didn’t answer a probation officer’s phone call while sitting in on a computer processing class in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. “There’s no question she was in class,” her attorney Sapna Mirchandani told the Post. “As I was told, because she could have been robbing a bank, they’re going to treat her as if she was robbing a bank.”

Levi’s story is one of several examples of Black offenders getting harsher sentences than their white peers. “There’s two justice systems in America: one for Black people and another for whites,” Floyd’s family attorney Ben Crump tweeted.

Judge Peter Cahill wrote in his sentencing order: "Part of the mission of the Minneapolis Police Department is to give citizens 'voice and respect.’ ... Here, Mr. Chauvin, rather than pursuing the MPD mission, treated Mr. Floyd without respect and denied him the dignity owed to all human beings and which he certainly would have extended to a friend or neighbor."

Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter on April 20, and he was sentenced on the heftier offense of second-degree murder, which comes with a 40-year statutory maximum term. Departing from the state's requested 30-year sentence, Cahill imposed a sentence that was 10 years more than the presumptive sentence of 10 and a half years. 

Cahill wrote in his sentencing order as an explanation that although four young women who witnessed the murder “were traumatized by witnessing this incident, the evidence at trial did not present any objective indicia of trauma.” He pointed out that one of them posted video to a social networking site, another recorded for several minutes, and two were “observed smiling and occasionally even laughing over the course of the several minutes they observed” Chauvin and other officers restraining Floyd.

"In other words, while the presence of children is an aggravated sentencing factor and a permissible ground for departure for purposes of the first stage of analysis, under the second stage of the analysis, this Court does not find that specific facts in this case are so substantial and compelling to warrant an upward durational departure on this ground," Cahill wrote. The short of it: Chauvin will be eligible for parole in about 15 years. 

RELATED: Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sentenced to 22.5 years for murder of George Floyd

RELATED: What to expect when Derek Chauvin is sentenced: Attorneys weigh in

As covered earlier today, the Pacific Northwest is experiencing the most severe heat wave in its history, with all-time record temperatures being set in Portland, Seattle, and Lytton, B.C, which just broke the record for hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada at 116 degrees. CBS News says this heat wave "is of an intensity never recorded by modern humans," and by one measure it's "more rare than a once in a 1,000 year event." Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli explains what's causing this "heat dome" and why events like this "are bound to become more common, more extreme and more deadly in the coming years": The heat is being caused by a combination of a significant atmospheric blocking pattern on top of a human-caused climate changed world where baseline temperatures are already a couple to a few degrees higher than nature intended. [...] In the case of this specific heat dome, which is a mountain of hot air stacked vertically through the atmosphere, it is a once in a 1,000 or even 10,000-year event for this particular area. How do we know? It's actually quite simple to explain. The intensity of a heat dome is measured by how "thick" the atmosphere is at a given spot. The hotter the air in that column, the larger the thickness of air in that column, because heat expands. In our historical record of North America's Pacific Northwest this heat dome registers a statistical standard deviation from the average of greater than 4. In layman terms, that means it falls more than 4 deviations to the right of the center of a typical bell curve (shown below) and that equates to values with less than a 99.99% chance of happening. In other words, statistically speaking, there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of experiencing this value. So, if you could possibly live in that spot for 10,000 years, you'd likely only experience that kind of heat dome once, if ever. It is worth noting that our historical record is limited and statistics like this are very sensitive to small changes. But if it seems like an overstatement to say there is a 1 in 10,000 chance of having a heat dome like this, it is certainly not an overstatement to say this is the kind of event you would expect to experience once in 1000 years. So what is causing this heat wave? Like any heat wave, it is being caused by a highly amplified jet stream pattern. These extreme jet stream perturbations are a natural, normal part of the atmosphere. But the climate science community is split as to whether these extreme jet stream perturbations are becoming even more likely because of climate change -- a phenomena known as the wavy jet stream. Along with a more wavy, buckling and slow-moving jet stream, comes a phenomena called "blocking". This is when waves in the jet stream become so elongated that they break off, sit and spin. In this case there is a textbook type of block called an Omega block over the Pacific Northwest because it looks like the Greek letter Omega. Inside this Omega, the heat pools and intensifies. There is a faction of climate scientists who believe that a warming climate -- specifically the Arctic -- results in a more wandering jet stream at certain times of the year. But it is hotly debated; there is an equal amount of research that does not arrive at this conclusion. Mann and his colleagues have been involved in some of this research, in which he finds that a specific type of Northern Hemisphere blocking -- what he calls Quasi Resonant Amplification -- will increase by 50% this century under business as usual human-forced climate warming. "I do indeed believe that the phenomenon we describe in our work played a very important role in the record heat wave," Mann said. As for the lack of consensus in the climate research on the wavy jet stream and blocking, Mann thinks it has more to do with the current state of climate modeling "This is an area where current generation models are NOT capturing a real-world climate connection," Mann explained. Whatever the cause, the result of an extreme jet stream pattern is extreme weather across many parts of the nation and globe. Over the past few days, the central U.S. has seen over a foot of rain with flash flooding along a stalled front. And, starting on Sunday and continuing through most of the upcoming week, the major East Coast cities will also sweat through a heat wave -- although not nearly as intense as the one in the West -- with feels-like temperatures near 100 degrees from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia and New York City.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to release an opinion any day now on Brnovich v. DNC and with it could strike another devastating blow to the Voting Rights Act. The court heard the case back in March. At issue are two Arizona laws, one requiring election officials to toss ballots that are cast in the wrong precincts, and another that would restrict the delivery of mail-in ballots, allowing for just the voter, a family member, or caregiver to collect and deliver a voted ballot. That would prevent campaign workers, community activists, or members like church groups from delivering group ballots, making it a felony to do so.

The third-party ballot collection ban is particularly detrimental to Native American voters, who are less likely to have access to reliable mail services in the state. Just 18% of Native American voters outside of the state's largest counties—Pima and Maricopa—have physical addresses and receive mail at home. The Tohono O'odham reservation has no home delivery and only one post office.

Preventing ballots cast in the wrong precinct—even in statewide or federal races—is targeted primary at Latino and other people of color, the DNC argued, because the state frequently changes precinct locations in urban counties with large populations of people of color. In 2016, when 3,709 out-of-precinct ballots were rejected, these voters were twice as likely as their white counterparts to have their votes tossed out.

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This, the DNC argues, is in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which "prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups" identified as protected by the law. It bans any voting procedure that "results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race," a denial or abridgment that occurs when "based on the totality of circumstances," racial minorities "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." This is the part of the VRA, incidentally, that Attorney General Merrick Garland is suing Georgia for violating with its new voter suppression laws.

As of June 21, the Brennan Center for Justice reports, 17 states have enacted 28 new laws that restrict access to the vote. Most of these new laws are specifically targeted to burden poor people, young people, and voters of color. Section 2 is pretty much the last vestige of the VRA left to protect these voters after the Roberts Court struck down much of the law in 2013. It tossed the key formula of Section 5 of the law, which determined which states with a history of discrimination needed to seek approval, or preclearance, from the federal government before enacting new voting laws. Arizona was one of those states, pre-2013, that was required to have election laws reviewed and approved by the Justice Department.

In the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, that VRA decision, Roberts wrote that voters would always have Section 2 as a remedy. Instead of protecting discriminated voters before the fact, he dismissed their concerns, saying they could be addressed after the fact. "Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide and is not at issue in this case," he wrote. Except now that Section 2—or the meat of it anyway—is not before the court again, its permanence isn't such a sure bet.

Meanwhile, Arizona is continuing to worst itself and has taken even more steps to undermine elections, taking the legal authority over elections away from of the Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, and handing it off to the Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich. The attorney general defending the state at the Supreme Court now. This power grab by Republicans is on Gov. Doug Ducey's (another Republican) desk now.

Oral arguments are not always a clue as to where the court is going to go, but it doesn't look good for voting rights, judging by what the justice said back in March when the case was heard. "Several members of the court’s conservative majority said the restrictions were sensible, commonplace and at least partly endorsed by a bipartisan consensus reflected in a 2005 report signed by former President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under President George Bush," The New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, Adam Liptak, wrote after the arguments, saying the court "seemed ready" to uphold the state's restrictions.

Which means two essential things: The Senate has to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act, two bills that will protect the vote. For all voters. It also means the Senate is going to have to get rid of the filibuster in its current form. Sen. Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans in the Senate are not going to provide the 10 votes Democrats would need to pass either of these key bills. It's that simple.

Even filibuster-loving Kyrsten Sinema is going to have to see that. The Arizona Democrat seems to be delighting in trolling progressives these days, but pretty soon reality is going to sink in. She's in Arizona, where the people who got her elected are being blocked from the polls. If she's going to have a future in politics, she's going to have to ensure it, because she sure as hell isn't going to get elected with Republican votes.

With a legally questionable move to shut down facilities for immigrant children, he's sending a message to 2024 primary voters.

President Joe Biden’s weekend airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria are rankling Democrats frustrated by his decision to sidestep Congress — a dynamic that promises to fuel the party’s long-running push to rein in presidential war powers.

Democratic lawmakers are in familiar territory over Biden's latest retaliatory airstrikes after criticizing him for striking the same Iranian proxies in the region earlier this year without first seeking congressional approval. In both instances, the president cited his authority under Article II of the Constitution, which allows him to take steps to protect U.S. service members in self-defense.

But some in Biden's party are sounding the alarm about possible abuses of that power, which presidents of both parties have employed to circumvent Congress and legally justify various military operations. The airstrikes come as lawmakers are already working to repeal the two-decade-old authorizations for the use of military force in Iraq, an effort that Biden supports.

“The danger here is that you fall into a pattern of military escalation that becomes war without voters ever having a say,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a top member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview. “The safest bet for a president is to just claim broad Article II authority.”

