James.galbraith

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The Court’s right flank is afraid that the monster under their bed will cancel them.

Here’s a quote from someone who, not that long ago, was widely considered to be on the cutting edge of conservative thinking about the law:

“Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously ... and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.”

Those are the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, in a 2010 opinion concerning whether the public should be allowed to learn who signed a petition seeking to call a referendum on a state law.

They form a stark contrast with the attitude of conservative justices on Monday, only a little more than a decade after Doe, when the Court heard another case asking whether disclosure laws can be applied to political actors.

The conservative justices who heard this new case, Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, showed little of the confidence and “civic courage” that Scalia once celebrated. Many of them bristled with paranoia that angry mobs lurk in every alleyway, waiting to cancel conservative speakers.

At two separate points in the oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch warned of a world where the government could demand to see your Christmas card list or a list of all the people you’ve dated in the past. Justice Clarence Thomas repeatedly suggested that the Court must provide constitutional protection to any advocacy organization that is accused of being “racist” or “homophobic.” Justice Samuel Alito warned of “vandalism, death threats, physical violence, economic reprisals, [and] harassment in the workplace” directed against donors to an anti-LGBTQ campaign.

Americans for Prosperity is a fraught case, presenting sensitive issues concerning when donors to advocacy organizations should be allowed to keep their identities secret in order to protect them from reprisals. As the Court first recognized in the Jim Crow era, when Alabama tried to uncover the NAACP’s membership list, there are rare cases where donors or other individuals associated with advocacy groups must be protected from state disclosure rules.

But the Court’s conservative majority appears to believe that reprisals against political conservatives are now so common that it may require handing down a sweeping and potentially unprecedented remedy to protect their fellow conservative activists from the horrors of cancel culture.

So what is this case actually about?

The specific regulation at issue in Americans for Prosperity is fairly small potatoes. California requires all nonprofit organizations that raise tax-deductible funds within the state to disclose their largest donors to the state attorney general’s office. That office, which claims that it needs this information to investigate fraud in the nonprofit sector, is required to keep all of this information confidential from the public. But the attorney general’s office hasn’t always followed ideal security procedures, and some of this confidential information has leaked to the public in the past.

The plaintiffs in this case are two conservative advocacy organizations, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Thomas More Law Center, who claim that this donor disclosure requirement is unconstitutional. (In an email sent after I previously wrote about this case, a spokesperson for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation suggested that I note that the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is a legally distinct entity from a related group called “Americans for Prosperity.”)

The Court’s precedents are fairly clear about how this case should proceed. Most people know of the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) because of its holding that corporations could spend unlimited money to influence elections. But Citizens United also took a fairly permissive approach to laws requiring the disclosure of political donors.

Courts distinguish between what are known as “facial” challenges to a law, and more mild “as-applied” challenges. If a law is declared unconstitutional on its face, that means it must cease to operate entirely. But if a particular plaintiff prevails in an as-applied challenge, the government may still be able to enforce the challenged law against other parties.

Citizens United applied the Court’s preexisting position that, when someone challenges a disclosure law, an as-applied challenge is the preferred vehicle. As the Court explained, an organization that “could show a reasonable probability that disclosure of its contributors’ names will subject them to threats, harassment, or reprisals from either Government officials or private parties” may bring an as-applied case against a disclosure law.

Based on this framework, the Americans for Prosperity plaintiffs have a strong case. At one point during the oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor — arguably the Court’s most liberal member — told California’s lawyer that “a reasonable person may not have much faith in the AG’s office after previous breaches” of its confidential information. And liberal Justice Elena Kagan also pointed to the trial court’s findings that there is a ”pervasive reoccurring” problem of public disclosure in the state AG’s office, and that donors to the plaintiffs ”would likely be subject to threats and harassment” if their names were disclosed.

So this could have been an easy case. Apply the same approach the Court applied in Citizens United, accept Sotomayor and Kagan’s understanding of the case’s facts, and grant relief to the two plaintiffs on an as-applied basis. The opinion could potentially even be unanimous.

How the conservatives saw the case

But the plaintiffs insist that they are entitled to facial relief — meaning that the state’s disclosure rule must be tossed out for all nonprofits, regardless of whether donors to those nonprofits face harassment, or even if they want to keep their donations secret.

Some of the Court’s Republican appointees seemed to think it would be extraordinarily burdensome to require challenges to California’s disclosure law to be handled on an “as-applied” basis.

“How do you think an as-applied challenge would work?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was in Court to defend using the “as-applied” rules in this case. Should a charity “attach an affidavit or something saying we’re a very controversial charity and we think, if people knew who gave money to us ... their rights to association would be chilled?”

Similarly, Justice Alito warned of a world where every single nonprofit that fears for its donors would have to “take California to court and fight the state tooth and nail for more than six years in order to avoid potential public disclosure of its list of donors.”

Realistically, these fears are exaggerated. Federal law permits courts to require a state that violates an organization’s constitutional rights to pay that organization’s legal fees. So, if California is too reluctant to grant exemptions to organizations that seek them, it will be hauled repeatedly into a judiciary dominated by conservatives — and will quickly learn that it has made a very expensive mistake.

Thomas, for his part, already wrote an opinion in Citizens United — he was joined by no other justice — indicating that he would strike down disclosure laws on their face even in the campaign finance context. And Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared to join Thomas’s camp on Monday.

“If the First Amendment protects the right to associate in private, why do we need to consider harassment?” Gorsuch asked at one point, suggesting that all donors who seek to influence politics through their wealth are entitled to remain private.

And then there was Alito, who joined the majority opinion in Citizens United and rejected the more radical approach laid out by Thomas in that case. He suggested that “in our current atmosphere,” political donors “to organizations that take unpopular positions on hot-button issues have reason to fear reprisals.”

The phrase “in our current atmosphere” is telling, because it raises the question of why he thinks the atmosphere was different in previous eras.

The seminal case establishing why advocacy groups should sometimes be allowed to receive exemptions from political disclosure laws is NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson (1958). It involved an effort by the Jim Crow state of Alabama to force the NAACP to disclose its members to the state — most likely so those names could either be turned over to the Ku Klux Klan or placed on an employment blacklist.

Though the Court ruled in favor of the NAACP in this case, it only granted as-applied relief to the organization. It did not strike down the underlying state statute, which required most corporations doing business in Alabama to make certain disclosures.

Does Alito think that the atmosphere in the Jim Crow South was more unfriendly to “organizations that take unpopular positions” than the atmosphere we live in today? If as-applied relief was sufficient to protect civil rights activists, why does the Americans for Prosperity Foundation require more?

The most likely explanation for the conservative movement’s shifting position from the views Scalia expressed in Doe to the views expressed by most of the Court in Monday’s oral arguments is a problem of empathy.

People who express unpopular views — or those who enable organizations that do so — have faced harassment or worse for as long as there has been democratic politics. Just ask Socrates. And, to be clear, donors to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation should no more face harassment than donors to the NAACP. As Sotomayor and Kagan noted, the foundation has a strong argument on the facts.

But it is true that the values espoused by people like Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are increasingly out of favor with the American public — the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — and the thing that distinguishes “our current atmosphere” from, say, the atmosphere when Alito joined the Citizens United opinion in 2010 is that Alito and people like him now correctly perceive that their views are on the outs. They are suddenly hyperaware of every incident where a business is boycotted because its owner opposes LGBTQ rights, or where a corporate executive is fired for expressing similar views.

But they’ve yet to explain why these incidents require a more protective rule than the one announced in NAACP. Or why the harassment faced by conservatives today is somehow worse than the threat that civil rights activists would have faced if their identities had been revealed to the Klan.

ALBANY — New York came 89 people short of maintaining its House delegation at 27 members, according to numbers released by the Census Bureau on Monday. Instead, it will lose one House seat at the start of 2023.

That’s the best result for New York since Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House. The state peaked at 45 House seats in the 1930s and 1940s, but had lost at least two members in each of the subsequent decades as its population has grown at a slower rate than the rest of the country.

New York’s population grew by 4.2 percent in the most recent decade, which was close enough to break even. But in raw numbers, it fell just short.

The loss leaves New York with the smallest share of Congress that it has ever had. The state had the country’s largest delegation from the 1810s until California passed it after the 1970 Census. Texas surpassed the state in 2000, and in 2010, Florida and New York both wound up with 27 members. Florida will gain a seat, meaning New York will have the country’s fourth-largest number of House members.

The loss of a seat led to immediate political recriminations. Republicans and business groups dusted off long-standing attacks against the state’s business climate. And the left assailed Gov. Andrew Cuomo for not doing enough to help drive up the count.

