James.galbraith

A smokestack emits smoke over Interstate 95 in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 17, 2019. | Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Ditching fossil fuels would pay for itself through clean air alone.

In the late 1960s, the US saw regular, choking smog descend over New York City and Los Angeles, 100,000 barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and, perhaps most famously, fires burning on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. These grim images sparked the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day, and a decade of extraordinary environmental lawmaking and rulemaking (much of it under a Republican president, Richard Nixon).

From the ’70s through the beginning of the 21st century, the fight against fossil fuels was a fight about pollution, especially air pollution.

American Stock/Getty Images

In the ensuing decades, the focus has shifted to global warming, and fossil fuels have largely been reframed as a climate problem. And that makes sense, given the enormous implications of climate change for long-term human well-being.

But there’s an irony involved: The air pollution case against fossil fuels is still the best case!

In fact, even as attention has shifted to climate change, the air pollution case has grown stronger and stronger, as the science on air pollution has advanced by leaps and bounds. Researchers are now much more able to pinpoint air pollution’s direct and indirect effects, and the news has been uniformly bad.

The evidence is now clear enough that it can be stated unequivocally: It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even if global warming didn’t exist. Especially now that clean energy has gotten so cheap, the air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition.

This conclusion has been reaffirmed by the latest air quality research, presented at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform by Drew Shindell, Nicholas professor of earth science at Duke University (and a lead author on both recent IPCC reports).

Shindell’s testimony reveals that the effects of air pollution are roughly twice as bad as previously estimated. That is a bombshell — in a sane world, it would be front-page news across the country.

“The air quality scientific community has hypothesized this for at least a decade, but research advances have let us quantify and confirm this notion, over and over,” says Rebecca Saari, an air quality expert who teaches in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo. “The air quality ‘co-benefits’ are generally so valuable that they exceed the cost of climate action, often many times over.”

Let’s take a closer look at the evidence for this extraordinary claim, and then we’ll consider its political implications.

Science keeps revealing that air pollution is more harmful than previously believed

Recently, I wrote about an ambitious and detailed new plan to substantially decarbonize the US economy by 2035 (primarily through electrification) and said that it would bring “transformative social and health benefits.”

Shindell and his team at Duke have attempted to quantify those benefits, drawing on the latest science. They began with the climate model used by NASA’s Goddard Institute and upgraded it “to represent air pollution at relatively high resolution,” Shindell testified, “making this model suitable for simultaneously studying the impact of climate and air quality.”

Using this all-in-one model, Shindell’s team mapped out a pathway from 2020 to 2070 that reduced US greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the world’s pledge to stay below 2°C and attempted to quantify the air quality and climate benefits.

(Note: Though the model and the techniques have been peer-reviewed, Shindell’s crunching of the latest numbers is currently going through peer review. He includes extensive documentation of his methodology in an appendix to his testimony.)

The numbers are eye-popping. Shindell testified: “Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2°C pathway would prevent roughly 4.5 million premature deaths, about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and approximately 300 million lost workdays in the US.”

All that prevented death, illness, and lost productivity adds up to a lot of savings:

The avoided deaths are valued at more than $37 trillion. The avoided health care spending due to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits exceeds $37 billion, and the increased labor productivity is valued at more than $75 billion. On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the US from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition.

Importantly, many of the benefits can be accessed in the near term. Right now, air pollution leads to almost 250,000 premature deaths a year in the US. Within a decade, aggressive decarbonization could reduce that toll by 40 percent; over 20 years, it could save around 1.4 million American lives that would otherwise be lost to air quality.

Of the potential yearly deaths prevented, Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois remarked at the hearing, “That’s a huge number. That’s nearly three times the number of lives we lose in car accidents every year. It’s twice the number of deaths caused by opioids in the past few years. And it’s even more than the number of Americans we lose to diabetes each year.”

If the numbers are shocking, it’s because the science has been developing rapidly. First, says Shindell, “there’s been a huge upsurge in work in developing countries, in particular China,” which has produced larger data sets and a wider, fuller picture of the real-world effects of exposure.

Wikipedia

Second, where scientists used to focus almost exclusively on pollution effects for which there is an established and well-understood biological pathway, the recent production of enormous data sets (for instance, the entire population of more than 60 million Medicare patients) has allowed them to uncover new statistical correlations.

With giant data sets, “you can control for socioeconomic status, temperature, hypertension and other existing conditions,” and other variables, says Shindell. “You can convincingly demonstrate that correlation is in fact causal, because you can rule out essentially every other possibility.”

For example, scientists now know that exposure to smog (tiny, microscopic particulates) hurts prenatal and young brains. Even though they don’t yet fully understand the biological mechanism, they know it reduces impulse control and degrades academic performance. Similarly, they know it hurts the kidneys, the spleen, even the nervous system.

“The well-understood pathways, things like strokes, lower respiratory infections, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, only seem to capture about half the total,” Shindell says. “When you look at the [new] studies, you find that air pollution seems to affect almost every organ in the human body.”

A recent study from the national academies of multiple countries, including the US, put it this way:

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: air pollution can harm health across the entire lifespan. It causes disease, disability and death, and impairs everyone’s quality of life. It damages lungs, hearts, brains, skin and other organs; it increases the risk of disease and disability, affecting virtually all systems in the human body.

“About twice as many people die in total as die just from the pathways we understand,” says Shindell. “We’ve been underestimating all along.”

Alongside these updated estimates of air pollution impacts, Shindell’s team developed a new way of assessing the nationwide health impacts of severe heat, in order to quantify one of the best-understood effects of climate change. Combining them into one model, Shindell testified, “we find impacts roughly double those that would have been obtained using older evidence.”

While that may sound like a big jump, it is likely a lower bound. On both air pollution and climate change, the study omitted many effects that “are clearly present but cannot yet be reliably quantified.” The true numbers are almost certainly higher.

The implications of this new air quality research are far-reaching. Though the benefits of the Clean Air Act were already thought to outweigh the costs, they may be twice as high as previously estimated. The costs of Trump’s rollbacks of Obama’s fuel economy standards and Clean Power Plan are up to twice as large as previously estimated.

It is no coincidence that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is trying to exclude consideration of co-benefits (often the largest class of benefits) in its air quality rulemakings. It’s no coincidence that it is trying to exclude consideration of studies with anonymous participants, a category that encompasses all the latest research Shindell and others draw on. The fossil fuel lobby, which now includes the entire executive branch, has long understood that the science isn’t going its way. These rule changes are its last-ditch bid to blind the government to new research.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

New air pollution research ought to break the climate policy logjam

Climate change has often been framed as an intractable problem for international coordination, a matter of shared sacrifice, with every country incentivized to be a “free rider,” reaping the benefits without taking on any of the costs.

But the latest air pollution research, coupled with the plunging cost of clean energy, should render that dynamic moot.

It is true that climate change can only be averted with the entire world’s cooperation; if the US reduces its emissions to net zero but the other countries of the world (especially China and India) continue on their current trajectory, it will make almost no difference in temperature. The health benefits of avoided severe heat will not manifest.

However — and this is the crucial fact — the air quality benefits will manifest, no matter what the rest of the world does. Shindell’s team ran a version of their scenario in which the US came into compliance with a 2°C pathway but the rest of the world continued with current policies. “We found that US action alone would bring us more than two-thirds of the health benefits of worldwide action over the next 15 years,” Shindell testified, “with roughly half the total over the entire 50-year period analyzed.”

The air quality benefits arrive much sooner than the climate benefits. They are, at least for the next several decades, much larger. They can be secured without the cooperation of other countries. And, by generating an average of $700 billion a year in avoided health and labor costs, they will more than pay for the energy transition on their own. Climate change or no climate change, it’s worth ditching fossil fuels.

And if this is true in the US — which, after all, has comparatively clean air — it is true tenfold for countries like China and India, where air quality remains abysmal. A Lancet Commission study in 2017 found that in 2015, air pollution killed 1.81 million people in India and 1.58 million in China.

Shindell’s research reveals that those estimates may be woefully low. (He hopes to do similar modeling on China at some point.) The true toll may be almost double that, which is why both countries have experienced mass demonstrations against pollution in recent years that have left their governments scrambling.

Yogendra Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

“Air pollution remains the leading environmental health risk factor contributing to premature death worldwide, as demonstrated repeatedly by the Global Burden of Disease studies,” says Saari. “Health care costs and lost worker productivity are direct economic impacts of air pollution so large they can exceed the costs of climate policy.”

Shindell ended with a call to Congress, testifying that it would be “unconscionable to realize these benefits could be obtained and not attempt to obtain them.”

Air pollution ought to be seen as a global civil rights crisis

The extraordinary level of suffering humanity is currently experiencing from air pollution is not necessary for modernity; it could be reduced, at a cost well below the net social benefits, with clean energy technologies on hand.

If they are not necessary, then the millions of lives ended or degraded by fossil fuels every year are a choice. And when suffering on this scale, that is this brutally inequitable, becomes a choice, it enters the same ethical terrain as war, slavery, and genocide. The effects are more distributed over time and geography, as are the decision-making and the moral culpability, but the cumulative impact on human well-being — on our longevity, health, learning, and happiness — is comparable, and every bit as much worth fighting.