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the Foreign Relations panel’s chair, suggested he wants a broader examination of Biden’s legal rationale for the strikes. The president’s Article II powers have long been viewed as expansive and broad by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

“Congress has the power to authorize the use of military force and declarations of war, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is planning to hear from the administration more on these strikes,” Menendez said in a Monday statement on the airstrikes.

Complicating matters further for the Biden administration, the Iraqi government condemned the strikes on its soil on Monday, with officials calling the attack a “blatant” violation of its sovereignty.

Additionally, U.S. forces in Syria came under rocket fire late Monday in what was likely a retaliation for the strikes by the militia groups, Lt. Col. Wayne Marotto, a spokesperson for the coalition, said on Twitter. There are no injuries and the damage is still being assessed, Marotto said.

Iran-backed militia groups in Iraq and Syria have stepped up their attacks against Americans in the region in recent months, prompting Biden to approve what Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby described as “defensive precision airstrikes” targeting the groups’ weapons storage facilities near the Iraq-Syria border.

“Given the ongoing series of attacks by Iran-backed groups targeting U.S. interests in Iraq, the president directed further military action to disrupt and deter such attacks,” Kirby added.

The Pentagon concluded that each strike hit its intended target, and officials are currently assessing the full effects of the operation, Pentagon spokesperson Cmdr. Jessica McNulty told POLITICO on Monday. Air Force jets from U.S. Central Command bases carried out the strikes, according to a defense official.

The groups have changed tactics from using rockets to deploying unmanned aerial systems or UAS in recent months, a move that U.S. officials see as escalation. The militias have launched at least five UAS attacks against facilities used by U.S. and coalition personnel in Iraq since April, McNulty said.

But those explanations from the Pentagon might not be enough for Democrats who are already demanding classified briefings about the nature of the threat. Several already view the airstrikes as “hostilities” under the War Powers Act that thus require congressional approval.

“The administration would be better off coming to Congress and asking for a debate on a declaration of war if they foresee a need to continue to go back and forth with … Iranian proxy groups," Murphy said.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), a former CIA officer who has pushed to repeal aging war authorizations, said she hasn't read the administration's justification for the airstrike yet but didn't foresee the move spurring a protracted war powers debate.

"We're pretty far away from authorizing or moving towards an authorization of use of military force specific to Iranian-backed militia[s]," Spanberger said in an interview. "There's a lot that happens throughout the world, and I think that there would be significant, significant debate … within Congress, before we would look at writing such an authorization."

Since Biden directed an airstrike on a border crossing used by Iran-backed militia groups in eastern Syria in February, he has refrained from launching additional retaliatory operations amid repeated militia attacks on U.S. and Iraqi personnel. Officials said the February move was calculated to signal to Iran that the Biden administration would not tolerate such attacks through proxies in the region, while avoiding escalation into a wider conflict.

But the administration sees the growing number of UAS attacks as an escalation designed to increase pressure on Washington to withdraw troops from Iraq, said one senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operations. The drones are now carrying larger and more precise payloads, this official said.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who has led the effort in the upper chamber to repeal the 1991 and 2002 Iraq war authorizations, said the White House’s Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk was planning to brief him about the strikes on Monday.

Kaine said he was concerned that the conflict would “escalate without a congressional discussion” but added that Biden’s actions were a “classic” self-defense mechanism.

“I have a much more constrained view of Article II powers than most around here,” Kaine added. “I think it has to be defense against attacks or imminent attacks.”

Democrats also raised concerns about whether U.S. strikes against the Iran-backed militia groups are actually having a deterrent effect. The administration has described the strikes as targeted and precise in nature, but the attacks on Americans have not abated.

“Protecting American troops is a priority, but clearly continuing airstrikes is not deterring Iran-backed militias from attacking our troops in Iraq,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) said. “I look forward to hearing a realistic plan from the Biden administration to de-escalate — as we discussed back in February — because we can’t keep launching strikes over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Biden’s airstrikes got a key endorsement from at least one top Democrat, though. House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement that the strikes “were an appropriate and reasonable use of force intended for defensive purposes.” Schiff added that he has asked the administration for “an assessment of whether this action will truly deter or prevent further attacks.”

Republicans were mostly mum about the airstrikes as of Monday morning, but Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Biden did the right thing and that the decision highlights the need to keep the 2002 Iraq war authorization on the books.

“I believe these actions are overdue and highlight the continued need for the 2002 AUMF, or — at a minimum — the need for a comprehensive replacement before a repeal can be considered, especially given that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are an ongoing threat to American troops,” Inhofe said in a statement.

Iraq’s government has long been in a tough spot as it has tried to maintain good relations with both Tehran and Washington, which are adversaries. Both U.S. troops and Iranian-backed forces have aided the Iraqi government in fighting against the Islamic State terrorist group, and Iran has significant economic, cultural and religious ties with Iraq.

Nahal Toosi and Connor O'Brien contributed to this report.

When they cry that President Biden hurt their feelings, you know they're looking for an excuse to walk away from bipartisanship.

Barr's latest admission about Trump's effort to overturn the election blows back on him.

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Viktor Orbán’s war on LGBTQ identities is a war on democracy.

During last week’s European championship soccer match between Germany and Hungary, the rainbow was everywhere on the German side. The German goalie wore a rainbow armband; the team’s fans donned rainbow wigs and waved rainbow flags.

All of this was directed at the opposing side: The Germans were protesting a new Hungarian law banning LGBTQ sex education and media directed at minors — a measure that has sparked outrage in Europe and elsewhere against Hungary.

While this may look like a PR mess for Hungary’s ruling right-wing Fidesz party, it’s in keeping with the right-wing populist playbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has turned to over and over again to shore up his authoritarian rule. In the past few years, demonizing queer and trans identities has become a central part of Orbán’s campaign for maintaining his grip on power.

The criticism from Europe, if anything, bolsters the strategy. It allows the Hungarian government to tout its core ideological argument: that it is the Hungarian Christian family’s champion against a godless, globalist European Union.

“Hungary asserts its role as ‘defender of traditional values’ while mostly West European states get to claim moral superiority with no one paying any price for it,” says Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia who studies far-right politics.

The new anti-LGBTQ rules — which were tacked on at the last minute to a bill increasing penalties for sex crimes against children — are part of a broader slate of legal attacks on the queer community that strengthen Orbán’s regime, the only non-democratic government in the European Union.

Demagoguery is at the heart of the Fidesz political strategy. A series of boogeymen — Muslim migrants, Jewish billionaire George Soros, and now LGBTQ activists — have been used to rally Orbán’s base to the ballot box and justify the expansion of authoritarian state powers.

In this, Orbán is not alone. The demonization of out-groups is a key ingredient in the right-wing authoritarian recipe, one used by factions the world over to win power and undermine democracy once they’ve acquired it. It’s a pattern Americans should pay attention to, especially during the current moment of right-wing panic about the purported corruption of our youth.

Hungary’s persecution of LGBTQ communities, explained

The new Hungarian regulations on LGBTQ expression are broad. Among other things, they prohibit sex educators from instructing students about LGBTQ sexuality and ban television stations from airing content “popularizing” LGBTQ identity outside the hours of 10 pm to 5 am. The regulations also prohibit films or advertisements from representing same-sex physical acts or gender-affirmation surgery in materials targeted at individuals under 18.

But what counts as “popularizing” LGBTQ identity, and what sorts of art count as being targeted at kids? According to local media and human rights groups, the bill isn’t especially clear on these points — raising fears about censorship. RTL Klub, the country’s largest television channel, warned that “series like Modern Family would be banned, as would some episodes of Friends.”

No less troubling: By declaring LGBTQ programming harmful for children, the law dehumanizes queer couples and individuals, legally codifying the notion that their very existence threatens Hungarian society.

Defenders of the law are open about its hierarchical aims. An article in the Hungarian Conservative, a magazine supportive of the Orbán regime, denies that Friends specifically would be blocked by the new rules — but touts the bill’s efforts to “protect children’s natural and healthy sexual development” from the allegedly nefarious influence of gay propaganda.

“Protecting children does not end with stopping sex offenders, but should also include the protection from potentially harmful influences well until children are old enough to make the best decisions for themselves,” the article claims.

This bill is not a one-off. Since coming to power in 2010, Orbán has systematically undermined LGBTQ rights in Hungary. The most significant early move was a constitutional provision banning same-sex marriage enacted in 2012.

Gergely Besenyei/AFP/Getty Images

In recent years, the anti-LGBTQ campaign has intensified. In 2018, the government banned the teaching of gender studies in Hungarian universities. A government spokesperson told CNN at the time that they did it because “we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.” In May 2020, the government prohibited trans Hungarians from changing their gender on official government forms.

In December 2020, the government approved a constitutional reform package that strengthened the anti-LGBTQ constitutional provisions: It stated that the family is defined as being “based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man.” The December legislative package also banned adoption by same-sex couples and abolished the Equal Treatment Authority, Hungary’s most important nondiscrimination agency covering LGBTQ rights.

The anti-LGBTQ policies of the past few years are not incidental to Fidesz’s ideology. A paper by Andrea Pető and Weronika Grzebalska, two scholars of gender and politics in Central Europe, identify the Hungarian government’s commitment to traditional gender norms as the “symbolic glue” that holds its overall ideology together, positioning social liberalism “as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the current state of politics.”

In the government’s narrative, the traditional Christian Hungarian family is under attack by nefarious globalist liberals who want to replace Hungarian mothers and fathers with immigrants. Defending the Hungarian nation means defending the family, defined exclusively as male-female pairings that produce more Hungarian children. The Orbán government is notoriously obsessed with the birthrate, passing tax and welfare policies specifically framed as incentives for native Hungarian women to have more kids.

The government attacks on LGBTQ identities flow directly from this conservative preoccupation with family and fertility, casting queer families as illegitimate, non-procreative entities.

“In a moral sense, there is no difference between pedophiles and those who demand [gay adoption],” László Kövér, the speaker of Hungary’s parliament, said in 2019. “Both objectify the child as a consumer good, and consider it a means of self-fulfillment.”