“What’s abundantly clear is that Gov. Cuomo bears substantial responsibility for New York losing a congressional seat,” said Daniel Altschuler of progressive advocacy group Make the Road New York.

The state spent the run-up to the census missing countless deadlines for figuring out how to increase its response rate. One report that was legally required to be completed by Jan. 2019 wasn’t finished until that October. At the start of March 2020, the state still hadn’t started what Cuomo had promised would be a $70 million outreach effort.

“What we saw was a failure to allocate enough resources, delays in having any real plan, and whatever money was ultimately dispersed was done so extremely late, and I think by many peoples’ accounts, too late to make an appreciable difference in increasing the count,” Altschuler said.

Others also blamed Albany officials, but for different reasons.

“New York’s tax burden continues to be the worst in the nation, and I have no doubt that’s a contributing factor to our sluggish growth,” said Justin Wilcox of Upstate United, the business group formerly known as Unshackle Upstate.

What this means for the state’s maps: Those big-picture figures are the only numbers available so far. The more detailed numbers that will be used to draw the new lines are due to be released in August and September.

But the estimates released by the Census Bureau in recent years suggest the biggest change could involve one upstate seat being broken up and absorbed into its neighbors.

On Long Island, for example, there are currently 3.9 districts. That includes the entirety of the seats held by Reps. Lee Zeldin, Andrew Garbarino and Kathleen Rice, most of the seat held by Rep. Tom Suozzi, and a sliver of the seat held by Rep. Gregory Meeks. Zeldin and Garbarino are Republicans and the rest are Democrats.

If the estimates released by the Census Bureau in 2019 were correct, then the number of seats on Long Island would fall to 3.8. That’s not a big enough shift to require a wholesale redesign — moving the portion of Meeks’ district that’s in Nassau County to Rice’s district would come pretty close to doing the trick.

New York City, meanwhile, would fall from 11.4 to 11.1 seats. The number of districts north of New York City would fall from 11.7 to 11.1.

The simplest way to address these changes would involve shifting some of the seats near the Bronx-Westchester border a little bit farther north. The Southern Tier district held by outgoing Republican Rep. Tom Reed could be broken up and added to four or five nearby districts, and every other district could undergo relatively minor shifts.

What’s next: The big question remains how much can Democrats control the process and gerrymander the lines to their own advantage.

There are certainly ways of creating maps that could benefit the party that controls both houses of the state Legislature. Republican Reps. Claudia Tenney and Elise Stefanik, for example, could be placed in the same district, one that would be made the only area seat that Republicans have a decent chance of winning. The Garbarino and Zeldin districts on Long Island, both of which have elected Republicans in the past four elections, could be blended to create a solid Republican seat and a solid Democratic one.

A constitutional amendment authored by Cuomo nearly a decade ago made such a scenario more difficult. When Republicans control the state Senate, they’re able to approve lines with a simple majority of 32 of the chamber’s 63 members. Democrats would have needed a supermajority of 42 members, and since such a threshold seemed unrealistic when the amendment was authored in 2012, the widespread assumption was that future lines would need to be balanced enough to have some support from both parties.

Senate Democrats, however, had two of their best election performances in history in 2018 and 2020, and now have 43 members.

But it’s not yet guaranteed that this supermajority will stay intact until lines are voted on next winter. Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) is awaiting trial on domestic violence charges, while Sens. Brad Hoylman of Manhattan, Brian Benjamin of Manhattan and Kevin Parker of Brooklyn are all running for local offices this year. And there’s always a chance that a member or two could be unsatisfied with the changes made to their own districts and vote against the maps for reasons of self-preservation.

Democrats have been working on a contingency plan that could let them dominate the process even if they lose a couple of members. A new amendment that will be voted on as a referendum this November would let a Democratic-controlled Senate approve new lines with 38 votes.

There has yet to be any public polling or campaigning on the question. But given that most of this year’s high-profile races will be for mayoral posts in Democratic strongholds like New York City, Buffalo and Albany, the odds of its passage are pretty decent even if Republicans succeed in characterizing it as a Democratic power-grab.

Over the past decade, the United States population grew at the slowest rate since the 1930s, the Census Bureau reported on Monday, a remarkable slackening that was driven by a leveling off of immigration and a declining birthrate. The New York Times reports: The bureau also reported changes to the nation's political map: The long-running trend of the South and the West gaining population -- and congressional representation -- at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest, continued, with Texas gaining two seats and Florida, one. California, long a leader in population growth, lost a seat for the first time in history. [...] The numbers are the product of the most controversial census process in decades. The Trump administration tried to add a citizenship question to the Census form, but the Supreme Court eventually blocked that plan. [...] The Bureau also faced a daunting task of conducting the Census during a pandemic. Then, last summer, the Trump administration pushed it to stop the count sooner than planned. Booming economies in states like Texas, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina, have drawn Americans away from struggling small communities in high-cost, cold weather states. In New York, 48 of 62 counties are estimated to be losing population. In Illinois, 93 of 101 counties are believed to be shrinking. In 1970, the West and South comprised just under half the U.S. population -- today it's nearly 63 percent. The new decennial census counted 331,449,281 Americans as of April 1, 2020. The total was up by just 7.4 percent over the previous decade. Combined with the decline in inflows of immigrants, and shifting age demographics -- there are now more Americans 80 and older than 2 or younger -- the United States may be entering an era of substantially lower population growth, demographers said, putting it with the countries of Europe and East Asia that face serious long-term challenges with rapidly aging populations. "This is a big deal," said Ronald Lee, a demographer who founded the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California at Berkeley. "If it stays lower like this, it means the end of American exceptionalism in this regard." It used to be clear where the country was headed demographically, Professor Lee said -- faster growth than many other rich nations. But that has changed. "Right now it is very murky," he said.

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What's even more popular than raising taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals? Cutting them for everyone else, which is exactly what Democrats already did through the stimulus checks and tax credits featured in their $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package.

According to new estimates from congressional forecasters, Democratic tax cuts for low- to middle-income earners included in President Joe Biden's relief plan could mean that people making less than $75,000 on average will pay nothing in federal income taxes this year.

In other words, Democrats are doing for most Americans what Republicans achieved for many major corporations through their 2017 tax giveaway to the rich. In fact, at least 55 of the nation's largest corporations paid zero federal income taxes in their most recent fiscal year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Once more, Democratic tax cuts in the relief plan should cut taxes for everyone but the wealthy "substantially more" than the GOP did in the first year following their tax cut, according to reporting from Politico. Not only could those earning less than $75,000 annually pay nothing, those earning between $75,000 and $100,000 could pay next to nothing—just 1.8% on average this year, according to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. 

"That will shift the relative burden to the wealthy, at least temporarily, with those earning more than $500,000 expected to pay more than two-thirds of all income taxes this year," writes Politico.

So while Republicans rail against the notion of raising taxes on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, Democrats flipped the script by cutting taxes for everyone else.

“It was a big honking tax cut for low- and moderate-income people,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told Politico. He noted that people don't generally think of stimulus payments as tax cuts, but that's exactly what they are. “It plays against type — Democrats are not supposed to cut taxes, Democrats are supposed to raise taxes.”

Democrats also went big with their cuts—slashing some $492 billion in revenues on the year, one of the largest single-year cuts in the history of Congress. That figure dwarfs the first year of the GOP tax cuts, which reduced taxes by $136 billion.

But the Democratic cuts were also temporary, and Democrats will now make a push to enshrine them permanently into federal law while also eyeing the possibility of raising rates on major corporations and the rich.

In the meantime, Democrats head into 2022 being able to run on the huge tax cuts they gave to most Americans—without a single vote from Republicans. 

Twenty seconds of body-camera video shown on Monday to the family of a Black North Carolina father shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies showed that the man had his hands on the steering wheel of his car when deputies ran up to his window and opened fire, said an attorney during a news conference shortly after the video’s release. “Let’s be clear. This was a execution,” attorney Chantel Lassiter said after viewing the footage blurring the deputies’ faces. “Andrew Brown was in his driveway. The sheriff’s truck blocked him in his driveway so he could not exit the driveway.

“Andrew had his hands on his steering wheel. He was not reaching for anything. He was not touching anything.”

Authorities earlier reported that Brown, 42, was trying to drive away from deputies with the Pasquotank County Sheriff’s Office while they were attempting to serve a warrant for his arrest on Wednesday in Elizabeth City, according to The Charlotte Observer. Demetria Williams, who lived near Brown, told The News & Observer she heard the gunshots and came running outside to find deputies pulling Brown's body from the car and trying to give him CPR. She told the newspaper she counted 14 shell casings on the scene. “He didn’t get far because the sheriff deputies were in the driveway. He was getting away. He wasn’t a threat,” Williams said.