US policymakers have a chance to kick-start an energy transition that could save 1.4 million American lives over the next 20 years, especially among the most vulnerable, even as it creates jobs and saves consumers money. As Shindell says, it would be unconscionable not to act on it.

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There are two lenses by which to look at presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s choice of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate, and both are winners heading into the stretch run of the 2020 presidential campaign. 

1)  A vice presidential candidate’s only job is to help the ticket win.

So, does Harris fit the bill? Absolutely. 

We find ourselves in an odd political situation. Trump has done most of the work to unify the Democratic Party, while the coronavirus has finished the job. Not only is there an obvious shared purpose among most corners of the party, but the lack of an in-person convention has eliminated the ability of the party’s left-most edges to cause a public disruption, either on the floor of the convention, or on the streets outside. Thus, Biden was spared having to shore up his left flank. Does it matter policy wise? Doubtful. His attorney general and commerce secretary will have more of an impact on progressive priorities. But politically? It removed pressure to use the vice-presidential card to go left. 

Did he need a Black woman to shore up the Black vote? Also doubtful. He won that in the primary all by himself, and the Obamas will play a big role in further motivating Black voters to turn out. And in any case, they knew what they were doing voting for Biden in the primary—their strategy has panned out. By going with the old, well-known white guy, they've not only set Democrats up for an easy presidential win, but by narrowing the gap against Trump compared to four years ago, Democrats are poised to win big in the House, Senate, and down ballot. Picking a Black woman does repay his Black supporters for their faith in him, but that’s a bonus, not the primary reason for the pick. 

So how does Harris help the ticket win? By helping lock down the only true swing demographic—college-educated suburban white women. 

Remember, 38 of the 41 House seats Democrats won in their 2018 wave were suburban seats, and the party is poised to make further gains in those suburbs. In fact, the suburbs are the reason we’re even talking about places like Texas being competitive. To be clear, Biden appears to be improving lately among non-college whites, but they would be the gravy on top (and I don’t trust them to fully turn). Locking down the suburban vote makes it impossible for Trump and his party to mount a comeback. 

And that will be Harris’ job—to lock down that suburban white female vote. Which brings us back to the second lens: 

2. Every Trump campaign action should be run by this filter: how will this play in the suburbs

Trump’s weird recent prattling about suburban white housewives? It’s weird, yes, but at least it makes some kind of perverted sense. Republican operatives see the suburbs as a bloodbath, and they’re desperate to reverse it, even if they clearly have no idea what the suburbs look like.

Pew Research estimated that in 2016, there were around 11 million stay-at-home parents. At first glance, that might seem like a lot—but that’s only 18% of all of the nation’s parents. If you cast a larger net, it’s even like a smaller share of the population: That 11 million is only 8% of the 2016 electorate (137 million), or 4% of the total adult population (262 million persons 16 or older in 2018).

And on top of that, of those 11 million stay-at-home parents, 17% of them are fathers. So an overall number of stay-at-home mothers would be more like nine million. Presumably, Trump’s pitch to “Suburban Housewives” wasn’t intended to include dads; he probably couldn’t even wrap his head around the idea of being a stay-at-home dad in the first place.

Once you subtract non-white stay-at-home-parents, and subtract the ones who don’t live in the suburbs, and subtract the ones who aren’t persuadable, “Trump is preaching to an audience of, maybe, somewhere between one million to 1.5 million. Even at the top end of that estimate, that’s just barely 1% of the total 2016 electorate.” Yeah, it’s a stupid tactic, but at least makes some logical sense based on their electoral math. 

Harris, quite clearly, is a candidate who will play well in the suburbs. So, it bears watching how the Trump campaign responded to her day. And it was, uh, quite lacking. 

“Not long ago, Kamala Harris called Joe Biden a racist and asked for an apology she never received. Clearly, Phony Kamala will abandon her own morals, as well as try to bury her record as a prosecutor, in order to appease the anti-police extremists controlling the Democrat Party. In her failed attempt at running for president, Kamala Harris gleefully embraced the left’s radical manifesto, calling for trillions of dollars in new taxes and backing Bernie Sanders’ government takeover of healthcare. She is proof that Joe Biden is an empty shell being filled with the extreme agenda of the radicals on the left.

“Joe Biden is no moderate, and with Harris as his ‘political living will,’ he is surrendering control of our nation to the radical mob with promises to raise taxes, cut police funding, kill energy jobs, open our borders, and appease socialist dictators. At the ballot box, Americans will resoundingly reject the abysmal failures of Biden-Harris in favor of the America First strength of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.”

- Katrina Pierson, Trump 2020 senior advisor

Ignore the factual inaccuracies for the moment (Harris didn’t call Biden a racist), or the weird messaging (“political living will”), and focus instead on the core message: 

- Harris is a moderate

- She is faking being liberal

- Biden is no moderate but an empty shell

- Ergo, picking Harris is a surrender to the radical mob.

How can a moderate masquerading as a liberal be a surrender to “radicals on the left”? It’s beyond nonsensical. But ignore even the logical fallacies in the statement and ask yourself: Is anything in this statement going to get a college-educated white woman to change back to Trump? Of course not. Energy jobs? That’s not a suburban concern. Immigration? Republicans centered xenophobia in the 2018 campaign (Honduran caravan! Salvadoran gang MS-13!) and got crushed in the suburbs. Socialist dictators? That’s rich from a president who has fallen over himself appeasing dictators, but again, how is that a concern in the suburbs? Cutting police funding? 

Even with the rise in opposition among college-educated white women to Black Lives Matter (a suitable proxy for the defund effort), it’s still an issue with double-digit support, and if you filter out Republicans and Democrats (two groups we can assume are unpersuadable), it’s actually 55-30 in support among college-educated white independent women. 

So the bottom line? This is where Trump stands with those college-educated white independent women nationally: 

Yes, we’re seeing increased performance among core Democratic constituencies, like voters of color and youth, but the biggest reason Trump and his party are currently on a wipeout trajectory is their inability to stem their losses in the suburbs, and those numbers are driven by those formerly Republican, now independent white college-educated suburban white women. They are the core of the shift from 2020. Anything beyond them (whether it’s increased progressive turnout, or defections from older and non-college whites) is just gravy. Good gravy! It’ll determine whether we can pull off narrow Senate upsets in places like South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas. But the bulk of the gains will come from those white women in the suburbs. 

Harris will help Biden lock down those gains, and the Trump campaign—due to sheer ignorance and incompetence—appears helpless to do anything about it.

When Donald Trump ran through a stack of supposedly better qualified, and certainly more traditional, Republican candidates in 2016, it was a clear signal that the Republican Party was wide open to a message of racism and hate. But it also showed a party that was ravenous for conspiracy theories and secret agendas. Birtherism. American Muslims celebrating 9/11. Bill Clinton hiring hit men. Ted Cruz’s father being connected to the assassination of JFK … Trump mentioned all of these things while he was a candidate in 2016. And somehow, none of this was was disqualifying for Republican voters. Far from it.

Trump has kept up the assault on reality from the White House. Long before COVID-19 entered the news, Trump was talking about vaccines—and his belief that they could cause autism. He’s made claims of voter fraud of every possible type. Mostly he’s continued to play into racist fantasies with everything from caravans, to false claims about South Africa stealing land from white farmers, to insisting that climate change is a “Chinese hoax.” Trump has plowed the ground for a party where science, reason, and evidence are simply not welcome. That new party isn’t conservative, it’s delusional. And Marjorie Taylor Greene’s victory in the Republican primary Tuesday night showed that this issue isn’t improving. It’s metastasizing.

At this point, the idea of the “Overton Window” is old hat. Things that were at the extremes of the party in one cycle, are mainstream by the next as the Republican Party drifts inexorably rightward. What was “voodoo economics” becomes the basis of Republican fiscal policy. Policies on immigration slide from hardline to wall. But what’s going on with Trump, and now Greene, is qualitatively and structurally different. 

In the past, the Overton Window moved because a small army of lobbyists, strategists, and media figures made it move. They invented the words—like how the inheritance tax became a “death tax”—and framed the issue to make an unreasonable point seem less ludicrous. Then worth listening to. Then commonplace.

That’s not what’s happening with Marjorie Greene. No one is shaping her words to put them into terms that are more acceptable. No one is softening up her abject racism, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric. There’s no one on K Street working to make sure that her videos supporting the QAnon conspiracy are pitched to appear mainstream. Marjorie Taylor Greene does not give a f#ck about mainstream. Neither do any of her “where we go one” followers. 

That’s why Republican leaders in Congress were staunch in their opposition to Greene and their support for her primary opponent, John Cowan, in Georgia’s 14th Congressional district. But Greene beat Cowan on Tuesday night. Easily.

Greene’s victory leaves Republicans with a national candidate who is running on a platform filled with Son of Pizzagate delusions. That includes the whole international network of pedophile assassins connected through pizza-orders and attempted Deep State coups. That includes how Jews are the real Nazis, Black people are enslaved to the Democratic Party, and Confederate monuments are signs of “progress.”

Greene’s words were roundly condemned by Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, both of whom declared her “offensive.” But the racism and conspiracy theories weren’t offensive to Republican voters. Racism and conspiracy theories are what the Republican Party is about these days. In fact, they are all that it is about. After all, both McCarthy and Scalise have backed up every ludicrous claim by Trump. They’ve been right there, carrying the torch, leading the party toward a horde of people … waving torches. 