How social conservatism fuels Hungarian authoritarianism

Hungarians have long been more conservative than most other EU states. A 2019 Eurobarometer poll found that 61 percent opposed same-sex marriage and 72 percent opposed allowing trans individuals to alter government documents to match their gender identity. This fits a general European pattern, in which former communist states are on average more culturally right-wing than their Western European peers.

At the same time, there’s some evidence of recent movement in a more progressive direction. A 2021 Ipsos poll found that 59 percent of Hungarians today support same-sex couples’ adoption rights, compared to 42 percent in 2013. A plurality had even come to favor same-sex marriage (46 percent in favor versus 38 percent opposed).

These numbers suggest the recent anti-LGBTQ moves are less of a response to a public groundswell than a political play by the ruling party to elevate the issue — to wage a culture war against progressive ideas and activists as a means of activating the Fidesz base and solidifying Orban’s hold on power.

By definition, “populism” as a political style relies on a contrast between a virtuous people and a corrupt elite. In modern right-wing populism, both in Hungary and elsewhere, that corrupt elite is typically identified with minorities and socially liberal activists — groups positioned as subverting national traditions, attacking traditional morality, and destroying national character.

“Minority rights are rejected as threatening the majority’s rights to do what they please, and dignity and solidarity is only granted to those belonging to the restricted community of real patriots,” Pető and Grzebalska write in their article on the gender politics of right-wing populism. “The illiberal right is not so much trying to eliminate the progressive civil society but rather turn it into a bogeyman that governing elites can activate whenever they need to mobilize their supporters.”

For much of Orbán’s time in power, Muslim refugees were the principal villain in this kind of story. Orbán linked their entry with George Soros, a Hungarian-American Jewish billionaire, arguing that he was facilitating migration as part of a plot to destroy the country’s Hungarian and Christian character. The Islamophobic and anti-Semitic overtones were not subtle.

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” Orbán said in a 2018 speech.

As the migrant crisis has receded, Fidesz has sought to inflame anti-LGBTQ sentiment (Soros remains a major villain in government propaganda). That the party is going into high gear now with its demagoguery is not surprising — there’s a national election next year. Coming off Hungary’s poor handling of Covid-19 and a scandal surrounding a leading Fidesz figure’s visit to a gay sex party, a play to rev up Fidesz’s socially conservative base by presenting them with yet another enemy to hate is unsurprising.

Now, it’s important not to equate social conservatism with authoritarianism. Opposing equal rights for LGBTQ individuals, while certainly illiberal, could well be supported by an electoral majority in Hungary.

But far-right governments like Orbán’s typically use populism in service of their authoritarianism: Attacks on minority groups are not merely electoral appeals but also justifications for power grabs that weaken democracy’s foundations.

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

By 2017, Fidesz and its allies had managed to seize control over roughly 90 percent of the media; since then, it has continued to apply pressure on the few free outlets that remain. The government uses tax and regulatory powers to punish businesses whose owners challenge Fidesz, passes laws making it difficult for human rights groups to operate, and changed school curricula to match Fidesz narratives.

Many of the anti-LGBTQ laws passed expand the state’s power to enforce ideological hegemony. In the name of fighting a phantom scourge, it has given itself new abilities to regulate education, media, and advertising — sometimes through vaguely worded provisions that could be enforced capriciously. In this sense, the anti-LGBTQ provisions aren’t merely cultural warfare but direct expansions of Orbán’s authoritarian reach.

This is not a uniquely Hungarian phenomenon: Authoritarian populists of both the right- and left-wing variety, in countries as diverse as Poland and Venezuela and Turkey, have used demonization of minorities and/or an allegedly corrupt elite to enact laws aimed at weakening their political opponents and revving up their base.

Closer to home, we’re seeing something similar afoot. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) recently signed a bill that would require professors at state-funded universities to fill out surveys describing the campus ideological climate, threatening budget funds if schools are deemed insufficiently open to right-wing ideas. Dozens of state legislatures have passed or proposed bills that regulate what can be taught in the classroom on similar grounds — a response to the allegedly corrosive threat of “critical race theory” on the US educational system.

These American bills are not directly inspired by Hungarian policies. But the affinities between right-wing populists in these countries are real, with many leading thinkers on the American right openly admiring Orbán’s willingness to wage culture wars, to the point where they’re willing to downplay his authoritarian abuses.

“What I see in Orbán is one of the few major politicians in the West who seems to understand the importance of Christianity, and the importance of culture, and who is willing to defend these things against a very rich and powerful international establishment,” Rod Dreher, a senior writer at the American Conservative who recently accepted a writing fellowship at the government-funded Danube Institute in Budapest, told me last year. “I find myself saying of Orbán what I hear conservatives say when they explain why they instinctively love Trump: because he fights. The thing about Orbán is that unlike Trump, he fights, and he wins, and his victories are substantive.”

This cultural affinity is effectively an intellectual shield for Orbán, with criticism of his anti-democratic tendencies portrayed by conservatives as a liberal smear.

“One suspects [allegations of authoritarianism are] just simple hatred of Christian conservatism, a fanatical projection of culture war antipathies to the near abroad,” Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in National Review, without a hint of irony.

The Hungarian government has assiduously courted the global intellectual right, setting up meetings between Orbán and prominent socially conservative thinkers from countries ranging from Canada to Israel. The goal is to construct an international traditionalist alliance, centering on Budapest, that aligns right-wing populist movements in Europe and beyond. The culture war is a useful tool for normalizing Hungarian authoritarianism globally, and for enlisting allies who are willing to overlook anti-democratic abuses when the right side of the culture war is perpetrating them.

It’s a strategy that, in many ways, has worked for Orbán — and shows just how vulnerable democracy is to far-right cultural demagoguery.

Jalopnik reports: A new United Kingdom-based study conducted by CarGurus confirms a trend that's been popping up lately: most drivers aren't confident in sharing the road with fully-autonomous vehicles. The site surveyed just over 1,000 automobile owners in the UK to understand their thoughts regarding self-driving cars, making sure to balance respondents by race, income, gender, and more. The study showed that, overall, 36 percent of respondents were concerned about the development of self-driving cars, with another 35 percent identifying as neutral and 30 percent as excited. 41 percent of respondents said they would not be comfortable in any self-driving car scenario, whether they were the one behind the wheel or they were sharing the road with autonomous delivery vehicles... Ultimately, CarGurus offers a few points that sum up the sentiment of the survey: - More people are concerned about autonomous vehicles than they are excited. It'll take more convincing and safety assurances to get people involved. - Most buyers would rather have driver assistance features but still be in charge. On the bright side, the study also found that people were at least excited about having a car that could steer into a parking spot by itself.

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Remember when ProPublica said they'd obtained the tax returns of some of America's richest people? Now they're reporting that Peter Thiel turned a small retirement account — the kind meant to help middle class investors — "into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank." Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned "confiscatory taxes." He's been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he's bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes. But Thiel doesn't need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account. Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall. To put that into perspective, here's how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108... What's more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.... While most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country's richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system. One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year... Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments. ProPublica argues Thiel's move alone "deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions." But he's not the only multi-millionaire they found stashing vast sums into untaxed accounts: Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway had $264.4 million at the end of 2018.Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich: $20.2 millionFormer Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer: $31.5 million

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Amazon's cloud services giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting into the encrypted messaging business. From a report: The company has just announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr -- a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. It claims to be the only "collaboration service" that meets security criteria set out by the NSA. AWS will continue operating Wickr as is, and offer its services to AWS customers, "effective immediately," notes a blog post from Stephen Schmidt, the VP and CISO for AWS, announcing the news. Financial terms were not disclosed in the short announcement. Wickr had raised just under $60 million in funding according to PitchBook data (it also notes a valuation of under $30 million but that seems to be a very old estimate).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two weeks ago, the CDC labeled the Delta variant as a “variant of concern.” Formerly known as B.1.617.2, or as one of two variants first identified in India, Delta was thought to be partially responsible for the rapid rise of cases in that country, and was known to share some of the features that made the earlier Alpha variant more contagious. But as more information comes in, “concern” doesn’t seem to express the level of anxiety that might be attached to this variant—which is rapidly becoming dominant in the United States and around the world. That’s because the Delta variant seems more than capable of reinfecting those people who have been infected by previous forms of the virus behind COVID-19. And it’s much more vaccine evasive than anything tested before.

And now there’s an “upgrade” to that variant in the form of B.1.617.2.1. This variant, also known as “Delta Plus” was also first detected in India earlier this year. This new variant has been seen in numerous countries, including the United States, and may have features that make it still more contagious and vaccine-evasive than the widespread form of Delta.

The original Delta variant is bad enough. Bad enough that a Nature preprint from scientists in India and the U.K. shows that this variant is turning previously rare COVID-19 reinfections into a regular occurrence. The vaccine is also 8-9 times less responsive to antibodies produced by vaccines. That doesn’t mean that vaccines are useless. In fact, vaccines may be the only thing that stops Delta at this point, as the response from vaccines is still well above that generated by the immune systems of people who have previously been infected by the Alpha or other variants of SARS-CoV-2 virus. 

Delta isn’t just spreading quickly because it is more contagious. It’s spreading quickly because it is blowing past the immune systems of those who have previously been infected.

As Cambridge microbiology professor Dr. Ravi Gupta explains in an extensive thread on the results, modeling of the huge recent wave of cases in India suggests that many of those who got sick with the Delta variant were previously infected. That includes those who had asymptomatic or mild cases of COVID-19 and thought that this previous exposure would generate immunity. 

But as both the in vitro research and modeling shows, Delta was not just 10-40% more transmissible than even the already highly contagious Alpha, it was also capable of evading neutralizing antibodies in 20-55% of those who had previously been infected by a non-Delta variant. Delta spreads more readily, and those who had a previous case—especially those where a mild case may represent a low level of immune response—are absolutely not protected from this variant. This is a very bad combination.