Description of the police video from the Brown family’s legal team seemed to support Williams’ explanation of what happened. Attorney Bakari Sellers, who is representing the family along with attorneys Ben Crump and Harry Daniels, repeated the words “one body cam, 20 seconds, and an execution,” during the news conference following the video release. Sellers also detailed how Pasquotank County Attorney R. Michael Cox treated both the family and their attorneys before letting the view the video. Cox initially tried to prevent the attorneys from viewing the footage, Sellers said. “We went back and forward, and I just want to say I’ve never been talked to like I was talked to in there,” Sellers said.

“Mr. Cox told me, a grown Black man, that he was not f—king going to be bullied,” Sellers added. He suggested that the sheriff played a role in granting the family and their attorneys access to the video. “And so I walked out, and I want you to know that the sheriff was very very apologetic and diplomatic,” Sellers said. 

The fight for transparency started days before the private release of the video. “It’s so important y’all that we not let them sweep this under the rug,” Crump said at a news conference before viewing the footage. Crump told a reporter the county's failure to release the video in a timely manner tells him that "the police did something that was illegal and against policy and that they don’t want to show it.” He’s asking for the public and the media to continue demanding transparency and accountability.

“Think about it. They’re trying to cover the faces of police officers who killed Andrew Brown but yet they will release all this negative rap sheet on Andrew Brown,” Crump said. “Well, we want to see the rap sheet on the people who actually killed Andrew Brown. Andrew didn’t kill anybody.”

Sellers asked the public to call Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin and ask them why they haven’t signed on to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, federal legislation that would establish a national standard for the operation of police departments and ban no-knock warrants and chokeholds. “You know, it’s good to protest, but I’m tired of that,” he said. “I’m tired of it being cyclical because I stand next to a young man who joins another club of Black people who will not be able to grow up with their father.”

Chief Deputy Daniel Fogg said in a video statement with Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten on Thursday that Brown’s arrest warrant was related to “felony drug charges. “Mr. Brown was a convicted felon with a history of resisting arrest,” the sheriff said. “Our training and our policies indicate under such circumstances, there is a high risk of danger.”

Deputies who fired the shots have been put on administrative leave and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations is leading the investigation into Brown’s death. "I'll tell you what I know to be factual, but I will not prejudge anything or draw any conclusions until we have all the facts, and that may take some time," Wooten said in the video statement. 

Elizabeth City issued a state of emergency on Monday after "numerous news media outlets” took steps “to secure a court order directing the Sheriff's office to release those tapes," according to the declaration. Officials explained that the declaration was enacted “to ensure the safety of our citizens and their property” despite what the city described as "peaceful" protests on its Facebook page. Cox said in a statement 13News Now obtained before the release of the body-camera footage that while the law allows a private viewing of the footage it also “allows us to blur some faces on the video and that process takes time.” “As soon as these redactions are complete, we will allow the family to view the footage,” he said. 

RELATED: Derek Chauvin is guilty. Now, about the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act ...

Lyft will sell its self-driving car unit to Woven Planet, a subsidiary of Toyota, for $550 million in cash, the companies announced Monday. CNBC reports: As part of the deal, Lyft and Woven Planet will work together on enhancing automated driving technology safety, according to a release. "Not only will this transaction allow Lyft to focus on advancing our leading Autonomous platform and transportation network, this partnership will help pull in our profitability timeline," Lyft Co-Founder and President John Zimmer said in a statement. The company expects the deal will remove $100 million of annualized non-GAAP operating expenses on a net basis, according to the release. Because of that, Zimmer added that if the deal closes when expected in the third quarter and recovery from the pandemic continues, Lyft expects to become profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis in Q3.

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An unarmed Black gay man remains in critical condition after being shot multiple times by a Virginia sheriff’s deputy early Wednesday morning, just days after Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd.

Isaiah Brown suffered multiple gunshot wounds after an unnamed Spotsylvania Virginia sheriff’s deputy mistook the cordless house phone Brown was using to speak with 911 for a gun. The same deputy had driven Brown home one hour earlier after his car broke down at a gas station.

“After viewing the Spotsylvania County sheriff’s deputy’s bodycam video and listening to the 911 call, it is evident that the tragic shooting of Isaiah Brown was completely avoidable. Isaiah clearly told dispatch that he did not have a weapon more than 90 seconds before the deputy arrived. He told dispatch that he was walking away from the house and away from anyone else and was on the roadway by himself. Isaiah was on the phone with 911 at the time of the shooting and the officer mistook a cordless house phone for a gun,” Brown family attorney David Haynes said in a statement.

Haynes also said the deputy “made multiple, basic policing errors and violated established protocols” during the incident. “The deputy was situated nearly 50 feet from Isaiah, was never threatened and should not have discharged his weapon,” Haynes said.

The deputy responded to a 911 call made by Brown that Virginia State Police described as a “domestic incident.” Brown can be heard arguing with his brother, Tazmon, because he wouldn’t let him “get inside my mom’s room” to retrieve his car keys. Brown expressed concern that he couldn’t get to his car, which the 911 dispatcher indicated was towed. Brown asked Tazmon to give him a gun, which he refused to do, and Brown said he was going to kill him before exiting the home. Brown confirmed to 911 that he was unarmed before the deputy arrived on the scene.

[I]t is evident that the tragic shooting of Isaiah Brown was completely avoidable … The deputy in question made multiple, basic policing errors and violated established protocols

David Haynes, Brown Family attorney

The deputy can be heard telling Brown to stop walking toward him and misidentifying the phone Brown was using to communicate with 911 as a gun that Brown was holding to his own head on both the 911 call audio and bodycam footage released Friday. The deputy fired seven shots, striking Brown, continued ordering Brown to “show me your hands” afterward and began administering medical aid to Brown while saying “I’ll pray for you.”

According to The Daily Beast, both the Spotsylvania County sheriff’s office and Virginia State Police confirmed that Brown was unarmed. The shooting was not captured on the bodycam footage released to the public as the camera was angled downward toward the road.

Speaking to NBC Washington, Tazmon believes Brown called 911 because he wanted a ride back to his car to prevent it from being towed. “The officer just started shooting at him for no reason. I didn’t hear a warning shot. All I heard was ‘Hands up!’ one time. And all he had was his phone, so I know he put his hands up,” Tazmon said.

Brown remains in intensive care on a breathing machine in a Virginia hospital. Haynes claimed in a news conference Monday that Brown was shot ten times and his condition was “touch and go” after having two of the eight bullets surgically removed. “My concern at this point is hopefully for my son to come home alive,” Jennifer Brown, Brown’s mother, said Monday.

Brown’s family is requesting that audio of the communication between the deputy and dispatch prior to the shooting, while Black Lives Matter Fredericksburg is demanding the deputy’s name and additional video footage be released.

The press conference continues. We’re learning that Isaiah Brown is still in critical condition. The family attorney says his condition is “touch and go.” He says he was shot 10 times and hospital says 2 bullets have been removed. 8 still remain. @NBC12 pic.twitter.com/pdcSIKhZXm

— Desiree Montilla NBC12 (@desmontilla) April 26, 2021

Brown’s shooting, along with those of Andrew Brown Jr. and Ma’Khia Bryant, has reignited the push for the Senate to sign the George Floyd Policing Act. “I want everyone here to take out your phones and Google the numbers for Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin and ask them why they haven’t signed on to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act,” Bakari Sellers, an attorney for Andrew Brown Jr.’s family, said Monday during a news conference.

Spotsylvania County Sheriff Roger Harris himself drew criticism Friday after saying “the deputy actually saved this gentleman’s life” to protestors gathered outside the Spotsylvania County sheriff’s office Friday evening. “I believe that the sheriff was reporting to the fact that he performed CPR, as of course he is required and trained to do. But it is incredible that he would make that statement that he saved his life by rendering CPR after he’s the one that shot him 10 times,” Haynes said.

The deputy has been placed on administrative leave while the Virginia State Police investigate the shooting.

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For TSMC, being the world's largest foundry with nearly 500 customers has its peculiarities. On the one hand, the company can serve almost any client with almost any requirements. On the other hand, it has to stay ahead of everyone else both in terms of capacity and in terms of technology. As far as capacity is concerned, TSMC is unchallenged and is not going to be for years to come. From a report: As for fabrication technologies, TSMC has recently reiterated that it's confident that its N2, N3, and N4 processes will be available on time and will be more advanced than competing nodes. Early this year TSMC significantly boosted its 2021 CapEx budget to a $25-$28 billion range, further increasing it to around $30 billion as a part of its three-year plan to spend $100 billion on manufacturing capacities and R&D. [...] TSMC's N5 family of technologies also includes evolutionary N4 process that will enter risk production later this year and will be used for mass production in 2022. [...] In 2022, the world's largest contract maker of chips will roll out its brand-new N3 manufacturing process, which will keep using FinFET transistors, but is expected to offer the whole package of PPA improvements.