When Donald Trump ran in 2016, Republicans in Congress dismissed him, but Trump showed he understood the Republican base better than the Republicans. Now Greene is simply demonstrating that again. There are no lines. There is no basement. Republicans want to believe the worst about government, humanity, and especially anyone who doesn’t look just like them. QAnon may be nothing more than product of a thousand demented ferrets scrabbling madly at sh#t-stained keyboards. It doesn’t matter. It provides a source of hate. And the modern Republican Party is all about hate.

Somehow the people who lit this fire still don’t grasp that it’s going to burn everything.

Donald Trump’s sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service could already have changed the outcome of one election. The clerk in Sterling Heights, Michigan, said that 165 ballots arrived too late to be counted in the August 4 primary election—even though they were postmarked five days before the primary. One primary in Macomb County was decided by just 87 votes.

The ballots arrived Monday August 10 with July 30 postmarks. This comes after some Michigan voters reported not receiving their absentee ballots in time despite having requested them well ahead of the primary. At the same time, people around the country are experiencing mail delays.

“It's not uncommon for us to receive 10 or 20 (late absentee ballots) here and there," Sterling Heights clerk Melanie Ryska told Crain’s Detroit. "But just to get this number at this time is very unusual.” 

The Postal Service claims delays are because of increased package volume and decreased staffing due to coronavirus, but it’s notably happening as Louis DeJoy, Trump’s new postmaster general, has cut off overtime and changed procedures at the USPS in ways that experienced postal workers say are causing backlogs.

Trump has attacked the idea of voting by mail dozens of times in recent months, making clear that he’s connecting his fear of losing in November to people being able to vote safely in a pandemic. But Trump is also trying to delegitimize the elections by creating confusion and results like this one in Michigan, in which ballots are disqualified through absolutely no fault of the people trying to vote.

This right here is a billion red flags set on fire while encircling a beacon lighting up the sky with the word “WARNING.” 

Last week we reported that Louis DeJoy, the U.S. postmaster general, a major Trump donor and loyalist, announced that he was reassigning and displacing 23 US Postal Service executives, including two who oversee day-to-day operations. The news caused alarm in Democratic circles, three months from a presidential election which plans to rely heavily on mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic. “Friday Night Massacre” trended on Twitter at the news.

Now, it appears, the alarm is warranted.

Reuters spoke with American Postal Worker Union leaders who say that yes, the shakeups are leading to mail delivery issues.

Scott Adams, the president of American Postal Worker Union Local 458 in Maine, told Reuters that a new order to leave on time, “even if the mail has not been loaded” has caused thousands of delayed letters.

Another rule, which requires carriers to leave first thing in the morning with only packages and letters sorted the night before, has required many carriers to “double back to pick up a second batch later in the day,” according to a union leader in Iowa.

Reuters adds: “Internal Postal Service documents seen by Reuters acknowledge that the changes may lead to delays.  ‘One aspect of these changes that may be difficult for employees is that — temporarily — we may see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor or docks,’ says one memo, dated July 10. The plan hopes to eliminate 64 million working hours nationally to reduce personnel costs, according to another memo.”

In his “Closer Look” segment on Tuesday night, Late Night‘s Seth Meyers took a look at Trump’s plan to sabotage the US Postal Service before the election.

Said Meyers: “It’s incredibly suspicious to have a right-wing businessman and megadonor in charge of a nonpartisan agency like the Postal Service. You think of postal workers as charming friends and neighbors straight out of Mayberry. This is like if your town ice cream man was replaced by Karl Rove. [in Karl Rove voice] ‘Here you go, kid, one bullet pop. That will be $6,000. They’re made by Raytheon.’”

Meyers also had something to say to Trump: “The Postal Service turned a profit as recently as 2006. Second, you’re the last person on earth who should be complaining about someone else losing money. You lost a billion — one billion dollars — in the ’80s and ’90s, which was more than any single taxpayer in the country lost, and you also somehow managed to lose money on casinos, which I didn’t even think was possible.”

The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah had a lot to say about it on Tuesday night as well. Launching his segment, Noah said, “With the presidential election right around the corner, the big question is no longer, ‘Will Donald Trump try to cheat?’ It’s now become, ‘How will Donald Trump try to cheat?'”

Noah later added, of Trump: “I mean, this guy is spending $20 million to sue mail-in voting. Normally when Trump spends that much money suing you, it’s because you’ve seen him naked.”

The post US Postal Service Shakeup Already Responsible for Mail Delays, Union Leaders and Internal Docs Say appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Joe Biden currently has a robust lead in polls. If the election were held today, he might even win in a landslide, carrying not only traditional swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania but potentially adding new states such as Georgia and Texas to the Democratic coalition.

But the election is not being held today. While the polls have been stable so far this year, it’s still only August. The debates and the conventions have yet to occur. Biden only named his running mate yesterday. And the campaign is being conducted amidst a pandemic the likes of which the United States has not seen in more than 100 years, which is also causing an unprecedented and volatile economy.

Nor has it been that uncommon, historically, for polls to shift fairly radically from mid-August until Election Day. Furthermore, there are some reasons to think the election will tighten, and President Trump is likely to have an advantage in a close election because of the Electoral College.

That, in a nutshell, is why the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, despite his current deficit in the polls. This is considerably higher than some other forecasts, which put Trump’s chances at around 10 percent. Biden’s chances are 71 percent in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, conversely.²⁵

If these numbers give you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016 … when Trump also had a 29 percent chance of winning! (And Hillary Clinton had a 71 percent chance.) So if you’re not taking a 29 percent chance as a serious possibility, I’m not sure there’s much we can say at this point, although there’s a Zoom poker game that I’d be happy to invite you to.

One last parallel to 2016 — when some models gave Clinton as high as a 99 percent chance of winning — is that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast tends to be more conservative than others. (For a more complete description of our model, including how it is handling some complications related to COVID-19, please see our methodology guide.)

With that said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with the comparisons to four years ago. In 2016, the reason Trump had a pretty decent chance in our final forecast was mostly just because the polls were fairly close (despite the media narrative to the contrary), close enough that even a modest-sized polling error in the right group of states could be enough to give Trump a victory in the Electoral College.

The uncertainty in our current 2020 forecast, conversely, stems mostly from the fact that there’s still a long way to go until the election. Take what happens if we lie to our model and tell it that the election is going to be held today. It spits out that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning. In other words, a Trump victory would require a much bigger polling error than what we saw in 2016.

Let’s briefly expand on the points I made above.

Biden’s lead is pretty impressive

In this article — partly as a corrective against what I see as overconfident assessments elsewhere — I’m mostly focused on the reasons why Trump’s chances are higher than they might appear. But we should be clear: Trump’s current position in the polls is poor.

Biden is currently ahead in our polling averages in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ohio and in the second congressional district in Nebraska — all places that Clinton lost in 2016. If he won those states (and held the other states Clinton won), that would be enough to give him 352 electoral votes. He’s also within roughly 1 percentage point of Trump in Texas, Georgia, Iowa and Maine’s second congressional district. If he won those, too, he’d be up to a whopping 412 electoral votes.

It’s important to remember that the uncertainty in our forecast runs in both directions. There’s the chance that Trump could come back — but there’s also the chance that things could get really out of hand for him. Our model thinks there’s a 19 percent chance that Biden will win Alaska, for example, and a 13 percent chance that he will win South Carolina. The model also gives Biden a 30 percent chance of a double-digit win in the popular vote, which would be the first time that happened since 1984.

But there are downside scenarios for Biden.

Polls often change substantially between now and November

Every day, my colleague Nathaniel Rakich tweets out a list of what our national polling average would have looked like at this stage in past campaigns. And it can be a pretty wild ride. Here is Tuesday’s version, for instance.

Three of the candidates leading in national polls at this point — Michael Dukakis in 1988, George W. Bush in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004 — did not actually win the popular vote. Bush blew a 10-point lead, in fact, which is larger than Biden’s current advantage. (Luckily for Bush, he won the Electoral College.) In other cases, the polls at this point “called” the winner correctly, but the margins were way off. Jimmy Carter eventually beat Gerald Ford by just 2.1 percentage points — not the 26.6-point lead he had at this point in the campaign. Bill Clinton won by 5.6 points — not 20.1 points. And Barack Obama won a considerably more commanding victory in 2008 than polls at this point projected.

Now, there are some mitigating factors here. Some of these polls were taken at the height of a candidate’s convention bounce, although there are ways to try to correct for those. And in general, polls have become less volatile over time, probably because increased polarization means there are fewer swing voters than there once were. The polls have been particularly stable so far this year, in fact.

But while there are some factors that reduce uncertainty, there are other factors that increase it.

COVID-19 is a big reason to avoid feeling overly confident about the outcome

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 150,000 fatalities and has upended pretty much every American’s life, and Trump’s approval ratings for his handling of it have been awful.

But to the extent this is an election about COVID-19, there’s the possibility that the situation could improve between now and November. Cases have recently begun to come down after an early-summer spike, and recent economic data has shown improvement there, too. There’s also the possibility that a vaccine could be approved — or rushed out — by November, though it’s highly unlikely it could be widely distributed by then.