Not only does this version of the virus seem to generate more spike proteins, giving it a easier access to human cells, it also replicates in greater numbers, resulting in a higher viral load in the respiratory system of those infected. That gives Delta a boost in moving to the next victim, and also makes it more likely to cause severe disease. Increased transmissibility plus immunity evasion makes Delta a threat to even places that have been ravaged by past waves of COVID-19, and makes it a serious threat to those who claim they don’t need to be vaccinated because they already had the disease.

The Delta variant is also infecting people who have been vaccinated at a rate well above any previous variant. Across India, the Delta variant “dominates vaccine-breakthrough infections.” However, these cases are still extremely rare. In vitro testing of the Delta variant against antibodies generated by vaccines from AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech showed that the response was 8.4 to 9 times less than that seen with the original “wild type.” To some extent, that should be expected. Both vaccines spike proteins created from the original genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 which was provided in January of 2020. Every change to that protein that has happened since then has reduced the impact of those vaccines. However, “reduced” does not mean “negated.” Not even close. The response generated by vaccines is still two orders of magnitude greater than that seen when looking at samples taken from those previous infected. Vaccine evasion by Delta happens. However, the vaccines are still effective at blocking almost all cases, and when infections do occur, vaccines are effective in reducing the severity of illness.

As the Associated Press reported on Thursday, almost all COVID-19 deaths in the United States are now among the unvaccinated. And “almost all” seems like an understatement. Because the percentage of COVID-19 deaths occurring among vaccinated patients was %0.8 over the month of May. That means 99.2% of all deaths occurred in the 46% of the population that is unvaccinated. This remains true, even as Delta forms an ever higher percentage of cases.

It also means, as CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said this week, “nearly every death, especially among adults, due to COVID-19, is, at this point, entirely preventable.” Over 99% are the pointless expression of continued high vaccine disdain among Republicans. 

Still, vaccinated people are getting infected. The international study looked at 100 health care workers who had become infected after being vaccinated. As other studies have shown, these vaccinated workers didn’t get as sick as others who were infected by the Delta variant. However, those infected with Delta still carried high viral loads. So even the vaccinated-infected could easily transmit the virus.

And that’s being seen in the real world. As The Wall Street Journal reports, an outbreak of Delta variant is spreading across Israel, with about half of those infected being fully vaccinated. However, this doesn’t meant that the Delta variant can completely bypass vaccination. The vaccination rate in Israel, while high, is still less than 65%. That’s below the projected level needed to halt community spread, even of the original version of SARS-CoV-2. The ability of the Delta variant to not just infect the vaccinated, but be passed along, changes the calculus. It’s unlikely that the R0 of the virus is such that it can sustain community spread in a community where everyone is vaccinated—the rate of infection is too low. However, the level of vaccination needed to evade Delta is going to be considerably higher.

This outbreak in Israel is, at the moment at least, not a nationwide wave, but more of a cluster. It’s likely that this outbreak will not be sustained. And, thanks to vaccines, it’s not generated a large number of severe cases. But it shows that an insufficiently vaccinated population is susceptible to the Delta variant, even when the national average is high. This particular outbreak started among a group that hasn’t been vaccinated—school children under the age of 16—and spread to their families. It shows how hard it will be to close this thing down so long as significant cohorts remain unvaccinated. Israel responded quickly by reinstituting mask requirements and dropping plans to reopen the country to international tourism in the next month.

In the United States, where the percentage of people vaccinated is still less than 20% in some counties, the variant could easily sustain community spread. And while the vaccinated may be protected from serious disease, the unvaccinated are not. Hospitals in some areas are already seeing increased loads of younger, sicker patients infected by the Delta variant.

The increased threat of community spread also means that some areas need to rethink relaxed guidelines and attempts to “get back to normal.” This is already impacting facilities like nursing homes in Colorado, where the Delta variant is threatening seniors whose immune systems don’t generate as strong a response to the vaccine.

Whether any of these things get worse with Delta Plus isn’t clear. And there is already many other variants that branch from the Delta variant. Any one of which may be more vaccine evasive.

The faster everyone gets a vaccine that reduces their chance of being infected, which in turn reduces their chance of spreading the disease, the more likely the world is to slow the parade of variants before a genuinely vaccine-evasive version enters rapid spread. However, everyone who got a vaccine in the last year should be expecting a booster in the next year, because the only way to be sure of keeping up vaccine resistance, is to try and keep up with the changing mix of viral proteins.

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Microsoft, which has unveiled a new version of Windows for the first time in six years, said it will integrate its Teams chat and videoconferencing software directly into the operating system. From a report: Teams has seen a huge surge in users during the pandemic, boosting Microsoft in a product category where it's been trying to catch up with Slack and Zoom. The latest personal computer operating system, Windows 11, also features a new design and will offer changes to the app store.

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[A report issued by the State Senate's Oversight Committee conclude Kraken claims are a myth.]

An investigation into alleged voting irregularities in Michigan led by Republicans in the Michigan State Senate rejected claims from the election was somehow stolen, as various Trump-aligned figures had claimed.

From the Detroit Free Press report:

An investigation led by Michigan Republican lawmakers found no basis for claims by former President Donald Trump and his allies that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, a Michigan Senate report released Wednesday concludes.

The results of the inquiry by the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee, chaired by a Republican and comprised of a GOP majority, are the latest repudiation of conspiracies and lies revolving around Michigan's election results.

"The Committee found no evidence of widespread or systemic fraud in Michigan's prosecution of the 2020 election," the report states.

"Citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan."

The full report may be accessed here.

From the report's introduction:

This report contains findings and suggestions developed from 28 hours of testimony from almost 90 individuals spanning nine committee hearings, the review of thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents from multiple government entities, hundreds of hours of Senate staff investigation, and countless reviews of claims and concerns from Michigan residents. A detailed examination of all evidence presented to the Committee established an undeniable conclusion; while there are glaring issues that must be addressed in current Michigan election law, election security, and certain procedures, there is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.

From the conclusion:

The Committee can confidently assert that it has been thorough in examination of numerous allegations of unlawful actions, improper procedures, fraud, vote theft, or any other description which would cause citizens to doubt the integrity of Michigan's 2020 election results. Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan. The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain. We also conclude citizens should demand reasonable updates and reforms to close real vulnerabilities and unlawful activities that caused much of the doubt and questionability to flourish and could, if unchecked, be responsible for serious and disastrous fraud or confusion in the future.

Trump lawyer and Ukraine conspiracy peddler Rudy Giuliani can no longer practice law in the state of New York: A state disciplinary group requested and was granted an immediate suspension of Giuliani's license for lying to courts during his attempts to overturn the U.S. presidential election on Trump's behalf.

The conclusions of the Attorney Grievance Committee are devastating:

"[W]e conclude that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020. These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client. We conclude that respondent’s conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law ..."

The committee carefully documents just a few of Giuliani's individual false statements. He lied outright about absentee ballots in Pennsylvania. He lied to a Pennsylvania court about the contents of his own claim. He lied about dead people supposedly "voting," presenting "varying and wildly inconsistent numbers" of these supposed dead people. He similarly lied about Georgia election results, about underage voters in the state, illegal voting by felons, dead people again, about video evidence, and voting by Arizona "illegal aliens."

A common theme among Giuliani's false statements is that he made little apparent effort to make his lies consistent even between one telling and the next, with the number of allegedly "fraudulent" votes fluctuating wildly and with evidence seldom more substantial than claiming he learned it from a "blogger" or other intermediary. His attempts to defend those false statements to the disciplinary committee come off nearly as ridiculous as the lies themselves.

In justifying Giuliani's immediate suspension pending further proceedings, the committee notes that Giuliani has continued to make similar false statements in public even during the proceedings, concluding "there is evidence of continuing misconduct, the underlying offense is incredibly serious, and the uncontroverted misconduct in itself will likely result in substantial permanent sanctions at the conclusion of these disciplinary proceedings."

"The seriousness of respondent’s uncontroverted misconduct cannot be overstated. This country is being torn apart by continued attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election and of our current president, Joseph R. Biden. The hallmark of our democracy is predicated on free and fair elections. False statements intended to foment a loss of confidence in our elections and resulting loss of confidence in government generally damage the proper functioning of a free society."

Nothing can stop Rudy Giuliani from attempting to undermine our democracy through the peddling of indefensible hoaxes. But at least in New York, he won't be able to claim he's doing so as a lawyer—and from the committee's conclusions, he won't be getting his license back soon, or likely ever.

With Fox News and Republicans in a continuing uproar over the false idea that a graduate-level legal theory is being taught in K-12 schools, Joy Reid brought one of the architects of that uproar, Christopher Rufo, onto her show Wednesday night, and smilingly refused to allow him to recite his well-rehearsed talking points.

The campaign against critical race theory in schools is based on identifying virtually any discussion of race or racism as critical race theory. Rufo has admitted as much—or bragged about it—tweeting “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” 

Reid was not having it when Rufo tried to do just that on her show. He repeatedly offered up non-critical race theorists like Robin DiAngelo as examples of critical race theory supposedly being taught in schools, and Reid shot him down—still smiling—every single time. (DiAngelo has a degree in multicultural education.) “Critical race theory” as promoted by Republicans and the right-wing media, Reid correctly identified, is really Christopher Rufo Theory. “You made up your own thing, you admitted you were going to do it, and I’m going to give you credit for one thing: You did create your own thing,” Reid said late in the interview.

Writing at Media Matters, Matt Gertz (not Gaetz) showed just how that happened, identifying a “feedback loop between powerful right-wing institutions” that’s driving the critical race theory discourse just as the same basic process made the tea party movement a thing in 2009, drove opposition to health care reform in 2010, and whipped up rage about public health guidelines in 2020.

The first step of that feedback loop is that “Right-wing think tanks came up with a framework for discussing ‘critical race theory.’” That’s Rufo, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, but his choice of targets has been amplified by others including the Heritage Foundation. Next, “Advocacy groups use the think tank framework to oppose ‘critical race theory,’” with “at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender,” according to NBC News. Those groups include blatant astroturf led by longtime Republican operatives as well as efforts by right-wing activists given strength by appearances on Fox News.