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On Monday, the Census Bureau released long-awaited data from the 2020 census showing which states will gain seats in the House for the coming decade and which will see their congressional delegations shrink. In all, 13 states will feel the impact of population changes over the past 10 years, with six adding seats and seven losing representatives. These shifts are all reflected in the map above (with a larger version available here), but they contain several surprises compared to projections based on recent growth trends.

In a continuation of long-standing patterns, most of the increases in representation will be concentrated in Sun Belt states, with Texas once again leading the way in gaining two seats. However, while Florida looked likely to grow by two seats, it will only add one, and Arizona, which forecasts showed tacking on another seat, won’t pick up any.

Conversely, losses will largely show up in states in the Midwest and Northeast, though New York avoided shedding two seats and came just 89 people away from standing pat. California, meanwhile, will experience its first decline in seats in state history. Montana, which lost a seat after the 1990 census, will once more send two members to Washington, D.C., though Rhode Island, which appeared to be on track to end up with just a single at-large district, will hang on to both of its seats.

These shifts also affect the number of votes each state gets in the Electoral College, though they would not have altered the outcome of last year’s presidential election and instead would have narrowed Joe Biden’s 306-232 win slightly to 303-235. But the biggest impacts of the census won’t be known until congressional redistricting is complete, a process that, thanks to delays in the production of necessary data, won’t begin until August at the earliest and will likely last through a good part of next year.

We do know, however, that Republicans will once again dominate the redistricting process, just as they did following the 2010 census: As shown on the map below (see here for a larger version), GOP lawmakers in the states will be able to draw new maps for anywhere from 38% to 46% of all districts while Democrats will control the process for just 16% of seats (the remainder will likely be drawn by nonpartisan entities or through bipartisan compromise). To stay on top of the mapmaking process as it unfolds, subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, the Voting Rights Roundup.

President Biden says we can solve our problems. Republicans say we're spiraling toward chaos and collapse.

How Republican screams about "socialism" give away their larger deception.

Biden’s not taking away your meat, as Republicans claimed this weekend. But partisan conflict over eating animals is just getting started.

Over the weekend, Republicans accused Joe Biden of trying to ban meat.

The claim, which you’ve heard from the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, is that Biden’s climate plan will prohibit Americans from chowing down on burgers in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions associated with industrial agriculture.

On Fox News this Friday, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow warned of a Fourth of July where “you can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts” (Kudlow doesn’t seem to be aware of what beer is made from). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) dubbed Biden “The Hamburglar.”

Of course, Biden’s climate change plan does not limit meat-eating in any way. A Washington Post fact-check traced the burger-banning Biden myth back to a misleading article in the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid known for sensationalist coverage and right-wing politics. Biden’s actual climate policies so far have focused on reducing emissions from cars and power plants, with no effort to block meat production or consumption.

At first blush, this is yet another instance of a fake outrage cycle in the right-wing echo chamber pegged to a lie. But there’s something more distressing here too — it’s the latest example of how efforts to curb the climate crisis and our reliance on meat are becoming just the latest flashpoints in our all-consuming culture wars.

The grain of truth in the Republican claims (agri-pun intended) is that any serious climate change plan needs to do something about meat production. A recent paper in Science, a leading academic journal, found that food-related emissions alone put the Paris climate agreement’s warming target of 1.5 degrees Celsius out of reach. The most effective way to address these emissions, according to the paper’s authors, is a global shift away from meat consumption.

Biden’s climate policies so far have not advanced this goal, so those conservative potshots over the weekend were lies. But here’s the thing: Biden’s plan absolutely should do something about industrial farming. Any plan to tackle climate change should do something to decrease America’s reliance on the meat industry — moonshot subsidies for lab-grown meat, for example.

But everything nowadays is bound up in our political identities, and meat has a cultural and economic significance few other things can match. Anything Democrats propose to address the problem of animal agriculture’s emissions will be — is already being — met by major backlash from the right.

Increasingly, America’s meat-eating ways are being subsumed into our culture wars. It’s yet another sign of how polarized our country is and how hard this polarization makes tackling a catastrophic threat like climate change.

The anatomy of a meat smear

On Thursday, the Daily Mail published an article with a characteristically inflammatory headline: “How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.”

The use of the word “could” there is crucial, as the article’s content is entirely speculative. It takes Biden’s recently announced climate change targets — cutting 50-52 percent of America’s emissions per month — and attempts to make projections about what policy changes might be needed to reach that target. Though Mail reporter Emily Crane admits that Biden “has yet to release any firm details on exactly how such a plan will affect the daily lives of ordinary Americans,” she goes ahead and makes some sketchy guesses.

“Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent and cut their consumption of other animal based foods in half,” Crane writes. “To do that, it would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day. It equates to consuming roughly one average sized burger per month.”

The estimate is based on a University of Michigan paper on how much hypothetical diet changes could reduce American climate emissions, which found that the US could achieve a 51 percent reduction in food-related emissions by reducing beef consumption by 90 percent and all other animal-based foods by 50 percent. But there is no evidence presented that the Michigan estimate is informing Biden’s climate policy.

We cannot assume that, in order to hit a 50 percent reduction overall, Biden would attempt to reduce emissions in each sector of the economy by exactly 50 percent. The plans for the agricultural sector may end up being more or less than that, and they may aim to accomplish them by means other than reducing domestic meat consumption (like reducing the use of nitrogen in plant agriculture). As the Mail itself admits, we genuinely have no idea.

Despite these flaws, the Mail’s article took off in the right-wing media world, with many interpreting it as an actual summary of Biden’s policy aims. According to the Post’s fact-check, the most influential vector was Fox News, which made an easily shareable infographic about “Biden’s climate requirements” that launders the Mail’s misinformation as an authoritative claim about Biden’s plan stemming from the University of Michigan itself.

On Monday, Fox News’ John Roberts admitted the error on-air: “a graphic and the script incorrectly implied it [the Michigan study] was part of Biden’s plan for dealing with climate change. That is not the case.” But it was too late: the graphic had already motivated of the more prominent false claims on social media, with prominent conservatives retweeting it as though it were accurate:

As we’ve seen in the past, lies that circulate unchallenged in the right-wing media ecosystem can sometimes harden into myths. Birtherism and the Obamacare “death panel” rumors began as fringe claims pushed with little to no factual basis; once amplified by conservative media, they became widely embraced by the GOP base and elements of the official Republican Party. The notion that the 2020 election was somehow stolen, while similarly factually challenged, spread even faster (largely because its progenitor was also the incumbent president and party leader).

Because so many conservatives distrust the mainstream media, fact-checks like the Post’s are not going to change the Fox-Republican narrative. As Biden continues to roll out his climate change policies, expect some conservatives to say it bans beef — even if it does nothing of the kind.

The culture war over meat begins

Here’s the problem, though: If Biden’s climate plan doesn’t do something about meat, it’s probably going to fail.

Globally speaking, livestock production represents a significant portion of overall greenhouse gas emissions. The reasons for this are intrinsic to meat production itself; there is no way for humans to consume meat in the way we do without abetting catastrophic warming.

Ruminant animals like cows, kept in numbers much larger due to meat and dairy demand, emit methane gas through their bodily functions — a pollutant more potent than carbon dioxide. Raising allegedly more climate-friendly meats, like chicken, also emits significantly more greenhouse gases than plant-based protein productions. Animal agriculture necessitates clearing huge amounts of land, a significant cause of deforestation in places like Brazil’s Amazon. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), factory farms where animals are crowded into tiny cages and kept in horrific conditions, create massive feces lagoons that intensify the methane problem.

There is, in short, no way around the problem: If we want to keep climate change at a manageable level, we need to change the way we produce and consume animal products.

The Biden administration may or may not eventually take steps to deal with this problem. But the hysterical reaction to a falsehood that it is going to be doing so suggests just how explosive the reaction will be if Biden actually moves in this direction.

Roger L. Wollenberg/Getty Images

Both in the United States and globally, meat’s cultural significance is hard to overstate. Humans have eaten animals for millennia, and it’s become deeply ingrained in our cultural rituals and self-understanding. In America, meat is linked with masculinity and ideals about the virtuous traditional American farmer — central concepts in a Republican Party dominated by culturally conservative rural whites.