How to account for this? No, we aren’t building a COVID-19 projection model. (It’s really hard.) But we have built an “uncertainty index” that essentially governs the margin of error in our forecast. It contains eight components, two of which are very high because of COVID-19. Specifically, these are the high volatility in recent economic data, and the volume of major news events, as measured by the number of full-width New York Times headlines. There’s more news this year — not just about COVID-19, but the protests around police brutality, Trump’s impeachment earlier this year, etc. — than in any recent election campaign.

We also expect turnout to be harder to predict this year based on primary elections held during the pandemic that had highly variable turnout — which, in turn, could lead to more polling error. So even if the polls don’t change that much between now and November, that could create some additional uncertainty on Election Day. See the methodology guide for more on how we handle COVID-19.

But the other components of the uncertainty index are low, pointing toward a stable campaign. For instance, polarization is high, poll movement so far has been limited, and there aren’t that many undecided voters; the index accounts for all of those things.

In fact, the uncertainty index points toward the overall uncertainty going into November being about average relative to past presidential campaigns. So our model isn’t necessarily saying that things are going to get crazy, although they could. But it’s also saying you shouldn’t necessarily expect highly stable campaigns like 2012 to be the new normal in the time of COVID-19. (And keep in mind that 2016 was a pretty volatile campaign, too, even without COVID-19.) Empirically, the polls can move quite a bit from August to November, more than you might expect intuitively!

There are some sources of uncertainty that the model doesn’t account for, however. We assume that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. The model also does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.

It’s hard to know what the “fundamentals” say

I’ve long been critical of models that use economic “fundamentals” to try to predict election results, mostly because — although they claim to be highly precise — they haven’t actually been very good at predicting the outcome of an election where they don’t already know the results.

And those models are especially likely to have problems this year because of highly variable economic data. One model based on second quarter GDP projects Trump to win -453 (negative 453!) electoral votes, for example. But if you built a model based on third-quarter GDP, which is expected to be highly positive, it might predict a Trump landslide.

This isn’t to say that we don’t employ a fundamentals forecast of our own. We do, but it’s much less confident than others, and it receives relatively little weight in the overall forecast. It also isn’t currently that bad for Trump. In fact, it essentially predicts the popular vote to be roughly tied. Why?

• Although three of the economic factors we use in the model (jobs, spending, manufacturing) have been terrible, a fourth component (income) has been very strong because of government subsidies in the form of the CARES Act, though that could change if stimulus payments lapse. The fifth and sixth components, inflation and the stock market, have also been reasonably favorable.
• Most of the variables that declined are now improving, and are expected to continue to improve. (Our model projects what the economy will look like by November rather than relying on current data.)
• High polarization potentially blunts the impact of a poor economy.
• Trump is an elected incumbent, and elected incumbents are usually favored for reelection.
• We extended our analysis back to elections since 1880 (!) to expand the sample size, and found the relationship between the economy and the election likely isn’t as strong as other models claim, anyway.

In other words, our forecast thinks it’s far from obvious that the economy will doom Trump, especially if he can tell a story of recovery by November. Indeed, Trump’s approval ratings on the economy are still fairly good, so our model seems to be doing a reasonably good job of capturing how voters actually feel about the economy.

Another way to look at it is that our model is just saying that, in a highly polarized environment, the race is more likely than not to tighten in the stretch run. Empirically, large leads like the one Biden has now tend to dissipate to some degree by Election Day. And if the race does tighten…

Trump appears to have an Electoral College advantage again

Our model says there’s an 81 percent chance that Biden wins the popular vote — compared to his 71 percent chance in the Electoral College. That means there’s about a 10 percent chance that Trump again wins the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. (Conversely, the model puts the chance that Biden wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote at only around 1 in 750.)

That reflects the fact that the tipping-point state — the state that would provide the decisive 270th electoral vote — is somewhat to the right of the national popular vote. More specifically, our projection as of Tuesday had Biden winning the popular vote by 6.3 percentage points nationally, but winning the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, by a smaller margin, 4.5 percentage points:

The Electoral College could once again help Trump

Forecasted vote margin in battleground states and lean relative to the nation, from FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast as of Aug. 11

State	forecasted vote margin	Lean relative to nation
New Mexico	D+11.8	D+5.5
Virginia	D+10.6	D+4.3
Colorado	D+9.2	D+2.9
Maine statwide	D+8.2	D+1.9
Michigan	D+6.9	D+0.6
New Hampshire	D+6.4	D+0.1
National	D+6.3	EVEN
Nevada	D+6.2	R+0.1
Minnesota	D+4.7	R+1.6
Pennsylvania	D+4.7	R+1.6
Wisconsin*	D+4.5	R+1.8
Florida	D+3.2	R+3.1
Nebraska 2nd District	D+0.9	R+5.4
Arizona	D+0.8	R+5.5
North Carolina	D+0.3	R+6.0
Ohio	R+1.0	R+7.3
Georgia	R+2.8	R+9.1
Maine 2nd District	R+3.9	R+10.2
Iowa	R+4.3	R+10.6
Texas	R+4.4	R+10.7

* Wisconsin is the tipping-point state as of Aug. 11.

That 1.8-point gap is actually smaller than what Clinton experienced in 2016, when there was about a 3-point gap between her losing margin in Wisconsin (which was also the tipping-point state in 2016) and her winning margin in the national popular vote. This analysis is a simplification, too. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the outlook, so the tipping-point state could easily turn out to be Florida or Pennsylvania or something more unexpected like North Carolina.

Still, as a rough rule-of-thumb, perhaps you can subtract 2 points from Biden’s current lead in national polls to get a sense for what his standing in the tipping point states looks like. Add it all up, and you can start to see why the model is being fairly cautious. Biden’s current roughly 8-point lead in national polls is really more like a 6-point lead in the tipping point states. And 6-point leads in August are historically not very safe. That margin is perhaps more likely than not to tighten and at the very least, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty about what COVID-19 and the rest the world will look like by November.

Biden is in a reasonably strong position: Having a 70-ish percent chance of beating an incumbent in early August before any conventions or debates is far better than the position that most challengers find themselves in. And his chances will improve in our model if he maintains his current lead. But for the time being, the data does not justify substantially more confidence than that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has won the GOP nomination for a deep red congressional seat in Georgia despite widespread condemnation from party leaders over her videos where she expressed racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.

Greene, who is also a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory, defeated neurosurgeon John Cowan in a primary runoff election on Tuesday for the deep-red Northwest Georgia district, where the GOP nomination is tantamount to a seat in the House.

A businesswoman who self-funded much of her campaign, Greene won the first round of the primary by a 19-point margin. But a week after, GOP leaders including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who chairs the House Republican campaign arm, took the rare step of disavowing her candidacy after POLITICO uncovered hours of videos where she demeans blacks, Muslims and Jews.

Among her more incendiary comments: She called the 2018 election of Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the first two Muslim congresswoman, “an Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government; suggested that Jewish megadonor George Soros turned Jews over to the Nazis; and described Black people as “slaves to the Democratic party” who should feel “proud” to see a Confederate monument because it symbolizes progress made since the Civil War.

Her victory saddles House Republicans with a new member who has espoused a slew of opinions many view as deeply offensive at a time when the country is facing a nationwide reckoning over racial justice, and and the GOP is struggling to appeal to once-loyal voters in affluent suburbs across the country.

This outcome is a nightmare scenario for some Republican lawmakers and operatives in Washington, D.C. and Georgia, who dreaded the idea of such a controversial addition to their party just months after they finally excised Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). And it will likely set off hand-wringing over whether the establishment should have done more to thwart Greene in the two-month stretch between her 19-point victory in the first round of the June primary and Tuesday’s runoff.

To the consternation of some House Republicans, neither McCarthy nor the National Republican Congressional Committee took sides in the runoff. Among leadership, only House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) actively worked on Cowan’s behalf.

In June, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Greene's comments “appalling” and said McCarthy had “no tolerance for them.” But by August, McCarthy declared himself publicly neutral and said he had a good relationship with both Greene and Cowan. His public indifference shocked some members of his conference.

Greene took the public criticism in stride, portraying herself as an outsider candidate who was victimized by liberals.

“The GOP establishment, the media, & the radical left, spent months & millions of dollars attacking me,” she said in a tweet after her win on Tuesday. “Tonight the people of Georgia stood up & said that we will not be intimidated or believe those lies.”

The outcome of this one race will not impact the House majority, but Democrats have already signaled that they will invoke Greene in their campaign messaging. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement that “Republican candidates running across the country, will have to answer for her hateful views in their own campaigns.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene is a next-generation Steve King who is now the Republican nominee for Congress because Minority Leader McCarthy refused to meaningfully oppose her racist candidacy,” Bustos said.

In his runoff campaign, Cowan cast Greene as an unstable flamethrower who would imperil other Republicans, especially those running to represent the state in the Senate and in two House battlegrounds in suburban Atlanta. “She is not conservative — she’s crazy,” he said in a recent interview.

Greene hit Cowan over a donation to then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie during the 2016 campaign, calling him insufficiently supportive of President Donald Trump. She also accused him of misrepresenting his role in a county sheriff’s office.