Next, Gertz writes, the work of the advocacy groups (which were inspired by the think tank framework) “generates press coverage, particularly from right-wing media.” Mentions of critical race theory have spiked from Fox News to Breitbart, fed by interviews with those advocacy groups in which what often goes unmentioned is that the person being billed as a concerned parent involved with a local anti-CRT group is a media-trained Republican operative: “For example, Fox has provided a series of reports about “critical race theory” in schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, often featuring the commentary of Ian Prior, a GOP operative and executive director of Fight For Schools who lives there. (County school officials say critical race theory is not taught in the district.)”

And then Republican politicians jump on the issue, centering their campaigns on it and passing legislation that is demonstrably not about critical race theory, but claims to be. That in turn helps convince more of the Republican base (the ones not already convinced by Fox News and OAN and Newsmax) that this is a Big Problem. Even though, at least in the case of critical race theory, it is a 100% manufactured controversy over a theory not actually being taught in K-12 schools that’s being used to stand in for any teaching about race and racism and U.S. history that makes conservative white people uncomfortable.

That’s how Republicans manufacture a culture war. They’re doing it right in front of our eyes right now, and they’re not even really bothering to hide that that’s what they’re doing.

SCOTUS is forced to clean up a $124 billion mess of its own making.

One of the conservative legal movement’s oddest obsessions involves something known as the “unitary executive,” the idea that all federal officers who execute federal law must be accountable to the president of the United States, which includes the president’s right to fire many senior government officials at will.

This obsession birthed a $124 billion Supreme Court case, Collins v. Yellen, that threatened to throw the entire US housing market into turmoil, unless a majority of the Court was willing to take a couple steps back away from its almost religious devotion to the unitary executive doctrine.

On Wednesday, the Court did just that. Although Justice Samuel Alito enthusiastically supported the unitary executive doctrine in the past, he wrote a majority opinion in Collins that walks back some of that doctrine’s most frightful implications. The vote in Collins was a bit messy, with different justices joining different parts of Alito’s opinion, but every member of the Court except for Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed that the plaintiffs in Collins asked for far too much.

Alito’s decision does not abandon the unitary executive, but it steps back from some of the more alarming aspects of the Court’s previous decisions applying this and similar doctrines. The Collins plaintiffs made an entirely plausible argument under those decisions that could have had devastating real-world consequences — in this case, an earthquake for the housing sector — but the Court chose to avoid that path.

The unitary executive had a previous test in front of the Supreme Court in Seila Law v. CFPB (2020). In that case, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that gave the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a degree of independence from the president. Under that law, the CFPB director served a five-year term and could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

The premise of the unitary executive doctrine is that all officials who execute federal law must be accountable to the president. That means that the president typically must be able to fire agency leaders and other top government officials at will — a view that the Supreme Court upheld in 2020. After Seila Law, President Joe Biden or whoever else occupies the White House can fire the head of the CFPB whenever they want.

Collins involves a different agency, known as the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but it involves the exact same issue as Seila Law. A federal law provides that the head of the FHFA may only be fired “for cause.” The Court’s decision in Collins applies the Court’s holding in Seila Law, and holds that the president must have the power to fire the FHFA director at will.

But that’s only one part of the Collins decision. The real question in Collins is what consequences flow from the fact that, from 2008, when the FHFA was created, until the Court’s decision in Collins, the president did not have the power to fire the head of that agency. And the plaintiffs in this case claimed that some truly outlandish consequences follow.

The FHFA was created to repair the housing market turmoil that sparked the 2008 recession, and to prevent similar crises from occurring again. In carrying out this mission, the agency effectively took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two semi-public companies that play an important role in stabilizing the mortgage industry. Then it oversaw hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of transactions with the Treasury Department to keep these two companies afloat.

The Court’s previous decisions, however, have some language suggesting that any action taken by an agency led by a director who is unconstitutionally shielded from presidential accountability is void — and that’s certainly how the plaintiffs in Collins read those decisions. They argued that literally every action taken by the FHFA since its creation 13 years ago must be declared invalid.

Had the Supreme Court agreed with this approach, it would have meant that all of the hundreds of billions spent to prop up Fannie and Freddie were spent illegally. It’s hard to even imagine how to unravel these transactions, and the process of doing so could have sparked another housing crisis similar to the catastrophic 2008 meltdown.

In any event, when confronted with the possibility of being responsible for one of the greatest financial crises in modern American history, Justice Alito blinked, as did most of his colleagues. Collins did not lead to an apocalyptic event; instead, it will stand as a warning of what can go wrong if the Court is too cavalier about remaking our constitutional system in a conservative image.

Why was so much at stake in this case?

To understand the dire consequences of a ruling for the plaintiffs in Collins, it’s important to go back and recount what happened during the 2008 housing crisis — and how the federal government responded to that crisis in ways that benefited millions of Americans, but that also cost certain investors a good amount of money.

Fannie and Freddie (also known as the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation) operate in an unusual gray area between the public and private sectors. Although both companies are publicly traded and have some private shareholders, they were chartered by Congress and are heavily regulated by the federal government. Among other things, the FHFA was given the power to effectively take control over both companies.

The two companies buy home loans from banks and other lenders, pool these loans together, and then sell shares of these pooled loans as “mortgage-backed securities” to private investors. As Alito explains in his Collins opinion, this process “relieve[s] mortgage lenders of the risk of default and free[s] up their capital to make more loans.” Rather than having to wait 30 years for a borrower to repay a loan, Fannie and Freddie allow banks to receive an immediate infusion of cash that they can re-lend.

Fannie and Freddie, however, are not the only players in this mortgage-backed securities market. In the lead-up to the 2008 housing crisis, many banks made expensive subprime loans to borrowers who lacked the means to pay them back. Some investment banks then bought up these risky loans and packaged them together as high-risk securities. And Fannie and Freddie got into this game in the mid- to late 2000s.

Then, in the late 2000s, housing prices started to drop. Many subprime borrowers found themselves with a loan they couldn’t afford to pay back, and a home that had lost so much value it was worth less than the amount they still owed on their loan. A wave of defaults ensued, driving housing prices even lower. The lending market started to dry up, and Fannie and Freddie lost $108 billion — more money than they’d made in the previous 37 years combined.

At the time, Fannie and Freddie either owned or guaranteed about $5 trillion worth of mortgage assets, or about half of all home loans in the United States. Many feared they were teetering on the brink of insolvency, and that they would have taken the entire US housing market with them if they did collapse.

To prevent such a cataclysm, the FHFA invoked its power to take charge of Fannie and Freddie. It then entered into a series of agreements with the Treasury Department to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into Fannie and Freddie’s coffers. The agreement between the two companies and the Treasury was amended several times, and, under the version that was in effect from 2012 until this January, the companies agreed to pay all money that they earned in excess of a $3 billion reserve back to the Treasury Department.

As it turns out, the companies’ fortunes improved shortly after this 2012 amendment went into effect, and Fannie and Freddie wound up paying the government $124 billion more than they would have under a previous version of their agreement with the Treasury Department. These lost profits enraged many of the two companies’ private investors, who wanted a share of that money for themselves.

And so the Collins litigation began. The plaintiffs hoped to invalidate the 2012 amendment to Fannie and Freddie’s agreement with Treasury, but they advanced a legal theory that was so sweeping in its implications that it could have thrown Fannie, Freddie, the FHFA, the Treasury Department, and the entire housing market into chaos.

Again, their argument was that any action taken by the FHFA while the agency’s director was shielded from termination is void. That would have meant that the FHFA and the Treasury Department would somehow have had to unravel more than a decade’s worth of transactions — transactions involving more money than the gross domestic product of Ecuador — that were taken for the explicit purpose of preventing an economic catastrophe unheard of since the Great Depression.

Alito and the Court’s “unitary executive” believers blink

If that prospect sounds bonkers, that’s because it is bonkers. The Collins case was the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb set to detonate in the middle of the US housing market, unless at least five justices agreed to disarm it.

And yet the plaintiffs’ arguments were entirely reasonable within the context of previous Supreme Court precedents.

First of all, there was absolutely no question, after Seila Law, that the federal law protecting the FHFA director from being fired by the president is unconstitutional. As Alito writes in Collins, “the Recovery Act’s for-cause restriction on the President’s removal authority violates the separation of powers. Indeed, our decision last Term in Seila Law is all but dispositive.”

Second, earlier Supreme Court decisions imply that when an agency head is improperly shielded from being fired by the president, the proper course of action is to invalidate that agency’s actions unless they were later ratified by an official who is accountable to the president. As the Court suggested in Bowsher v. Synar (1986), an official who is not properly accountable to the president “may not be entrusted with executive powers.”

Or, as Justice Neil Gorsuch said, in a partial dissent in Collins that is Joker-esque in its nihilism, “unconstitutionally installed or improperly unsupervised” officials “cannot wield executive power,” and any “attempts to do so are void.”

But no other justice joined Gorsuch’s opinion, and Alito’s opinion for the Court can be summarized in one tweet:

To be clear, the unitary executive doctrine is still the law. And it could still create mischief in the future. Among other things, if all officials who exercise executive power must be subject to termination at the president’s whim, independent boards like the Federal Reserve could potentially lose that independence, allowing the president to pressure these boards into handing down purely political decisions.

But, at the very least, the Court appears unwilling to allow hyper-technical violations of this doctrine to bring down more than a dozen years of work that may have saved us all from a depression.

Though the head of the FHFA must be removable at will by the president, Alito argues in his opinion that “there was no constitutional defect in the statutorily prescribed method of appointment to that office” — that is, an FHFA director who is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate may still exercise executive power. Their previous actions are not void.