To make matters worse, animal agriculture is also a huge business, meaning that billions of dollars would likely line up behind pro-meat Republicans. A new study reported by my colleague Sigal Samuel found that animal agriculture industries have already spent millions trying to undermine climate policy, when there’s been no federal effort to intentionally reduce American meat consumption. Imagine how hard they’d fight if there was one.

This conjunction of forces — the cultural power of meat and the interests of Big Agriculture — make the issue of reducing meat consumption politically challenging.

When a draft FAQ about the Green New Deal mentioned the problem of animal methane emissions, conservatives responded by falsely claiming the policy would ban cow production — seeing this as a potent attack line. There’s a reason Biden’s team responded to the current rumors by tweeting a picture of Biden grilling patties: This is a fight they don’t want to have directly.

Even the most palatable meat alternatives, like lab-grown meat and Impossible-style plant proteins, threaten both conservative self-images of America and the bottom line of the agriculture industry. When current Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) ate at a plant-based vegan restaurant in Atlanta during the 2020 campaign, his opponent David Purdue mocked him by tweeting a picture of himself eating bacon. The caption? “Pick your side, America.”

The unstoppable force of climate change advocacy on the left is about to hit the immovable object of attachment to meat on the right. The resulting fight will implicate issues at the very core of American identity, a country where animal agriculture is a major part of our mythologized cowboy past and economic present.

With the stakes so high, there’s every reason to believe that meat could be the next big fight in our all-consuming culture war. “Biden bans burgers” isn’t a one-off lie; we may look back on it as the meat wars’ Fort Sumter.

With a devastating second wave of Covid-19 sweeping across India and lifesaving supplemental oxygen in short supply, India's government on Sunday said it ordered Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to take down dozens of social media posts critical of its handling of the pandemic. From a report: The order was aimed at roughly 100 posts that included critiques from opposition politicians and calls for Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, to resign. The government said that the posts could incite panic, used images out of context, and could hinder its response to the pandemic. The companies complied with the requests for now, in part by making the posts invisible to those using the sites inside India. In the past, the companies have reposted some content after determining that it didn't break the law. The takedown orders come as India's public health crisis spirals into a political one, and set the stage for a widening struggle between American social media platforms and Mr. Modi's government over who decides what can be said online. On Monday, the country reported more than 350,000 new infections and more than 2,800 deaths, marking the fifth consecutive day it set a world record in daily infection statistics, though experts warn that the true numbers are probably much higher. The country now accounts for almost half of all new cases globally. Its health system appears to be teetering. Hospitals across the country have scrambled to get enough oxygen for patients.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief executives of Facebook and Apple have opposing visions for the future of the internet. Their differences are set to escalate later today. The New York Times: At a confab for tech and media moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July 2019, Timothy D. Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook sat down to repair their fraying relationship. For years, the chief executives had met annually at the conference, which was held by the investment bank Allen & Company, to catch up. But this time, Facebook was grappling with a data privacy scandal. Mr. Zuckerberg had been blasted by lawmakers, regulators and executives -- including Mr. Cook -- for letting the information of more than 50 million Facebook users be harvested by a voter-profiling firm, Cambridge Analytica, without their consent. At the meeting, Mr. Zuckerberg asked Mr. Cook how he would handle the fallout from the controversy, people with knowledge of the conversation said. Mr. Cook responded acidly that Facebook should delete any information that it had collected about people outside of its core apps. Mr. Zuckerberg was stunned, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Facebook depends on data about its users to target them with online ads and to make money. By urging Facebook to stop gathering that information, Mr. Cook was in effect telling Mr. Zuckerberg that his business was untenable. He ignored Mr. Cook's advice. Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Cook's opposing positions have exploded into an all-out war. On Monday, Apple plans to release a new privacy feature that requires iPhone owners to explicitly choose whether to let apps like Facebook track them across other apps. One of the secrets of digital advertising is that companies like Facebook follow people's online habits as they click on other programs, like Spotify and Amazon, on smartphones. That data helps advertisers pinpoint users' interests and better target finely tuned ads. Now, many people are expected to say no to that tracking, delivering a blow to online advertising -- and Facebook's $70 billion business. At the center of the fight are the two C.E.O.s. Their differences have long been evident. Mr. Cook, 60, is a polished executive who rose through Apple's ranks by constructing efficient supply chains. Mr. Zuckerberg, 36, is a Harvard dropout who built a social-media empire with an anything-goes stance toward free speech. Those contrasts have widened with their deeply divergent visions for the digital future. Mr. Cook wants people to pay a premium -- often to Apple -- for a safer, more private version of the internet. It is a strategy that keeps Apple firmly in control. But Mr. Zuckerberg champions an "open' internet where services like Facebook are effectively free. In that scenario, advertisers foot the bill. The relationship between the chief executives has become increasingly chilly, people familiar with the men said. While Mr. Zuckerberg once took walks and dined with Steve Jobs, Apple's late co-founder, he does not do so with Mr. Cook. Mr. Cook regularly met with Larry Page, Google's co-founder, but he and Mr. Zuckerberg see each other infrequently at events like the Allen & Company conference, these people said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roku is warning its customers with YouTube TV subscriptions that the service could go dark in the coming days due to what it calls Google's "predatory" and "monopoly" behavior. From a report: In a lengthy statement, a Roku spokesperson blasted Google's actions in detail. The tech giant is "attempting to use its YouTube monopoly position to force Roku into accepting predatory, anti-competitive and discriminatory terms that will directly harm Roku and our users." The company has also sent an email to customers this morning expressing the concerns. Roku is arguing that YouTube and Google are out to manipulate the user experience to siphon data and tilt search results in YouTube's favor, among other complaints. It also maintains that Google could require Roku to spend money upgrading microchips or other equipment in order to accommodate YouTube TV. The current agreement between the companies will expire in the next few days. While the Roku statement did not specify a date, this week will see April end and May begin, a turning of the calendar that matches with most distribution contract deadlines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The myth of the elusive “white working class” Trump voter continues to haunt Democratic dreams of holding on to its slim House and Senate majorities. But a closer analysis suggests that what unified millions of Americans to support Trump, and what continues to constitute the biggest threat to Democrats has little to do with economic disparity or any “bread and butter” issues. Rather, it has more to do with the deliberate, calculated efforts by Trump—and now by all Republican elected legislators—to maintain and stoke a perpetual sense of “victimhood” among their constituents.

Trump’s supposed appeal to “white working class” Americans has been interpreted as a phenomenon unique to Trump himself, as if his arrival on the political scene suddenly galvanized entire swaths of a previously dormant voter demographic. The reality, though, is considerably more nuanced, as reported in The Washington Post in 2017: “If being working class means being in the bottom half of the income distribution, the vast majority of Trump supporters during the primaries were not working class.” The great majority of those who supported Trump during the 2016 primaries—the truest measure of a “Trump voter”—earned livings well above the national median income level.

Nor was lack of a college education peculiar to Trump supporters. Although 70% of his votes came from people without a college degree, there was nothing unique about that in terms of Republican voters overall, as The Post’s Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu noted.

[D]uring the primaries, about 70 percent of all Republicans didn’t have college degrees, close to the national average (71 percent according to the 2013 Census). Far from being a magnet for the less educated, Trump seemed to have about as many people without college degrees in his camp as we would expect any successful Republican candidate to have.

As always, if you enjoy this work, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List!

Individual countries will ultimately have the final say though.

NEW DELHI — India’s crematoriums and burial grounds are being overwhelmed by the devastating new surge of infections tearing through the populous country with terrifying speed, depleting the supply of life-saving oxygen to critical levels and leaving patients to die while waiting in line to see doctors.

For the fourth straight day, India on Sunday set a global daily record for new infections, spurred by an insidious, new variant that emerged here, undermining the government’s premature claims of victory over the pandemic.

The 349,691 confirmed cases over the past day brought India’s total to more than 16.9 million, behind only the United States. The Health Ministry reported another 2,767 deaths in the past 24 hours, pushing India’s COVID-19 fatalities to 192,311.

Experts say that toll could be a huge undercount, as suspected cases are not included, and many deaths from the infection are being attributed to underlying conditions.

The crisis unfolding in India is most visceral in its graveyards and crematoriums, and in heartbreaking images of gasping patients dying on their way to hospitals due to lack of oxygen.

Burial grounds in the Indian capital New Delhi are running out of space and bright, glowing funeral pyres light up the night sky in other badly hit cities.

In central Bhopal city, some crematoriums have increased their capacity from dozens of pyres to more than 50. Yet officials say there are still hours-long waits.

At the city’s Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat crematorium, workers said they cremated more than 110 people on Saturday, even as government figures in the entire city of 1.8 million put the total number of virus deaths at just 10.