Despite Greene’s forceful showing in the June primary, the runoff appeared to be up for grabs. Cowan saw a fundraising windfall and received a cascade of endorsements from Republican members eager to block Greene. Among his more prominent supporters was Scalise, who fundraised and campaigned for Cowan. That backing gave Cowan’s campaign legitimacy and helped him outraise Greene in the final weeks and air more TV ads.

But no major outside group waded into the race to tip the race in his favor, a shocking development given the willingness of super PACs to drop serious money in primaries for safe GOP seats. The Club for Growth, for example, spent big to boost state Rep. Matt Gurtler in a neighboring north Georgia open seat. Gurtler ultimately lost to gun-store owner Andrew Clyde on Tuesday.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, House Republicans' flagship super PAC, rarely plays in primaries and typically only does so in battleground districts where the nominee could impact which parties wins the seat in the fall. But it made an exception this spring , when it spent to help Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) beat back a primary challenge in her safe Republican district — a race with arguably lower stakes than the Georgia runoff.

Greene did have some congressional backers, even after her comments came to light. Some members of the House Freedom Caucus, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), are supporting Greene and encouraged her to abandon her initial bid in the 6th District against Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath and to run in the more conservative 14th District after incumbent Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.) announced his retirement.

Greene has said she will join the Freedom Caucus.

Her win does give House Republicans a boost in their quest to grow the number of women in their conference, which is at a record low of just 13. Greene is the fourth woman to win a nomination for safe, Republican seat, after victories by female candidates in Illinois, Tennessee and Michigan.

Bricks are about as basic as architectural materials can get, yet these simple building blocks have hidden powers that can be leveraged to provide electricity, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists modified a common red brick -- the same kind you'll find on sale for under a dollar at your local hardware store -- so that it could power a green LED light. This proof-of-concept for a "smart brick" reveals that brick technology, which dates back thousands of years, can be tweaked to have futuristic applications, including electrical conductivity and sensing capabilities. The results were published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. "We have created a new brick that can be incorporated into your house that has the functionality of storing electrical energy," said study co-author Julio D'Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, in a call. "We are thinking that sensing applications is a low-hanging fruit for these bricks," he added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The State Department did not fully consider the risk of civilian casualties when it approved more than $8 billion in arms sales to Middle Eastern countries last year, according to a redacted inspector general report released Tuesday.

An unredacted version of the report, obtained by POLITICO, also raised questions about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assertions that an emergency situation existed, allowing him to greenlight the sales over congressional objections.

Lawmakers had asked the inspector general to investigate the transfer of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan after Pompeo in May 2019 cited threats from Iran and used emergency authorities to transfer the weapons. The move short-circuited lawmakers, who had blocked some of the transfers for more than a year over concerns that the U.S.-made equipment could be used to kill civilians.

The inspector general determined that, on a technical level, Pompeo carried out his use of emergency authorities in accordance with the legal regulations, which give him considerable discretion in, among other things, determining what counts as an emergency.

Yet the IG also said the department “did not fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns” surrounding the transfer of precision-guided munitions to the three countries. The IG provided additional details about this failure, as well as a recommendation, in a classified annex of the report.

The unclassified section of the report published online included several redactions that were insisted upon by the State Department. But a version shared with lawmakers, dozens of whom had received it by mid-afternoon Tuesday, did not include those redactions, showing a fuller picture of the timelines involved and raising questions as to whether an emergency existed.

For instance, an unredacted timeline shows that State Department staffers proposed using emergency authorities on April 3, 2019, that drafts of the emergency certification were circulated 20 days later, and that it wasn’t until May 4 that Pompeo directed that the emergency be certified by May 24.

The report released online, however, said Pompeo briefed Congress on Iranian threats on May 21, approved the paperwork two days later and then certified that the emergency authorization was transmitted to Congress the next day.

In essence, the public version gives the impression that Pompeo moved quickly on an urgent issue, whereas the unredacted version shows a much longer timeframe of deliberation and action, undermining the argument that an emergency existed at all.

According to the unredacted report, by the time the inspector general began reviewing what happened in October, “foreign partners had taken full delivery of 4 of the 22 arms transfer cases included in the May 2019 emergency.” The low number of full deliveries, which was redacted in the public version of the report at State’s insistence, also raises questions about how much of an emergency was in play in the first place.

"The concern all along was that Pompeo concocted the emergency to bypass Congress," a congressional aide told POLITICO. "A few key details in the report verify that, and those are the details State tried to bury. It looks like a coverup.”

A State Department spokesperson said the situation in the Middle East "clearly justified the use of the statutory authority in the Arms Export Control Act."

"And after the report from the Office of Inspector General, it is clear the IG also agrees that statutory requirements were complied with, as they found no wrongdoing in the emergency arms sales and stated clearly that the Secretary properly executed the certification and complied with the requirements outlined in the Arms Export Control Act," the spokesperson said.

The 22 transfers included the sale of 120mm mortar rounds to Saudi Arabia and Javelin anti-tank guided missiles to the UAE, along with the transfer of laser-guided bombs from the UAE to Jordan.

Of those 22 cases, lawmakers had placed holds on 15, the report said.

The Conventional Arms Transfer Policy prohibits the U.S. from approving arms transfers if it knows those weapons will be used against civilians.

The report has been heavily anticipated in part because Pompeo recently engineered the firing of Steve Linick, the inspector general under whom the investigation began. Linick also was looking into whether Pompeo and his wife, Susan, had improperly used State Department resources for personal reasons, a probe that remains underway.

Pompeo has denied that the investigations had anything to do with his decision to ask President Donald Trump to fire Linick in mid-May. Pompeo has alleged that Linick was a "bad actor" who was undermining the mission of the department. Linick, who had held the post since 2013, has said he was shocked to be fired.

Pompeo resisted sitting down for an interview for the report on the arms sales, one reason its release was delayed for so long. He instead answered questions in writing.

On Monday, the State Department held a background briefing with reporters to highlight the finding that Pompeo appropriately carried out the emergency declaration. The department did not release the report at the time, and did not mention the determination regarding civilian casualties.

The department's effort to pre-spin the report's findings before it was released infuriated leading Democrats. House Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) compared it to Attorney General Bill Barr's efforts to put an early spin on the findings of then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia election interference investigation.

"The people briefing the press were the subjects of the IG’s probe, not the report’s authors," Engel said in a statement. "This obvious pre-spin of the findings reeks of an attempt to distract and mislead. Mike Pompeo is pulling directly from the Bill Barr playbook."

After Linick's firing, the inspector general's office was briefly led on an acting basis by Stephen Akard, an ally of Vice President Mike Pence who also held another position at the State Department. But he left the job last week. The IG's office is now being temporarily led by Diana Shaw, who had been serving as Akard's deputy.

Police brutality is an ongoing issue frequently gaining attention as new footage continues to surface on social media and other public spaces. Florida’s Key West Police Department is under fire after a 2018 video surfaced in which officers are conducting an arrest at an elementary school. In the difficult-to-watch video, officers can be seen handcuffing an 8-year-old child as he cries. The child, unidentified due to his age, was arrested and charged with felony battery. According to an attorney representing the child, the boy has special needs and was participating in an Individualized Education Program at the school, NBC News reported.

The police footage garnered attention Monday after being posted to Twitter and Instagram by Tallahassee civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. "Instead of honoring and fulfilling that plan, the school placed him with a substitute teacher who had no awareness or concern about his needs and who escalated the situation by using her hands to forcibly move him," Crump said in a statement. "When he acted out, the teacher called the police, who threatened him with jail and tried to put him in handcuffs, which fell off because he was too little."

Crump, a well-known attorney, represents the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. On Monday, he announced that he and Pennsylvania attorney Devon Jacobs will be representing the child and plan to file a federal lawsuit against the Key West Police Department and the Monroe County School District this week. "As a former police officer, I am appalled by the conduct of these officers," Jacobs said in a statement.

The child slumps down in his seat at the beginning of the video, resulting in the police officer’s body cam footage capturing only the top of the boy’s head. “You know where you’re going? You’re going to jail,” a Key West police officer says in the video. The officer then instructs him to stand up and place his hands on a metal cabinet in the hallway of his elementary school for a pat-down. Officers then try to handcuff the boy but are unable to do so, since his wrists appear to be too small. It’s “not worth it,” another officer can be heard saying. The child is then led outside of the school and taken to a police vehicle, at which point an officer says: "You understand this is very serious, okay? I hate that you put me in this position that I have to do this. The thing about it is you made a mistake and now it's time to learn from it and grow from it, right? Not repeat the same mistake again."

According to the arrest report obtained by the Miami Herald, police were called to Gerald Adams Elementary on Dec.14, 2018 after the child punched a teacher in the chest. The child was allegedly sitting incorrectly on a bench seat in the cafeteria during lunch when a teacher asked him to sit down. After he ignored her requests, she then told the child to sit next to her. The child allegedly refused and told the teacher, “Don’t put your hands on me,” the report said. The teacher “did not sustain any obvious injuries as a result of the punch,” the report added. In the police report, Officer Michael Malgrat said that when he saw the child in the school’s administrative office, “he was postured as if he was ready to fight.”