It’s as good a reason as any not to light the nation’s economy on fire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Peloton's Treadmills cost between $2,500 and $4,000. They've also injured 70 people and killed one child. Peloton issued a recall on the treadmills after an investigation by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Those who kept the Tread+ got a nasty shock in their inbox recently: After the treadmill downloaded an update Peloton said was designed to make the device safer, users reported they could no longer run on it without paying Peloton a $39.99 per month subscription fee. "We care deeply about the safety and well being of our Members and we created Tread Lock to secure your Tread+ against unauthorized access," Peloton said in an email it sent to customers. "Unfortunately at this time 'Just Runn' is no longer accessible without a Peloton Membership." It offered to waive the subscription fee for the first three months and apologized for the inconvenience. Peloton's subscription ecosystem provides users with live classes, crafted playlists, and customized tracks. For people who just want to run or bike, they can select the "Just Bike" or "Just Run" feature and use their devices like normal exercise equipment. Unless, of course, the user has updated the Tread+ to get the safety update. [...] The new Tread Lock update adds another layer of safety to the Tread+. "Tread Lock is a safety feature that automatically locks the Peloton Tread+ after you put your Tread+ to sleep or after 45 seconds of inactivity outside of a class," Peloton said on its website. For now, the cost of using that new feature is, apparently, about $40 a month, though Peloton claimed it would not always be so. "Unfortunately due to current technical limitations, Tread Lock is not yet available without a Peloton Membership," Peloton told Motherboard in an email. "We understand that this is an inconvenience for some and are working on updates to Tread Lock that will allow us to make Tread Lock and Just Run available without a Peloton Membership."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the kind of hypocrisy I’m accustomed to associating with Republicans but seems to rise above political affiliation, a white senator championing diversity fumbled on a question about his membership at a mostly white private beach club in Rhode Island. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse was approached by GoLocal Providence's news editor Kate Nagle on Friday about his membership at Bailey’s Beach Club, which the news site described as “all-white.” Nagle started her interview by citing concerns Whitehouse had in 2017 about a lack of diversity at the club, even though his wife is one of the largest shareholders. “Has there been any traction in that? Are there any minority members?” Nagle asked. The senator, who’s from Rhode Island, responded: “I think the people who are running the place are still working on that. I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet.” 

The very next question Nagle asked Whitehouse is whether in the aftermath of the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd an “elite, all-white wealthy club” should exist. “It’s a long tradition in Rhode Island, and there are many of them,” Whitehouse said. “We just need to work our way through the issues.” And just like that, he gave Republicans the distraction they’ve been waiting for.

"Has Sheldon Whitehouse resigned from this racist & segregationist beach club yet?" Donald Trump Jr. asked on Twitter. "Have the media even asked him that simple question? Have the media called the club to ask how these policies could stand in 2021? Are there protests in front of the club?  Where's the outrage?!?” The questions seem so insincere coming from the younger Trump that they almost feel like part of a bad joke. Although I have my fair share of sentiments about Whitehouse’s response—and I’ll get to those—the question readers should be asking is why the same GOP leaders calling for a ban on teaching critical race theory in schools all of a sudden are advocating for more diverse private clubs.

Journalist Amee Vanderpool tweeted on Monday: "In case you were wondering what this latest GOP smear attempt against Sheldon Whitehouse is all about, I assure you: it's not about his exclusive beach club membership. It's about (Senate Minority Leader Mitch) McConnell trying to stop Whitehouse's bill to ban dark money from politics:"

“The bill would require organizations spending money in federal elections to disclose their donors, allowing the American people to see who is attempting to sway their elections and gain control over their government,” Whitehouse’s office said in a news release last year. The senator added in the release: “Americans are drowning in anonymous political attacks and misinformation. That’s because a dark-money ‘tsunami of slime’ is washing over our democracy with virtually no way for the public to see who’s behind it. No wonder Americans are losing faith in our political system. It’s time to require big corporations and anonymous ultra-rich donors to take responsibility for their crooked influence campaigns.”

That’s a bill I can get behind. Problem is, Whitehouse isn’t doing his bill or the country any favors by flip-flopping on his devotion to rooting out systemic racism. He said all the right things in a statement last June, speaking out for justice after the deaths of Floyd, Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was shot and killed when officers serving a no-knock warrant barged into her home and opened fire even though the person they allegedly were searching for was already in police custody on March 13, 2020. Floyd, 46, was killed on May 25, 2020 when a white Minneapolis police officer responding to an allegation Floyd had used a counterfeit $20-bill kneeled on the Black father’s neck for more than nine minutes. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was unarmed when he was accused of trespassing on the property of a South Georgia home, then hunted down and fatally shot on Feb. 23, 2020. 

“Our country is at a crossroads,” Whitehouse said in the statement. “A nation reeling from a pandemic and an economic catastrophe that have disproportionately affected communities of color is mourning the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. All the while, President (Donald) Trump is toiling to deepen the fault lines in American life.

“We hear the voices of the peaceful protestors who have marched.  We can and must do better to root out systemic racism in its many forms and meet America’s full promise of justice for all.”

Except where exclusive beach clubs are concerned, apparently.

Meaghan McCabe, a spokeswoman for Whitehouse, tried to do damage control after facing the accusations tying the senator to the club. She told the Boston Globe in a statement that the club had “no such restrictive policy” barring members due to race or ethnicity. “The club has had and has members of color,” McCabe said in the statement. “The Senator has dedicated his entire career to promoting equity and protecting civil rights, as his record shows.” Whitehouse also told NBC-10: “There is no discriminatory policy, and the club has had and does have, a membership of color.”

Former top aides to President Donald Trump have begun an aggressive push to combat the teaching of critical race theory and capitalize on the issue politically, confident that a backlash will vault them back into power.

These officials, including Trump’s former campaign chief and two former budget advisers, have poured money and organizational muscle into the fight. They’ve aided activists who are pushing back against the concept that racism has been systemic to American society and institutions after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And some of them have begun working with members of Congress to bar the military from holding diversity trainings and to withhold federal funds from schools and colleges that promote anything that can be packaged as critical race theory.

The immediate goal, two Trump alumni said, is to get legislative language included in a must-pass bill. The larger one is to harness a national movement that could unseat Democrats.

“This is the Tea Party to the 10th power,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser who has zeroed in on local school board fights over critical race theory, said in an interview. “This isn’t Q, this is mainstream suburban moms — and a lot of these people aren’t Trump voters.”

Concerns about critical race theory, which examines how race and racism permeates society, have been percolating for months in what activists describe as a sincere grassroots phenomenon led by parents. Critical race theory dates back to the 1970s, but as the country remains in a prolonged conversation about race following George Floyd’s death, a new political battle over how to teach American history has emerged.

It has increasingly become a major focus of the Republican establishment, which has sought to capitalize on the angst even as some officeholders have failed to define what critical race theory is and the threat it poses. (Critical race theory, for example, does not imply white students should feel guilty about past civil rights issues and is not taught in many of the schools where lawmakers are seeking to ban it).

Their efforts to elevate the issue have worked.

Google searches for “critical race theory” skyrocketed on March 18, for example, the same day that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed banning it from Florida’s school curriculum. Fox News mentioned critical race theory nearly 1,300 times over a three-and-a-half-month span, according to an analysis done by the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America. Last week, Texas became the fifth state that passed a law taking aim at critical race theory or similar topics, and legislation has been proposed in more than a dozen other states.

Democrats, liberal political analysts, and even celebrities have used the power of the Black press and broadcast news to push back.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association and a friend to the Biden White House, supported a thorough teaching of American history — including the more painful parts — in an NBC interview last week. “We have made many mistakes in this country, but our kids, our kids deserve to learn all of that truth,” she said.

Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hollywood actress and LGBTQ activist Lena Waithe, along with dozens of academics and writers, are also backing efforts to support teaching students about systemic racism. They penned an open letter in The Root in support of Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 project, which many Republicans see as a key tool for pushing critical race theory.

They are combating the decision of major Trump World and other national Republican figures who are increasingly entering the fray. Earlier this month, Republicans at the North Carolina GOP’s annual convention jumped to their feet with enthusiastic applause when Trump called for a ban on critical race theory from the local school level to the federal government. Some top Republicans aren’t coy when they talk about the electoral benefits that stoking such a culture war issue could provide.

“I look at this and say, ‘Hey, this is how we are going to win.’ I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up,” Bannon said. “I think you’re going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on it and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it.”

Jessica Anderson, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm, said critical race theory is one of the top two issues her group is working on alongside efforts to tighten voting laws. A former Office of Management and Budget official in the Trump administration, Anderson’s Heritage Action for America put out a pamphlet on Monday calling critical race theory a “destructive” ideology and urging voters to call on their lawmakers to support anti-critical race theory bills introduced by Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Dan Bishop (R-N.C.). It also urges voters to use Freedom of Information Act requests as a tactic to identify critical race theory-tied elements in schools’ curricula.

“It could turn out to be one of the most important conservative grassroots fights since the Tea Party movement,” she said.

In addition to Heritage Action, a new group called Citizens for Renewing America, an outfit started by Russ Vought, Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget director, has rushed in to bolster anti-critical race theory efforts.

As OMB director, Vought drafted a September memo warning federal agencies that Trump wanted them to “cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions." More recently, Citizens for Renewing America has circulated a 33-page document titled “An A to Z Guide on How to Stop Critical Race Theory and Reclaim Your Local School Board.”

In Washington, Heritage Action is pursuing a long shot strategy to try to shoehorn anti-critical race theory language into must-pass legislation such as the annual defense spending bill. Vought’s group, meanwhile, is pushing for Republicans to force the provisions in Bishop’s bill to be included in legislation to raise the debt limit this fall.

“We believe it’s necessary for us to find leverage points to get that onto bills that must pass,” Vought said in an interview.

Slightly outside Washington, another prominent Trump alum has been active on one of the other major frontlines of the critical race theory debate.

Ian Prior, a former Justice Department spokesperson in the Trump administration whose children go to Loudoun County, Va., schools, is spearheading an effort to recall six Democratic school board members in that Washington D.C. suburb. Heritage Action helped organize a rally there earlier this month after a Loudoun County High School teacher complained that white students “are being told to check their white privilege.”