“The virus is swallowing our city’s people like a monster,” said Mamtesh Sharma, an official at the site.

The unprecedented rush of bodies has forced the crematorium to skip individual ceremonies and exhaustive rituals that Hindus believe release the soul from the cycle of rebirth.

“We are just burning bodies as they arrive,” said Sharma. “It is as if we are in the middle of a war.”

The head gravedigger at New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, where 1,000 people have been buried during the pandemic, said more bodies are arriving now than last year. “I fear we will run out of space very soon,” said Mohammad Shameem.

The situation is equally grim at unbearably full hospitals, where desperate people are dying in line, sometimes on the roads outside, waiting to see doctors.

Health officials are scrambling to expand critical care units and stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen. Hospitals and patients alike are struggling to procure scarce medical equipment that is being sold at an exponential markup.

The crisis is in direct contrast with government claims that “nobody in the country was left without oxygen,” in a statement made Saturday by India’s Solicitor General Tushar Mehta before Delhi High Court.

The breakdown is a stark failure for a country whose prime minister only in January had declared victory over COVID-19, and which boasted of being the “world’s pharmacy,” a global producer of vaccines and a model for other developing nations.

The long-awaited iOS 14.5 update is finally rolling out with a new privacy tool.

On Monday, Apple is rolling out a long-awaited privacy feature for iOS. The latest version of the company’s mobile operating system, iOS 14.5, will prompt iPhone and iPad users to opt out of tracking in apps that monitor their behavior and share that data with third parties.

This new feature is a significant step for user privacy, as it gives people more control over their mobile phone app data and how it’s used by companies, like Facebook and Google, to target ads. At the same time, the move has frustrated app developers and tech companies that have relied on the reservoir of user data for years, and who fear they’re likely to be cut off from it in the near future.

The biggest difference most people will see with the introduction of the new privacy tool, called App Tracking Transparency, is a pop-up that appears when you open an app that tracks you:

Apple

Since 2012, apps developed for iOS have used an Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) to conduct tracking across different websites and apps. Apps usually collect this identifier so they can connect the information about the user gathered through the app to information about that user gathered elsewhere, like on the web, in order to better target ads. Before 14.5, Apple mobile users were able to limit ad tracking through toggles deep in the software’s settings, but this newest update directly prompts users to approve and disapprove this tracking for every app.

With the App Tracking Transparency feature, however, apps will need users’ permission to access a user’s IDFA before conducting tracking, which could include collecting user data to sell to data brokers or linking a user’s app data with third-party data that was collected in order to target ads. These new rules, Apple has said, will also impact other app processes, including sharing location data with data brokers and implementing hidden trackers for the purpose of conducting ad analytics. Some ad industry experts believe a large number of users will opt out of tracking when the new app tracking transparency feature goes live.

The iOS 14.5 software update is considered a major win for user privacy and is expected to give iPhone users a much greater sense of the type of tracking that takes place in their devices (in fact, privacy advocates were frustrated that the tool wasn’t rolled out earlier). While Apple users had some control over ad-tracking in the past, it’s easier than ever for users to opt out of being tracked.

“They’ll see a simple pop-up that basically prompts them to answer the question of, are they okay with being tracked or not? If they are, things move on,” Apple CEO Tim Cook explained in an interview with Kara Swisher earlier this month. “If they’re not, then the tracking is turned off for that individual with respect to that specific app.”

At the same time, this new Apple feature has frustrated other technology companies that rely heavily on this data to support their web advertising businesses. Google has announced a number of changes to its Google ads systems following the announcement of the new Apple privacy features. The update has also led to a rather public fight between Facebook and Apple. Facebook has run a months-long media campaign claiming that Apple’s changes will hurt the personalized ads that support small businesses. The change is actually more likely to hurt Facebook, assuming many Facebook users opt out.

Apple has been running a campaign of its own, touting privacy and security as key features of its products, for years. Tim Cook, the company’s CEO, has long emphasized that Apple is not in the data business, a position that has increasingly put him at odds with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. App Tracking Transparency isn’t even the only big privacy update in iOS 14, which also includes “privacy nutrition labels” that encourage apps to provide explanations of their privacy that are easier to understand.

Aside from its privacy features, iOS 14.5 offers a few other reasons to update your software. For instance, you will now be able to set your phone to automatically download security updates, rather than remembering to do this yourself. New emoji options are available. You also now have the option to unlock your phone using an Apple Watch if the device’s Face ID cameras see that you’re wearing a mask.

The App Tracking Transparency tool won’t necessarily mean an end to all tracking, and Apple is already playing whack-a-mole trying to find and stop other workarounds for identifying your device. Still, this newest feature is a new and in-your-face way to remind users about the kind of data apps are seeking about them.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

The Supreme Court could make the NRA’s dreams come true.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, a case that could transform the judiciary’s understanding of the Second Amendment and lay waste to many of the nation’s gun laws.

The case involves New York state’s handgun licensing law — a law that has been in place since 1913 — which requires someone who wishes to carry a handgun in public to demonstrate “proper cause” in order to obtain a license permitting them to do so.

Proper cause can be demonstrated in several ways. Someone who wishes to use a gun for hunting or target practice may obtain a license permitting them to do so, although this type of license can be restricted to only allow the bearer to use their gun for these purposes. People in certain kinds of work may also obtain licenses — a storekeeper might be issued a limited license allowing them to keep a gun in their store for protection, for example, or a bank messenger may be allowed to carry a gun to protect themselves and the money they transport.

But to obtain an unrestricted license to carry, New York courts have established that an applicant must “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.” So someone might be able to obtain a license because they have a particular fear of their stalker — but someone who merely wants to carry a gun, because of a general belief that it would be useful if they are ever the victim of a violent crime, cannot obtain a license.

The plaintiffs in Corlett include a New York state gun rights group and two New York men who applied for a license to carry a handgun in public and were denied that license. They claim that “law-abiding citizens” have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun in public — and the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, could agree with them.

Indeed, Corlett could potentially dismantle more than a decade of judicial decisions interpreting the Second Amendment, imposing prohibitive limits on lawmakers’ ability to reduce gun violence.

In fairness, there is one early sign that the Court may be inclined to place some limits on its decision in Corlett. Although the plaintiffs asked the Court to rule on a broad question — “whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense” — the justices announced on Monday that they will only resolve a more narrow question: “whether the State’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.”

Nevertheless, this narrower question is still broad enough to allow the Supreme Court to rewrite a decade of Second Amendment precedents, to unwind a consensus within the lower courts that permits many gun regulations to stand, and then to allow those lower courts to complete the process of dismantling other gun laws.

How the Supreme Court’s current precedents approach the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” and until fairly recently, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of this amendment very seriously. As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. Thus, the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.”

But the Supreme Court largely abandoned this approach in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

While Heller marked a sea change in the Court’s approach to the Second Amendment, it was also a heavily caveated victory for gun rights advocates. Among other things, Heller suggests that bans on “carrying concealed weapons” are lawful, as are “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” or bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Additionally, while Heller struck down the District of Columbia’s “absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home,” the opinion is much less clear about gun rights outside the home.

Since Heller, the Supreme Court has largely been silent about the scope of the Second Amendment, handing down only one significant Second Amendment decision, McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). That case merely held that states, and not just the federal government, are bound by the Second Amendment’s restrictions on gun laws — whatever those restrictions may be.

And yet, while the Supreme Court has largely stayed out of the business of interpreting the Second Amendment since Heller, a clear consensus has emerged in the lower courts regarding how to interpret that amendment — even though this consensus is not shared by many key members of the Supreme Court.

The consensus approach to the Second Amendment, briefly explained

In the absence of more guidance from the Supreme Court on how to apply the Heller decision, lower federal courts have largely coalesced around the same basic approach to Second Amendment cases.

At least 10 federal appeals courts apply what federal appellate Judge Stephen Higginson describes as a “two-step analytic framework.” Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most skeptical level of review in most constitutional cases. Meanwhile, “less onerous laws, or laws that govern conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core,’” are subject to a more permissive test known as “intermediate scrutiny.”

Under this consensus framework, gun regulations that impose very serious restrictions on “core” Second Amendment rights — which Higginson described as the right of “law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home” that the Court recognized in Heller, but may also include some guns rights that were historically considered important — will typically be struck down, while less severe restrictions or gun laws that don’t burden the Second Amendment’s “core” are more likely to be upheld.

In 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit applied this framework to the gun licensing regime at issue in the Corlett case, and it upheld that regime. In an opinion by George W. Bush appointee Judge Richard Wesley, the Second Circuit explained that there is a long tradition of laws in the United States that prevent people from carrying guns outside of their homes.