“This is a heartbreaking example of how our educational and policing systems train children to be criminals by treating them like criminals,” Crump said in a statement, according to the Miami Herald. “If convicted, the child in this case would have been a convicted felon at eight years old. This little boy was failed by everyone who played a part in this horrific incident.”

Crump’s social media post went viral Monday with hundreds of people criticizing the police department for their actions and involvement. The school’s inability to address the issue in-house was questioned, in addition to why the police were involved in a special needs case in the first place. The school was also criticized for failing to address the child’s needs and placing a substitute teacher in charge of a child without the knowledge of his needs. According to The Washington Post, Crump noted that officers used “scared straight” tactics, a technique allegedly designed to deter juveniles from future criminal activity by emphasizing severe consequences. These intimidating tactics are not only dehumanizing but ineffective.

Defending the officers involved in the incident, Key West Police Chief Sean T. Brandenburg told the Miami Herald his officers did not do anything wrong. “Based on the report, standard operating procedures were followed,” he said.

“At eight years old, three and a half feet tall, and 64 (pounds), this little boy didn’t pose a threat to anyone," Crump said on Twitter. According to Crump’s statement, the child was taken to an adult prison for processing but the police department claims the boy was booked in a juvenile justice facility.

This isn’t the first incident to appear on social media depicting police mistreatment of minors. Last week, police in Colorado apologized after officers wrongfully pulled over a car containing four Black children and handcuffed two of them, the Post reported. Earlier this year, footage of another Florida officer arresting a 6-year-old girl and restraining her with a zip tie also surfaced, causing national outrage. Nationwide and amid ongoing protests against police brutality, footage of police officers dehumanizing people of color have surfaced with both adults and children as victims. It seems that “All lives matter” to some—unless those lives belong to people of color, in which case there must be more context to the story.

The status of the child’s criminal case is unknown at this time and the police report fails to mention any special needs. Crump and Jacobs are expected to hold a news conference on the case Tuesday.

Due to the Donald Trump administration's complete incompetence at containing a pandemic that much of the rest of the world has already gotten under some semblance of control, United States citizens are now unwelcome in much of the world. We are simply considered too potentially disease-riddled to be allowed to visit other nations freely.

But the list of nations banning United States residents from crossing their borders may be soon be getting an extremely notable new addition: the United States itself. No, really. Trump's White House team is now considering whether returning United States citizens should be barred from reentering the country if there is "reason to believe" they might carry the virus.

To answer the most obvious question, in theory the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention may have the authority to keep American citizens from returning to the country if they "may have been exposed to or [are] infected with" a transmittable disease. Or at least, that is what the Trump team is relying on—it's not clear if a blanket ban would really pass constitutional muster. In practice, as with so much else that Republicans have slavishly insisted Trump be allowed to do during this administration, it does not matter. Trump can simply order border officials to refuse entry, invite the lawsuits, and presume that every one of those lawsuits will prove moot long before they make it through even the first layers of our judicial system.

When you've been pre-immunized by a loyal Senate, as we've learned, laws no longer much matter. You can do whatever you want.

The draft proposal the White House is said to be contemplating seems a bit nebulous on the details. Trump's team wants to bar those "suspected" of having COVID-19. What counts as "suspected?" A fever? Having spent time in a known coronavirus hotspot? Will they be requiring travelers submit to "rapid" but testing, confining them to waiting rooms until the results are available? Where do they intend to get the tests from, during a nationwide shortage?

As actual pandemic safety precaution, the measure is (yes, we've been here before as well) largely symbolic—i.e. pointless. While it's nice to think the administration might actually develop a plan to test at least some group of Americans, even if it's only "Americans rich enough and dumb enough to travel internationally during a pandemic," it would not make even the most minimal of dents in actual pandemic spread. The virus is already here, and widespread.

The more typical pandemic approach would be to test travelers and quarantine those returnees who tested positive. This has been the presumptive approach since the beginning, or would have been if Donald Trump was not a deeply weird and sociopathic crackpot. Trump famously groused against allowing an infected cruise ship to dock at a U.S. port during the early days of the pandemic, complaining that it would inflate the U.S. case count and make him look bad.

That particular ship has (cough) sailed, now that U.S. cases have topped 5 million and deaths have topped 160,000. There's no numeric advantage in denying U.S. citizens reentry to the United States, rather than allowing them to return but quarantining them. It appears to be another case of the Trump team searching frantically for things that sound "tough" while having limited to no actual preventative value.

More to the point, this may be another case of a Trump rule that is aggressively enforced at only one border, while being mostly for show at the others. The odds that border officials will just happen to test those Americans entering from the U.S.-Mexico border at far, far greater rates than those flying in from elsewhere are ... high. To put it mildly. It might even be reasonable to assume that the new rule is primarily a way to further harass and torment non-white dual citizens attempting to reenter this country from another, just for the Trumpian reason of wanting to.

Uber would likely shut down temporarily for several months if a court does not overturn a recent ruling requiring it to classify its drivers as full-time employees, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an interview. From a report: "If the court doesn't reconsider, then in California, it's hard to believe we'll be able to switch our model to full-time employment quickly," Khosrowshahi said. Uber and rival Lyft both have about a week left to appeal a preliminary injunction granted by a California judge on Monday that will prohibit the companies from continuing to classify their drivers as independent workers. Following the order will require Uber and Lyft to provide benefits and unemployment insurance for workers. California's attorney general and three city attorneys brought the lawsuit against the companies under the state's new law, Assembly Bill 5, that aims to provide benefits to gig workers core to a company's business by classifying them as employees. In his decision granting the preliminary injunction, the judge rejected the notion that drivers should be considered outside the course of the companies' businesses, calling the logic "a classic example of circular reasoning."

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OHH YEAHHH

Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, the city’s first Black police chief, announced publicly Tuesday that she will be retiring on Sept. 2 after more than 28 years of service. Her decision follows the Seattle City Council’s vote to reduce the police force by up to 100 officers and cut about $3 million in police department funding, according to The Washington Post. Best, however, assured the public her decision was “not about the money” but her desire to move forward with a plan and to have her officers respected.

“This is not about the money - I have thicker skin than that,” she tweeted Tuesday. “This is about the disrespect shown all SPD officers.”

Best said in another tweet: “The Council gave us $1.6 million to hire the best, brightest and most diverse. Now they want me to layoff 100 of those officers.  I can’t do that.”

”I don’t want the people who work for me to be impacted by the animus directed toward me. That animus felt personal,” she added.

Following the brutal death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Seattle is one of several cities pushed to the forefront of a resulting protest movement to defund police departments and reallocate a portion of their bustling budgets to social, health, and education services as a preventative approach to crime. Similarly, activists have been pushing the Seattle City Council to not only cut, but redistribute half the police force’s budget to community programs, The Washington Post reported.

Council member Kshama Sawant, who cast the sole vote opposing the city’s much more modest funding cut, said in a statement that the council didn't go far enough. “This budget fails to shift the misplaced priorities of the Democratic political establishment,” she said in the statement. “It continues to hand more money over to the bloated police department than to eldercare, homeless services, and other human services, affordable housing, neighborhoods, and arts and culture combined.”

Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County also released a statement of support for the chief Tuesday. “Today’s news of the retirement of Chief Carmen Best is a loss,” the organization said. “It does nothing to further our fight for authentic police accountability and the safety of Black lives, that the first Black woman to hold the position of Chief of Police of the Seattle Police Department has been forced out of her job by the Seattle City Council. Racism is racism.

“We demand the Seattle City Council stop prioritizing performative action that solely suggests the appearance of change. We demand transparency and accountability for the series of actions and inactions that led to Chief Best’s resignation. And we demand a successor that serves Black Lives.”

Deputy Chief Adrian Diaz will fill Best’s role as interim chief upon her retirement, Best said.

“I am confident the department will make it through these difficult times,” she wrote in the letter, the Seattle Times republished. “I look forward to seeing how this department moves forward through the process of re-envisioning public safety.”

RELATED: What does defund the police actually mean? Here's what protesters and activists are talking about

RELATED: A roundup of reforms aimed at fighting police brutality since George Floyd's death

RELATED: Viral video depicts protestors pouring milk and water on child allegedly pepper-sprayed by police

How deep into the Republican cesspool has Susan Collins fallen? She’s parroting the anti-Semitic dogwhistles they so happily trade in these days. Yep, that great moderate Susan Collins went there. On a WSKW radio show last week, Collins whined about how she's been "grossly outspent and attacked" by "Chuck Schumer's PAC." She said Schumer "wants to be Majority Leader of the Senate more than he wants anything […]. He's motivated by power, and has poured more money into Maine that any State in the nation."

That was just the warm up, though. She went full-on anti-Semitic after that bit. "There's also all these left-wing, uh, hedge fund owners that are financing Super PACs and financing Sara's [Gideon] campaign, such as Donald Sussman and George Soros, and unfortunately if you say something long enough, uh, it starts to create doubt." Like if you invoke the name "Soros" often enough you bring all the MAGA/QAnon racist white supremacists flocking?

Your $3 contribution will help Sara Gideon get Collins out of the Senate!