But Prior, who has become a semi-regular on Fox News to discuss the matter, insists that his group, Fight for Schools, isn’t “some astroturf thing that’s powered by big money,”

“We just sat on a back porch and started it,” he added. “There is an energy here that transcends political parties.”

Polls don’t quite show that the issue is cutting across party lines. A new Morning Consult/POLITICO survey, for example, found that while the majority (54 percent) of Republicans believed critical race theory was negatively impacting society, a plurality of Democrats (48 percent) and Independents (46 percent) said they didn’t have a sense of any impact. The survey found that the population was fairly split on whether it should be taught in K-12 schools: 32 percent supporting it and 36 percent opposing it.

Few of the organizations working to oppose critical race theory, including Heritage Action and Citizens for Renewing America, disclose their donors. Prior said he did not have donor information to share. So it is impossible to know which big-moneyed interests, if any, are funding the anti-critical race theory initiatives those groups are undertaking.

But some deep-pocketed individuals are contributing to the cause.

Anderson, for one, said Heritage Action had “huge donor interest in this.” Other donors have started new groups of their own — including some who revved up the budding Tea Party movement a decade ago.

Frayda Levin, a longtime libertarian donor who’s served on the Club for Growth’s board, recently started her own group, Color Us United, which aims to be a counterweight to Black Lives Matter in the press.

“Our side is really gearing up to push back against what we call the race industrial complex,” Levin said.

And 1776 Project PAC, which was founded to support local school board candidates against critical race theory in schools, has raised over $135,000 from 1,600 donors in less than a month, said its founder Ryan Girdusky, a 34-year-old former political operative who created the PAC after listening to complaints from friends with kids.

“It really isn’t this organized effort on the part of, like, a right-wing intelligentsia or political think tank or some plan for us to have a boogeyman so we can get the suburbs back,” Girdusky said. “I’m sure it would be a lot more interesting if we were all meeting up in a castle somewhere.”

Delece Smith-Barrow contributed to this report.

Mayors and city councils across Arizona issued face mask mandates during the pandemic to prevent the spread of Covid-19, angering conservative state lawmakers who decried government overreach. So the legislators turned to the newest Republican playbook and passed a law allowing businesses to ignore those public health requirements.

The one-line “preemption” law signed in April by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who refused to issue a statewide mask order, won’t make much of an immediate difference now. It doesn’t go into effect until later this year, and local officials have lifted mask mandates in compliance with CDC guidelines as the threat of the virus subsides.

But the bill’s main sponsor says it was needed to ensure “rogue city leaders” can’t impose mask mandates again, should another outbreak occur.

“Next year, if a liberal town … imposes a mask mandate again on businesses throughout the community because of a bad flu virus or the sniffles, everybody would have to abide,” said state Rep. Joseph Chaplik, a freshman lawmaker who is skeptical of the science showing masks help reduce transmission of disease. “If we’re going to give up our freedom and liberties for temporary safety, we’re going to have neither safety nor freedom.”

The strategy used in Arizona has been employed with new intensity by Republicans in states like Texas, Florida and Georgia, where lawmakers over the past year passed legislation preempting the ability of city — and state — leaders to enforce their own regulations. The bigfooting of local officials accelerated as the pandemic turned public health decisions into political minefields, but it also also touched on other wedge issues, like police funding, gun control and climate change.

The move by GOP lawmakers represents a sharp ideological shift for a party that has long championed states rights and local control. Republicans, their influence growing in statehouses and shrinking in cities, see an opening to extend their reach into urban centers. And Democrats, typically the targets of these preemption laws, fear they could be left powerless.

“At the end of the day, we want to give community members the voice to have the policies and laws that they’re voting for local officials to make,” said Brooks Rainwater, senior executive and director for the Center for City Solutions at the National League of Cities, a nonpartisan advocacy group generally opposed to preemption legislation.

“Giving local officials the space is that goal,” he said. “There shouldn’t be these big dichotomies in how policies are being made between state and local.”

As Republicans have maintained a tight hold on the majority of state legislatures, much of today’s preemption battles feature GOP-led assemblies handicapping Democratic-run cities. That dynamic is drawn from the stark partisan divide between statewide and local power: Republicans control 30 state legislatures while Democrats control 64 of the 100 biggest cities in the U.S.

Preemption fights are nothing new. State and local officials have been pitted against each other on what seems like every policy, from soda taxes to minimum wage increases to transgender rights. But in recent years, deep red states have latched onto preemption legislation more and more as a strategy to snatch away power from Democratic city leadership and rally their base.

Take Florida, where the Legislature this session pushed through several major preemption bills, starting with a high-profile “anti-protest” measure as part of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement. Buried within the law is a provision checking the ability of counties to redirect funding from police departments and giving the state’s governor the authority to review and reject those budget decisions. Lawmakers also enacted a proposal tightening an existing law forbidding local governments from approving any policies on guns.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, capitalizing on the conservative resistance to Covid-19 protocols, also issued an executive order waiving fines issued to businesses by local governments for violating Covid-related mandates and signed legislation allowing a governor to preempt local emergency rules.

And now, environmentalists took another hit after DeSantis this week signed a law that preempts local government decisions on energy and makes it difficult for cities to reduce fossil fuels by switching to renewable energy.

“It’s like there’s a competition out there for Florida to be the worst of the worst on these awful preemption laws,” said Brooke Errett, a senior organizer for Food and Water Watch Florida who lobbied against the bill.

Supporters say the bill, backed by oil and gas interests, shouldn’t deter cities from setting or achieving clean energy goals and is in fact needed to prevent them from cutting off natural gas used by homeowners or restricting consumer choice on energy.

Opponents don’t buy that. Rep Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) called the bill a “power play” by utilities and the fossil fuel industry at the expense of solar and other clean energy sources.

Preemption bills protecting fossil fuel interests have surged across the country, with legislation recently passing in 15 states, including Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa and Kentucky. Critics say these laws pose a serious threat to combating air pollution and climate change.

Republicans even succeeded in Kansas despite the state having a Democratic governor. Lamakers muscled through an energy bill this session that preempted parts of a town’s plan that set a goal of shifting all community energy use to renewable energy sources by 2035. It became law without Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s signature due to its passage with a veto-proof majority.

Colorado, which has a legislature controlled by Democrats, is going the opposite direction. Democratic lawmakers have been working to undo some of the major preemption laws on the books. They first repealed a state law prohibiting cities from enacting rules about gun ownership. It was proposed in the aftermath of a mass shooting at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder in which 10 people were killed.

“Communities should be able to decide what are the right policies to keep them safe,” said Colorado Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg, who led the bill’s passage.

The state also enacted a law to ban plastic bags and plastic foam containers used in restaurants and retail. It lifts a ban on local governments setting their own plastics regulations that are stricter than the states. From Pennsylvania to California, political clashes around eliminating widespread use of plastic bags and other single-use items have emerged as some of the most contentious preemption fights in recent memory.

Fenberg views Republicans' aggressive approach to preemption as a “race to the bottom.”

This debate exposes how deep the ideological split is between the two parties. Republicans see themselves as defending personal choice and freedom, while Democrats argue they are actually the ones advancing those same principles by letting communities self-govern.

“Our job is to protect individuals and protect their liberty,” said North Dakota state Rep. Jeff Hoverson, a Republican who shepherded a law restricting state officials’ ability to enforce mask mandates. It was vetoed by Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, but the Legislature overrode it.

“We should be protecting them from not just state government and federal government but local government as well,” he said. “The government needs to have a lot more compelling case than it does to interfere. Really, the S.O.B.’s, they’re wrecking our country.”

The Court’s new union-busting decision reads like something out of Ayn Rand’s darkest fantasies.

Since 1956, the Supreme Court has applied a well-established framework to businesses that wished to exclude union organizers from their property. On Wednesday, however, the Court effectively scrapped that framework — one that was already fairly restrictive of union organizing — and replaced it with something far more restrictive.

In the process of deciding Wednesday’s case, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the Court also rewrites much of its existing Fifth Amendment law. Then it adds caveats to its new rule that resemble the reasoning behind an infamous anti-labor decision from more than a century ago. The Court’s decision is rooted in value judgments about what sort of regulations are desirable and what should be forbidden — namely, those protecting workers’ rights. And it was handed down on a party-line, 6-3 vote.

Thus far, the Supreme Court’s first term since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave conservatives a supermajority has been a fairly mixed bag. The Court rejected a frivolous attack on the Affordable Care Act and has sent mixed messages about how fast it plans to move its religion jurisprudence to the right.

But Cedar Point is a sign the radical new conservative regime that many Republicans crave and that liberals fear could actually be upon us. The Court fundamentally reshaped much of American property law in Cedar Point. It did so in a party-line vote. And it did so in a case involving labor unions — institutions that are often celebrated by liberals and loathed by conservatives.

The case involves a nearly half-century-old California regulation, which gives union organizers limited, temporary access to farm worksites. Under this regulation, a union may enter such a worksite for up to 30 days at a time, and it may invoke this right up to four times a year. On the days when the union is permitted to enter, it may only speak to the workers for three hours a day — the hour before the start of work, the hour after the end of work, and the workers’ lunch break.

Thus, union organizers are allowed on a farm’s property for a maximum of 120 days a year, and for a total of only three hours per day. And the union also must notify the employer when it wishes to invoke this right.

But the right of unions to enter onto a California farm to organize workers is now in deep trouble. In an opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that California’s longstanding regulation violates the Constitution’s “takings clause,” which provides that no one shall have their property taken from them by the government “without just compensation.”

And, in order to reach this result, Roberts rewrites decades of law interpreting that clause.

The Court’s new interpretation of the takings clause is extraordinarily deferential to property owners

Before Wednesday, the Court distinguished between two different types of violations of the takings clause. “Per se” takings involved unusually severe intrusions on private property — such as if the government strips a plot of land of all of its economic value — and were treated with particular skepticism by courts. Less severe intrusions, meanwhile, were classified as “regulatory” takings.