“During the Founding Era,” Wesley wrote, “many states prohibited the use of firearms on certain occasions and in certain locations.” North Carolina, for example, forbade “going armed at night or day ‘in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the King’s Justices, or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere.’” In the 19th century, Georgia and Tennessee banned outright the sale of weapons, such as handguns, that could be concealed. And New York’s own licensing regime is more than a century old.

In light of this history, the Second Circuit concluded that “state regulation of the use of firearms in public was ‘enshrined with[in] the scope’ of the Second Amendment when it was adopted,” and thus a licensing regime for people who want to carry firearms in public did not fall within the core of the Second Amendment.

Why the consensus approach is in danger

While lower court judges have largely embraced the “two-step analytic framework” applied by most circuits, there have been a few dissenters. One dissenter is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who argued in a 2011 dissenting opinion, when he was still a lower court judge, that the consensus approach should be abandoned. “Courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition,” Kavanaugh claimed, “not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”

In that 2011 case, Kavanaugh would have struck down a law banning semi-automatic assault weapons and requiring gun owners to register their firearms.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, also called for a stricter Second Amendment when she was a lower court judge. Recall that Heller suggested that “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill” are constitutional. But, dissenting in Kantor v. Barr (2019), Barrett claimed that this rule should be shrunk so that only “dangerous people” may be prohibited from owning a gun. So under Barrett’s framework, a person convicted of a nonviolent felony like mail fraud would still have a Second Amendment right to own a gun.

There’s also a third reason to suspect that the Supreme Court is likely to use the Corlett case to move the law dramatically to the right.

Shortly before his death in 2019, retired Justice John Paul Stevens revealed some of the internal deliberations behind the Supreme Court’s Heller decision. After former Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of Heller, circulated his original draft to the Court, former Justice Anthony Kennedy asked for “some important changes” to that draft.

Because Heller was a 5-4 decision, Scalia needed Kennedy’s vote to hold onto his majority. According to Stevens, it was Kennedy who requested that the opinion include language stating that Heller “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many existing gun laws.

But Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court in 2018 and was replaced by Kavanaugh. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the dissent in Heller, died in 2020 and was replaced by Barrett.

The current Court, in other words, is much more conservative than the Court that decided Heller in 2008. It’s not even clear that a majority of the current Court supports the portions of Heller that limit the scope of the Second Amendment — much less the kind of analysis that led the Second Circuit to uphold New York’s gun licensing law.

The future of gun control in the United States could be quite grim — and Corlett could mark the moment when lawmakers’ power to fight gun violence falls apart.

GOP lawmakers are responding to Black Lives Matter protests with anti-protest bills.

In the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, Republican lawmakers are advancing a a number of new anti-protest measures at the state level — including multiple bills that specifically make it easier for drivers to run down protesters.

The most recent example of such a law came Wednesday, when Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a new law that effectively allows drivers to hit people with a car in a specific set of circumstances.

Under the new law, an Oklahoma driver will no longer be liable for striking — or even killing — a person if the driver is “fleeing from a riot ... under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”

The measure also creates new penalties for protesters who obstruct streets or vehicle traffic, including hefty fines of up to $5,000 and as much as a year in jail.

Critics argue that the law will allow people to specifically target public protesters, with little ramification, but Republicans have promoted similar measures in recent years alongside the rise of the Movement for Black Lives in recent years, and such laws have received renewed conservative support after last summer’s protest movement.

At its peak in June 2020, Black Lives Matter protests may have comprised the single largest protest movement in US history, according to the New York Times, with as many as 26 million people nationwide demonstrating in support of racial justice and police reform following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Those protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, according to the Washington Post, and almost 98 percent resulted in no injuries to “participants, bystanders or police.” However, many Republican lawmakers have pushed a draconian legislative response anyway — even as incidents of drivers running down protesters have increased nationwide.

In addition to the Oklahoma measure, Republicans in Iowa’s House passed a bill earlier this month that would carve out similar protections from civil liability for drivers who hit protesters with a car, and on Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a broad anti-protest measure into law that does the same.

These recent measures build upon laws proposed in 2017 — the same year that Heather Heyer, an anti-racist protester, was killed by a white supremacist driver during protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. That driver purposefully sped into a crowd of people; the anti-protest laws passed recently offer different levels of protection depending on a driver’s motivations.

As Vice’s Tess Owen explains, the new Florida law “creates civil immunity for people who drive into crowds of protesters, meaning they won’t be sued for damages if people get hurt or killed if they claim self-defense.”

The Iowa bill would also grant civil immunity to drivers who hit protesters blocking traffic, so long as the driver was not engaging in “reckless or willful misconduct.”

But only the Oklahoma law creates both criminal and civil immunity for drivers who hit protesters with their cars while “fleeing.”

Laws like the one in Oklahoma are a far-right dream

If the recent spate of anti-protest measures in Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma is disturbing on its face, however, context does little to make it better. There is a specific history in the US of the far right using cars as weapons, and it’s not hard to see how bills like the one that is now law in Oklahoma might only make things worse.

The most notable example is from August 2017: Heyer, 32, was struck and killed and at least 19 others were injured when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. rammed a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville. Fields has since been sentenced to life in prison.

But it’s more than that single incident. According to Ari Weil, the deputy research director for the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, there were at least 72 incidents of cars driving into protesters over a relatively short span in 2020, from May 27 through July 7.

Examples aren’t hard to find. There’s even a Wikipedia page specifically dedicated to “vehicle-ramming incidents during George Floyd protests.” And as Weil explained in an interview with Vox’s Alex Ward last year, “there’s an online environment that for years has been celebrating and encouraging these types of horrendous attacks.”

“What’s particularly worrisome is where those memes spread,” Weil told Vox. “I know of at least four cases where law enforcement officers were sharing these in Facebook groups. [Fields] shared these memes twice in two months before his attack, and other planners of the Unite the Right rally shared these, too.”

According to Weil, the sort of law now on the books in Oklahoma isn’t new, either. When he spoke to Vox in June, Weil said that “at least six states had legislators who tried to pass bills that would protect drivers from civil suits if they hit protesters. Luckily, none of those passed.”

Now, several of them have — and Republicans in Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, and elsewhere are also pushing bills that would limit protests in other ways.

Even more concerning, it’s not always just random people driving through protests. In several cases, police have also used their cars as weapons against protesters. In Detroit last June, an officer drove his police SUV through a crowd, sending protesters flying; two New York police officers did likewise at a Black Lives Matter protest in May 2020.

Indeed, some of these bills package protection for drivers alongside enhanced authority for law enforcement. The Iowa law, for example, eliminates liability for drivers who hit protesters, while expanding qualified immunity and increasing benefits for police officers, according to the Des Moines Register.

The Republican Party is doing its best to criminalize protest

Though bills that would protect drivers who run over protesters are especially alarming, they’re by no means the only changes that Republicans are pushing in response to Black Lives Matter protests — protests which continued this month following the police killings of Adam Toledo in Chicago, Daunte Wright in Minnesota, and Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio.

In particular, the Florida bill signed this month by DeSantis is a sprawling measure that creates new criminal penalties for protesting, among other provisions. And while it purports to address “rioting” — DeSantis has called it “the strongest anti-rioting, pro-law enforcement piece of legislation in the country” — the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida warned last week that the bill effectively “criminalizes peaceful protest” in Florida.

“Ask yourself this,” ACLU of Florida executive director Micah Kubic said in a statement. “What problem are Gov. DeSantis and certain members of the Florida legislature trying to solve? To be clear — the goal of this law is to silence dissent and create fear among Floridians who want to take to the streets to march for justice.”

During his time in office, former President Donald Trump expressed support for such aggressive measures. As protests erupted after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor last summer, Trump called on governors to quash demonstrations, and praised the National Guard for “cut[ting] through” demonstrations “like butter” in Minneapolis.

Anti-protest bills proliferated around the country during Trump’s tenure in office — and have continued to gain support in the early months of President Joe Biden’s administration as Republican lawmakers at the state level lean even harder into a Trump-style “law and order” message. According to a tracker from the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, at least 30 measures restricting the right to peaceful assembly have been enacted since November 2016, while 68 more are currently pending. All told, at least 220 bills that would curb the right to protest have been introduced in 45 states since November 2016.

And in 2021 alone, International Center for Not-for-Profit Law senior legal adviser Elly Page told the New York Times last week, 81 anti-protest measures have been introduced in 34 states.

One such bill, in Kentucky, would make it a misdemeanor punishable by jail time to insult or taunt a police officer and make resisting arrest during a riot a felony offense. Both the Kentucky and Florida bills would also make it harder for protesters to post bail if arrested in certain circumstances.