After that offensive, obnoxious, and dangerous roll, she got down to her regular pity party routine. All her previous opponents, she says, "ran honorable campaigns. They didn't lie about my record. They didn't attack my integrity. Unfortunately, that's not what we're seeing this time." And after all that, she tries to pull her "moderate" schtick again. "I am THE most bipartisan member of the Senate," she says. "I have been for the last seven years, and have worked very closely with members from both sides of the aisle because I'm a problem solver. I like to get things done." She left off the part about how she needs Mitch McConnell's permission to be bipartisan, that her vote with Democrats is only there when it doesn't matter.

There really can't be any question about Collins any more. She's down in the white supremacist, anti-Semitic mud with the rest of the Republicans.

Salt Lake City police officers are accused of using excessive force by unleashing a police dog on a black man who was kneeling on the ground with his hands in the air, as seen in bodycam footage of the April arrest published by the Salt Lake Tribune.

Police were called to Jeffrey Ryans after someone heard him arguing with his wife, the Tribune reports: “Body camera footage from the officers show Ryans was in his backyard smoking a cigarette — he says he was about to leave for his job as a train engineer — when the officers shined their lights on him and started yelling.”

Police sought to arrest Ryan because of a restraining order filed against him, likely tied to a domestic violence arrest, the paper says, though details about the circumstances of the arrest are unclear.

Ryans got down on his knees and put his hands in the air when police went ahead and released the dog, ordering it to attack, commending it, “good boy, good boy,” as the dog ripped into Ryans’ leg.

“Ryans has suffered nerve and tendon damage, infections and has difficulty walking. Doctors have not ruled out the possibility he will need to have his leg amputated,” the paper reports. Ryans is in the first stages of filing a lawsuit.

The post White Cops Unleash Dog on Black Man Kneeling with His Hands in the Air: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Kentucky's local leaders, business leaders, labor groups, and safety net providers are running out of patience with their senior Sen. Mitch McConnell, who as Senate majority leader is arguably the most powerful man in the government. They're meeting a brick wall with their pleas for him to help save the state during this coronavirus crisis, The Washington Post reports: "In more than two dozen interviews, out-of-work residents, struggling restaurant owners and other business leaders, as well as a cadre of annoyed food, housing and labor rights groups, all said they are in dire need of more support from Congress—the likes of which McConnell has not been able to provide."

“I’m not sure why he didn’t listen to his constituents when we organized sign-on letters, we organized calls with his staff,“ said Adrienne Bush, the executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky. "[W]e had another virtual lobby day on July 21. […] The response was, ‘We’ll take your concerns to the leader.’” The leader apparently doesn't feel the need to respond to his constituents or to the Post, as he declined to comment on this story. He passed on hearing from people like Lexington resident Michael Holland, a 59-year-old electrician who has been off the job since February. “The $600 a week has been a lifeline,” he told the Post, speaking about the enhanced unemployment insurance (UI) benefits that McConnell allowed to expire last month, after diddling around for a few weeks trying to negotiate with his own squabbling Republican senators on a replacement and then abandoning the effort completely.

McConnell didn't want to re-up that $600/week because, he said on the floor, “it dis-incentivizes re-hiring and re-opening to pay people more to stay home.“ That's not a compelling argument for Holland. “There are some people, I’m sure, that are bringing home more than they were making before the pandemic,” he said. “But there’s also those of us who’s making a lot less. […] What about those of us who need a job, and can’t get a job, because the coronavirus is coming back?”

McConnell doesn't particularly care. He doesn't want to hear from Holland, or from Michael Halligan, director of a network of Kentucky food banks called God's Pantry. McConnell doesn't care that the food bank distributed 3.6 million pounds of food to needy Kentuckians in the month of July alone, or about the fact that the loss of that $600/week is going to create much more demand. “You can speculate on the impact on the various programs and how that influenced the economy,” Halligan said. “Based on our historical knowledge, if economics tighten, food insecurity will increase.” For some unknown reason, Halligan believes McConnell still might help. “The elected officials, the legislative leaders in the House and Senate,” he said, “they really understand what the needs of those who are hungry are.” His faith seems misplaced.

About 200,000 households in Kentucky are in danger of losing their homes, Bush, the housing director, told the Post. The average rent in Kentucky is $1,100. The base rate for UI benefits, which the state has reverted to since the bonus expired, goes from a minimum of $39/week to a maximum $502/week. So an unemployed person receiving the maximum would now have to spend more than half of their income on rent.

Many of those unemployed are Kentucky's coal miners, 200 of whom lost their jobs in July alone. The coal communities of eastern Kentucky, already among the state's poorest, are being hit with the combined effects of being reliant on a dying industry and the coronavirus. “It’s like some of the final blows for working miners in the region,” said Wes Addington, the executive director of the Appalachian Law Center. Those 200 who lost their jobs when Rhino Energy filed for bankruptcy last month won't even have the cushion of the $600/week bonus. It's gone now. It's enough to turn a self-described “die-hard Republican” like 42-year-old Kenny Saylor, a trucker, against McConnell. In April, he said, ”everything went south for me.” Unemployment payments have helped him get by since then, but now that they're gone? “I’m scared to death of losing everything,” he said. McConnell doesn't want to hear from him, though.

Here's what McConnell does care about and who he actually does listen to back in Kentucky: the Chamber of Commerce. In his failed bill, McConnell did include liability protections for employers who might be sued if their employees came back to work and were infected by the virus. “For us, that is a huge win, and that is a huge benefit,” Chamber of Commerce president Ashli Watts told the Post. Big corporate Kentucky still loves him. Small business Kentucky, not so much.

“If we don’t get the kind of help we need […] a town that had 100 restaurants now has 20, which means 80 percent of the hospitality jobs are gone,” said Dan Wu, the owner of Atomic Ramen in Lexington. “The tax revenue is down, and the whole city and state’s economy is going to be down.” Another restaurant owner, Ouita Michel, says sales in her restaurants are down 72% from last year. She says that the state's business owners are at a “tipping point“ with McConnell. “He’s in a position right now where he does need to listen very carefully to what constituents tell him,” she said.

He might be in that position, but he's shown no inclination to actually listen, even as the $120 million a week in federal stimulus that's been pouring into Kentucky dries up. That’s the money that's kept people paying rent and supporting local retailers and services and keeping restaurants open. “We’re seeing huge numbers of people needing help,” said Jason Bailey, the executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. “I can’t imagine a state that needs additional relief more than Kentucky does.”

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A Trump rally attendee holds a large “Q” sign while waiting in line on to see President Trump at his rally August 2, 2018. “Q” represents QAnon, proponents of a debunked conspiracy theory. | Rick Loomis/Getty Images

Awash in racism and conspiracy, Marjorie Taylor Greene embodies the logical ends of Trumpism. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, currently the leading candidate in the race for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District seat, has a campaign that marries two powerful political forces: conspiracy theories and racism. In doing so, Greene could give new energy to Trumpism in the next Congress.

Like President Donald Trump, Greene has played on racist tropes, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy theories to amass a reputation for repudiating political correctness in favor of “truth-telling.” She has, for instance, called Q, the purported leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory — which claims Trump will save the US from “deep state” pedophiles and other malcontents — a patriot. She’s called George Soros, a Jewish Democratic donor, a Nazi. And she boasts a long history of decrying Islam, denying racial inequality, and defending Confederate memorabilia.

Now Greene seems poised to win a seat in Congress. She leads the Republican field in Tuesday’s runoff election against John Cowan, a local neurosurgeon, for the US House of Representatives seat representing the 14th District in Georgia. The 14th stretches from the Atlanta suburbs to the state’s northwest corner. More than 85 percent of its constituents are white. It is a conservative, deep-red district that is rated Solid Republican by the Cook Political Report.

And nationally, the race has garnered attention as one of a number with prominent QAnon candidates that, together, seem indicative of Republican Party’s future — and how much sway Trump’s controversial political style may hold over the party’s direction in the years to come.

Establishment Republicans have struggled to manage bigotry and conspiracism

In June, Politico published an exposé featuring videos of Greene making antagonistic and xenophobic comments. In one clip, taken from the candidate’s YouTube page, Greene says: “Let me explain something to you, Mohammed! Let me explain. We already have equality and justice for all Americans. Muslims are not being held back in any way ... what you people want is special treatment, you want to rise above us, and that’s what we’re against!

After the story, mainstream Republicans rebuffed Greene’s campaign. Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, called her statements “disgusting” in the New York Times, and a spokesperson for House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney called the comments “offensive and bigoted” in Politico.

However, while House leadership rebuked her comments, these types of statements were not without precedent — particularly at the top of the Republican ticket. President Trump has built his political career levying similar racist and xenophobic statements, like insinuating that Barack Obama was not a citizen, insisting that broad swaths of Mexicans were violent criminals, and telling female Congress members of color to return to their home countries.

Beyond racism, Greene also supports, and has promoted, QAnon. It is a conspiracy theory that believes a pedophilic “deep state” of federal officials is working against Trump — and that he has a secret strategy to defeat them. Greene has previously said on YouTube that she’s “very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.”

This adherence is concerning in part because believers in conspiracy theories like these have shown themselves to act erratically, if not violently, in recent years. For example, in 2016, a man fired gunshots into a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, because a similar conspiracy theory had suggested there was a secret pedophile ring connected to Hillary Clinton being run from the basement. Some experts, like Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, fear bringing this type of fringe thinking to Congress would amplify the number of conspiracy theorists, including those with a willingness to attempt dangerous attacks.