Property owners subject to a per se taking nearly always prevail in court, while property owners alleging a regulatory taking are much less likely to succeed — even when the government imposes fairly strict limitations on how they can use their property. In one famous regulatory takings case, the Court upheld a New York City law preventing the owners of Grand Central Terminal from constructing a high-rise office building on top of the station.

Because the Court views per se takings with such extraordinary skepticism, past decisions held that very few intrusions on private property qualify as such. A per se taking did not occur unless the government deprived a property owner of “all economically beneficial or productive use” of their property, or subjected the property owner to a “permanent physical occupation” of their land.

Thus, California’s regulation did not qualify as a per se taking prior to Cedar Point, as the presence of union organizers does not strip a worksite of all of its economic value, and the regulation did not allow those organizers to permanently occupy a worksite. It only allowed them to enter the property for three hours a day, and for only about a third of the year.

Roberts’s opinion didn’t eliminate this distinction between regulatory and per se takings altogether, but it significantly blurred the line. Under the new rule announced in Cedar Point, any law or regulation that “appropriates a right to invade” private property amounts to a per se taking. If California allowed union organizers to enter an employer’s land for a single minute, then California committed a per se taking.

“The right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” Roberts writes. And much of his opinion suggests that any intrusion on this right to exclude amounts to a taking.

But then Roberts’s opinion takes an unusual turn, in an apparent effort to ward off some of the radical implications of its expansive vision of per se takings.

Roberts isn’t willing to live with the implications of his opinion for cases that don’t involve unions

One problem with Roberts’s expansive view of the takings clause is that it could prevent the government from performing very basic functions, such as health and safety inspections.

Suppose, for example, that a restaurant has a disgusting, rat-infested kitchen that violates numerous local health ordinances. The restaurant’s owners obviously do not want these violations to be discovered, so they refuse to admit any government health inspectors. Under Roberts’s reading of the takings clause, it’s not clear why the restaurant owner should not be allowed to do so — or why it shouldn’t be able to, at the very least, demand compensation from the government before health inspectors can be allowed on their property.

After all, if “the right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” why should an employer be allowed to exclude union organizers but not health inspectors?

Indeed, as California warned in its brief, the expansive vision of the takings clause laid out in much of Roberts’s opinion “would also imperil a wide variety of health- and safety-inspection regimes” (including “food and drug inspections, occupational safety and health inspections, and home visits by social workers”) as well as a federal law providing that “underground mines must be inspected ‘at least four times a year.’”

Roberts’s opinion recognizes that it would be untenable to hold that health and safety inspections violate the Constitution, so he carves out a special rule allowing such inspections to stand. “The government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits,” such as a license to operate a business, Roberts writes, so long as that condition “bears an ‘essential nexus’ and ‘rough proportionality’ to the impact of the proposed use of the property.”

Those are some very large and very vague words, and it’s not entirely clear what it means for an inspection requirement to be roughly proportional to “the impact of the proposed use of the property.” Nor is it clear why, if the government can require restaurants to admit health inspectors as a condition of doing business, it can’t also require that restaurant to admit union organizers as a condition of employing workers.

The Court has simply made a value judgment here. It views health inspections as sufficiently important to justify creating an exception to its new understanding of the takings clause, but it doesn’t view protecting a worker’s right to organize as important enough to justify a similar exception.

There is precedent for this kind of thinking. In Lochner v. New York (1905), an infamous Supreme Court decision often taught in law schools as an example of how judges should not behave, the Court drew a similar line between laws intended to protect health and laws intended to protect workers from abuse.

Lochner struck down a New York state law limiting the number of hours that bakery workers could work in a given day or week (at the time, workers were typically paid by the day or by the week, so working additional hours did not mean more pay). In reaching this conclusion, the Court held that laws intended to “conserve the morals, the health, or the safety of the people” are typically valid, but laws intended to regulate working conditions are far more suspect.

But Lochner is now widely viewed as a terrible misstep by the Supreme Court, and even Roberts accepts this view of Lochner. Dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Roberts denounced “the unprincipled tradition of judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York.”

And yet, just six years after his opinion in Obergefell, Roberts is engaged in the very same kind of “judicial policymaking” — judging rooted in a judge’s personal value judgments rather than in law or precedent — that he once decried.

So what happens now?

There is one potential silver lining for the unions impacted by Cedar Point. The takings clause does not forbid the government from restricting property rights, it merely requires the government to compensate property owners when it violates the clause. And it’s not at all clear how much compensation the farm owners should be due here.

Indeed, at oral argument, Barrett suggested that farm owners may only be entitled to as little as “50 bucks” to compensate them for the cost of having people present on their land whom they’d rather exclude.

Maybe Barrett’s view will prevail. But another way to look at how much these property owners should be compensated is to ask how much money they stand to lose if unions are allowed on their land. A union that enters onto a worksite might successfully unionize that site, and then secure a collective bargaining agreement that requires the employer to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional compensation to its workers. Perhaps the state should have to compensate the employer for all of these costs?

In any event, the question of how much compensation is due to these farm owners will no doubt be litigated — at considerable cost to both the unions and to the state. And it’s far from clear how that litigation will end. Because of this uncertainty, California is likely to stop enforcing its pro-union regulation, at least for now, because it has no way of knowing how much enforcing it will cost the state.

And at the very least, the Court has revolutionized its understanding of the takings clause. And it did so in an opinion that applies an extremely skeptical rule to pro-union regulation while it simultaneously creates carveouts for regulations that the Court’s conservative majority supports.

The campaign against the phantom of critical race theory is all about stirring up white resentment and fear.

Tread+ owners must pay $39 a month to use their treadmills.

Peloton has come up with an interesting solution to its treadmill safety issues, which have been connected to a child’s death: Force owners of its $4,295 Tread+ to either return the machine for a refund or pay a $39 monthly membership fee to use it at all. Users are outraged, and some have even compared Peloton’s demand to ransomware.

It’s a reminder that when you buy or use a product whose access is controlled by someone else, that access can always be taken away from you. As more and more of the things we buy are connected to the internet, living and dying by manufacturer-pushed software updates and on platforms that can be shuttered at any time, we have less and less control over them. Even if we pay a considerable amount of money for those devices, we may never fully own them.

In this case, Peloton says the change was made for safety reasons, and that forcing customers into the membership was the only way to implement the update. Peloton recalled the Tread+ in May, following the death of a child who was pulled under a treadmill; reports of injuries to several other children, pets, and adults; and a public spat with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The company stopped selling the Tread+ and urged Tread+ owners to “immediately stop” using them and offered full refunds for devices returned before November. But Peloton didn’t completely discourage people from using the machine. In fact, it even offered to send movers out to owners’ homes to relocate their Tread+ units to a space that kids and pets couldn’t access, for free.

Now, some Tread+ owners will face an extra monthly charge they didn’t have before. Peloton recently informed them that soon they will no longer be able to use their machines unless they also purchase an All-Access membership for $39 a month. Peloton is offering three months of All-Access free to compensate for the inconvenience.

Peloton told Recode the move was necessary to add a safety feature called “Tread Lock” to the machines.

“In our ongoing work to ensure that our products are even safer and as part of our voluntary recall in collaboration with CPSC, we released Tread Lock, a four-digit passcode to secure Tread+ against unauthorized access,” Peloton told Recode. “Unfortunately, due to current technical limitations, Tread Lock is not yet available without a Peloton Membership.”

Peloton told Recode that it’s working to make Tread Lock available for free but wouldn’t say how long it would take to implement the change. If it takes less than three months, then Tread+ users without a membership (Peloton wouldn’t tell Recode how many of its users fit into this category) won’t end up paying anything extra. They might even decide they like the service so much that they’ll keep using it, which is good for Peloton. If it takes longer than the free period or doesn’t happen at all, then Tread+ owners will have to decide if they want to keep the device and shell out $39 a month or return it. If you’re a Tread+ owner who doesn’t have kids or pets and might argue that this safety measure (and the expense) isn’t necessary, well, that’s just too bad.

It’s worth noting that Tread+ already comes with a safety key that Peloton recommends users remove and store away from children when the machine isn’t being used. It’s also worth noting, as the CPSC has, that not all of those injuries occurred because a child accidentally turned the machine on when no one was around. Some happened while a parent was using the machine, and all the safety keys and Tread Locks in the world wouldn’t have prevented them.

While Peloton does apparently have the ability to brick its machines entirely, which would force owners to return them, it’s instead going with this compromise that is to Peloton’s benefit. It’s also part of its business model. The machine itself is a one-time purchase while subscriptions are a continuous source of revenue and what differentiates Peloton from traditional machines. It’s not just exercise; it’s Exercise as a Service. So Peloton wants as many of its customers to subscribe as possible. A very cynical take on the situation would say that this is one way to do that.

The change only appears to affect Tread+ machines and not the smaller and cheaper Tread model, which is the subject of a separate recall due to reports of injuries from its touchscreen loosening and even falling off.

While the specifics of this situation are unusual, the idea that you don’t entirely own the things you buy these days is not. Apple has made its devices increasingly harder for anyone but Apple to access and repair — which also gives Apple the ability to set its own prices for that service — and John Deere similarly maintains strict control over the software that runs its machines. You technically don’t own the music, videos, or books you “purchase” from Apple Music or Amazon Prime, and they can be taken away from you. Pebble smartwatches became dumb when Fitbit acquired the company and shut down the platform (although there have been fan-led efforts to keep Pebbles going). And we’ve seen plenty of conservative politicians and pundits complain that social media companies’ shifting terms of service have gotten them booted from platforms for speech or actions that used to be acceptable.

Peloton has been hugely successful, largely due to its “connected fitness” model that gets customers to keep paying every month to receive the full benefit of their machines. It also gives Peloton more continuous control over those machines than a traditional, non-connected treadmill or exercise bike company would ever have. And that control can be exercised however Peloton — or any other hardware manufacturer in the software and services business — wants it to be.