Another measure, in Minnesota, would make anyone convicted of a crime at a protest “ineligible for student loans and many other forms of state financial aid,” including food stamps and unemployment, according to the Minnesota Daily.

Not all of those bills have a realistic chance of passing — Minnesota and Kentucky, for example, both have Democratic governors, who would likely veto any such measures that reached their desks — but they’re a clear indication of the broader mood of the Republican Party. Never mind that most Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful, and never mind that George Floyd was murdered in plain sight, on video, by a police officer — to Republicans, it’s the protests that have to be stopped.

Bitcoin "fell dramatically in late April," writes The Street, "sinking from its mid-month high of around $64,000" to Sunday's current price of $47,600 — a drop of over 25% in less than two weeks. So this week the Street spoke to Bobby Ong, the chief operating officer at the cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko, asking "Was that just par for the course — normal volatility — of something else?" Ong: The recent bloodbath on April 18 saw a record of approximately $9.77 billion worth of futures contracts liquidated in just 24 hours. There was already a massive amount of leverage in the market in anticipation of the Coinbase initial public offering. The excitement of having the first crypto company IPO also led bitcoin's price to hit a new all-time high of $64,804. However, the direct listing of Coinbase also had a lukewarm reception from stock investors. More recently, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty spreading on social media due to various factors, including (rumors of) the U.S. Treasury taking legal action against certain financial institutions for money laundering, which turned out to be false information. Other than that, CNBC was recirculating news about the crypto ban in India, Turkey banning crypto payments, President Biden proposing a higher capital gains tax, and China bitcoin miners losing power. The selloff happened during the weekend when there were thinner order books. With high leverage and thin order books, even a small decrease in price will trigger a sharp drawdown and cause a downward spiral in price. Naturally, the market also needs to correct itself, because there were many over-leveraged traders. It is also important to note that bitcoin options expire towards the end of every month, which usually causes increased volatility in the last week of each month. TheStreet: Do you see the decline as a chance for people to get into it at a cheaper price? Ong: It depends on that person and their goals. The profiles of buyers today are very different before, when it was mostly libertarians. Today. it's U.S. institutions, and soon it will be governments.

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Saturday University of Minnesota researchers emailed the Linux kernel mailing list apologizing for submitting buggy code as part of a research project to see whether it would be accepted. Late Saturday night, the kernel team's Greg Kroah-Hartman replied: Thank you for your response. As you know, the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board submitted a letter on Friday to your University outlining the specific actions which need to happen in order for your group, and your University, to be able to work to regain the trust of the Linux kernel community. Until those actions are taken, we do not have anything further to discuss about this issue. thanks

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"Banking giant HSBC has confirmed that top managers in its Canary Wharf HQ have lost their offices and will have to hot-desk on an open-plan floor," reports the BBC, noting it comes as the bank "pursues plans to shrink its office space by 40% in a post-pandemic shake-up." Boss Noel Quinn said the whole bank was embracing "hybrid working" and he would no longer come in five days a week. "My leadership team and I have moved to a fully open-plan floor with no designated desks," he said on Linkedin. Up to now, senior managers have been based on the 42nd floor of the building in east London in their own private offices. But in future, they will be jostling for workspaces two floors down, while their old offices have been transformed into client meeting rooms and other communal spaces. Mr Quinn told the FT that the old arrangement had been "a waste of real estate", adding: "Our offices were empty half the time because we were travelling around the world..." He added that most staff at the bank would be able to work part-time from home in future. "A minority of roles can be done wholly remotely. We estimate, though, that most of our roles could be done in a hybrid way — and that includes myself and the executive team of the bank..." Other firms in the sector have announced plans to embrace hybrid working as employees signal their desire to commute less. One big UK employer, the Nationwide building society, has indicated that it does not intend to force people to return to the office if they have been successfully able to work from home during the pandemic. It said about two-thirds of its 18,000 employees had been working from home for the past year. Forbes has more context: [HSBC's] Quinn wrote in a LinkedIn post, "Having spent more than a year working from home, the last thing I want is to be stuck in an individual office when I return to the building." The chief executive said, "I want to have people around me, to reconnect with colleagues and friends and to be able to speak to them informally..." Having a prime location in a prestigious city is highly expensive and a drag on earnings. If the costs of office space could be dramatically slashed, the banks would see significantly more free cash flow. The other driver is the acknowledgement that many people want to work part or full-time remotely for a variety of reasons. The last year served as a test case, which showed that it's possible to conduct business with a large segment of the workforce being remote... HSBC is not alone in shedding properties in Europe. Lloyds Bank is also moving toward a hybrid model. This entails a 20% cut in office space over the next two years. The move was made after about 77% of Lloyds' 68,000 employees said they wanted to work from home for three or more days a week.

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In an indication of just how low state-level Republicans will stoop to propagate Trump’s Big Lie of “election fraud,” the Arizona state Senate has commissioned yet another “audit” of 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 election. The “audit” is being conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a company led by a right-wing conspiracy theorist named Doug Logan. and is being monitored by far-right pro-Trump attorney and fellow conspiracy theorist Lin Wood, and the disinformation hub of One America News Network (OANN).

As reported by Sam Levine for The Guardian, this audit was ordered by Arizona’s Republican-controlled state Senate despite (or, more likely, because of) the fact that two prior audits found no evidence of voter fraud in the state’s balloting. Of course, it also comes several months after Arizona  officials certified the state’s 2020 election results. It will include a hand recount, presumably by people specially chosen by Logan’s firm. The recount will also presumably operate under the direction of Wood, who, despite his purported familiarity with election laws, has no credible claim to representing the people of Arizona. It also incorporates a strategy to personally visit Arizona voters identified in the ballots, which may be a violation of federal law.

Levine’s report observes that this transparent attempt to “discover” voter fraud where none exists has already earned the derision of several voting rights groups, such as the Carter Center and the Brennan Center for Justice. In a letter directed to the president of the state Senate, those organizations, with decades of actual election monitoring experience behind them, noted that Logan’s company lacked both the independence and the technical expertise to undertake such a task. Not that any of this would particularly matter to Wood or OANN, both of which have created a profitable cottage industry out of hawking election lies.

From The Guardian’s report:

David Becker, an election administration expert and the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the effort was so shoddy he was hesitant to acknowledge it as a legitimate investigation.

“I’ve never seen an ‘audit’ that was remotely similar, and given the fundamental flaws, I don’t think this process can even be described as an audit,” he said in an email.

Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, expressed her disgust at the attempt by her Republican colleagues to manufacture doubts about the state’s election results for political benefit.

“They’re trying to find something that we know doesn’t exist,” said Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who serves as the state’s top election official. “It’s ludicrous that people think that if they don’t like the results they can just come in and tear them apart.”

As reported by Talking Points Memo, this effort to impugn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona has some well-heeled backers. Wood himself claims to have donated $50,000 to the audit effort through his group, Fight Back. Meanwhile, Logan, who previously took part in preparing a bogus list of election fraud claims that was ultimately posted on disgraced Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s website, was still accepting private donations to the effort earlier this month, according to The Washington Post.

In a possibly unintended insult to Arizona veterans who fought and died to protect the integrity of our elections, the audit will be conducted at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, with, as TPM report notes, 24-hour security. That security is being arranged by the state Senate; it is not clear who is paying for it, or for that matter, who is paying for the remainder of the costs of conducting the audit, which will likely take months to perform. The GOP-led state Senate has allotted $150,000 in Arizona taxpayer funds to the effort, but that will not cover the entire cost.

The spokesman for the audit is a former Republican secretary of state named Ken Bennett.

He said that the audit team hadn’t settled on a disclosure mechanism for making public who donated to the effort and what the funding paid for.

But while the funding sources of the audit remain a bit murky at this point, it doesn’t appear that anyone doubts what the results will be. Certainly not Lin Wood, who heaped praise on Logan and his company slated to perform the work.

“If it’s the Doug Logan that I knew, and I believe it is, he is a fine Christian man,” Wood said. “I think he’s an excellent person to have that job. I’d trust any audit he gave.”

How reassuring.

Of course the purpose of all this—aside from incidentally profiting those involved—is to continue sowing doubts about the 2020 election and the process as a whole. It is part of a coordinated state-by-state effort by the Republican Party and its media enablers to justify unnecessary voter suppression measures against (in this case) Arizonans, all with the goal of keeping Republicans in power. As pointed out by Levine, that effort was made abundantly clear on Wednesday, when the Republican-dominated Arizona House voted to impose new restrictions on voting, including making mail-in ballots more difficult to obtain.