Greene’s racist comments and her naked embrace of fringe conspiracy theories appear to have won her support in her district, but threaten to undermine the more tempered political vision of some moderate Republicans seeking to realign the party for a potential Trump loss.

Rising Republican star Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan recently argued in an Atlantic interview on the future of the party that “successful politics is about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” and that it should be the goal of the GOP to build “a big tent.” Likewise, last month, Oren Cass, a former staffer for Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), critiqued the Trumpism and the Republican orthodoxy of the past 20 years, arguing their limited scope will increasingly make it difficult for Republicans to hold on to power: “The kind of coalition that those ideas were built for does not seem to have any potential as a majority coalition,” Cass told Vox’s Ezra Klein.

As a potential end to Trump’s presidency looms, many in the GOP disagree on the direction for a post-Trump norm. Some, like Hogan, push for a moderate vision; others, like Sen. Ben Sasse, have taken up the cause of fiscal conservatism; and still others, like Rep. Doug Collins, advocate for a focus on “law and order.” Meanwhile, Republicans like Greene and fellow QAnon-aligned candidate Lauren Boebert are pushing to take Trumpism to its logical end — with more racism and conspiracy theories.

Greene epitomizes the potential peril of a “Congressional QAnon Caucus”

Strong support for candidates like Greene undermines this push for a transition to a more approachable, pluralistic, economically populist Republican Party. This year, several Republican candidates have successfully campaigned for office by tapping into conspiratorial thinking. According to the Media Matters QAnon tracker, “Nineteen candidates — 18 Republicans and one independent — have already secured a spot on the ballot in November by competing in primary elections or by fulfilling other requirements needed to get on the ballot.”

If these candidates win in November, experts fear it will institutionalize fringe thinking. “There’s a huge concern with having a potential for a popularly elected caucus that has no basis in fact, or as untethered by campaigning on evidence,” Graham Brookie, a specialist in disinformation and the director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told Vox. “It would be dangerous to have a cadre of elected officials in the House’s representatives that believes the federal government is trying to overthrow itself violently.”

And it is dangerous in part because, although 18 members would be a small caucus, small but vocal caucuses like the Tea Party have caused the GOP trouble — and transformed it — in the past.

QAnon candidates have been so successful, in part, due to institutional distrust endemic in the GOP caucus. Many “elements of the worldview underpinning QAnon don’t look all that different from what’s coming from the top of the ticket,” Vox’s Cameron Peters writes in explaining the group’s electoral popularity. Peters notes that a Yahoo News/YouGov poll from late May found “half of all Americans who name Fox News as their primary TV news source believe the conspiracy theory (that Bill Gates wants to use mass vaccination to implant microchips), and 44 percent of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well.”

This success, which includes Greene’s lead in her conservative Georgia district, offers a preview for how party grassroots elected officials with a strong affinity for Trump and his style may proceed in his absence. With Trump trailing in national polls, a second term in the White House is not a sure thing — but the presence of Greene and other QAnon supporters in Congress would ensure, at the very least, the continued projection of virulent racism and misinformation into the national discourse.

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Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.

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President Trump outside the White House on August 9. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Trump’s attacks on mail voting and the political calculus behind them, explained.

Imagine this election night scenario: With a decisive number of mail ballots yet to be tallied, President Donald Trump enjoys a narrow lead over Joe Biden. But before all the votes can be counted — a process that could take days — Trump declares victory, citing purported irregularities with mail-in votes.

You can even picture Trump insisting that the preliminary election night tally must stand as final with a tweet that reads similarly to this one he posted in November 2018, when Florida’s US Senate and gubernatorial elections were still undecided:

It might be hard to fathom that sort of authoritarian power grab happening here in the United States, but it’s a scenario that election experts are worried about.

“That is my nightmare scenario,” said Paul Gronke, professor of political science at Reed College in Portland and director of the Early Voting Information Center. “We gotta slow down. Trump’s gonna be tweeting, the media, you, all of your counterparts, have to slow down. Because he’ll claim victory, or he’ll start to claim malfeasance and fraud, lawyers will be climbing into airplanes and arriving in all these small jurisdictions, and it will be not good.”

Gronke’s concern was echoed by Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

“Trump is still trying to tell his voters that they should vote in person, and Democrats are telling their voters that they should vote by mail,” Berman said. “And mail ballots take longer to count then in-person ballots. So you could very much have a situation where the initial returns make it seems like Republicans are way up, because the mail ballots that are largely cast by Democrats haven’t been counted yet.”

“If you had a situation where Republicans are up and Democrats take the lead based on mail ballots, even if that’s a totally normal situation, Trump is absolutely going to try to weaponize that, and claim it’s evidence of some sort of voter fraud or rigged election,” he warned.

Winners, of course, don’t usually whine about the rules while a contest is ongoing. But Trump has been trailing Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in polls for months. And with the interlocking public health and economic crises stemming from the coronavirus not trending in a positive direction, using the levers of state power to delegitimize election results would be a desperation play.

“You know, you could have a case where this election won’t be decided on the evening of November 3,” Trump told Axios’s Jonathan Swan in an interview that aired on HBO last week. Asked why that’s a problem — after all, there’s no rule that elections have to be decided on election night — Trump said, “lots of things will happen during that period of time; especially when you have tight margins, lots of things going to happen.”

Then, during a media availability on Sunday, Trump claimed that Democrats are using mail ballots to try and “steal an election.”

Experts worry that — as is so often the case with Trump — those comments are actually projection.

Despite what Trump would have you believe, mail-in election fraud isn’t really a thing

Since the coronavirus pandemic began to seriously disrupt American life in March, Trump has been conspiracy-mongering about mail voting, tweeting things like it’ll result in a “CORRUPT ELECTION” and the “SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES.” In a remarkable July 30 tweet, Trump went as far as to suggest that the election should be delayed until people can safely vote in person.

In reality, voter fraud of all forms is extremely rare, and that’s especially the case with mail voting. As the Brennan Center detailed earlier this year (emphasis theirs):

None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change. As the New York Times editorial board notes, “states that use vote-by-mail have encountered essentially zero fraud: Oregon, the pioneer in this area, has sent out more than 100 million mail-in ballots since 2000, and has documented only about a dozen cases of proven fraud.” Rounded to the seventh decimal point, that’s 0.0000001 percent of all votes cast. An exhaustive investigative journalism analysis of all known voter fraud cases identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012. As election law professor Richard L. Hasen notes, during that period “literally billions of votes were cast.” While mail ballots are more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting, it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.

Trump has repeatedly cited episodes of attempted fraud on behalf of Republican Mark Harris in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018 and more recently in New Jersey as evidence there’s good reason to be worried. But as Berman explained to me, there’s an irony in Trump citing instances where attempted fraud was detected and ultimately unsuccessful.

“When you do absentee ballot fraud, or voter fraud in general, on a scale large enough to influence an election, you get caught because it’s obvious you’re cheating,” Berman said. “There’s lots of procedures in place to protect mail voting. Every mail ballot has its own ID number, for example. So there are lots of things you can do to protect the system, and if you try to game the system one way or another, that’s gonna catch the attention of election officials and authorities, and they’re going to be able to invalidate those ballots.”

Trump, however, is less interested in reports of actual fraud than he is creating the appearance of fraud. And that’s where his dismantling of the Postal Service comes in.

The USPS is designated with safeguarding mail-in ballots — and it’s facing some unique challenges

Louis DeJoy, a Trump megadonor, became postmaster general in June. Since he took over, he’s done some dramatic restructuring of the United States Postal Service (USPS), leading critics to wonder if he’s working to hamper the institution, which, of course, is tasked with collecting ballots from voters and getting them to polling locations in a timely manner.

After operational changes implemented under DeJoy’s leadership, mail carriers are no longer receiving overtime pay, resulting in service slowdowns. And while Trump has been bashing the USPS for years, the move to kneecap the Post Office just ahead of an election in which unprecedented numbers of voters will try to vote by mail because of a pandemic reeks of an effort to sow chaos — and perhaps provide Trump with a pretext to challenge the results of the election that, according to current polls, he’s more likely to lose than win.

During a recent Fox & Friends interview, Trump was asked to respond to Hillary Clinton’s accusation that he’s trying to sabotage the Post Office ahead of November’s election. Notably, he didn’t deny it.

“As you know, the Postal Service for 40 years has had big problems,” Trump said. “And they’re not equipped to handle a governor where they say, ‘millions of ballots, by the way, will be posted in a couple weeks. Gear up.’ You can’t do that. It doesn’t work that way.” (The Postal Service has said it has “ample capacity” to handle mail ballots.)

Gronke characterized Trump’s hampering of USPS as an effort “to fundamentally undermine the core of democracy.”

“They’re really gonna try this? I mean, this is pretty blatant,” he told Vox. “In some ways, for me, this is worse than the Trump attacks [on mail voting], which is just sort of — he’s flailing. But this could really be harmful.”

Gronke’s sentiment was echoed by Ari Berman.

“I think all of the changes at the Post Office — delaying mail, cutting overtime — can lead to mail ballots being delayed, and that also is an effort by the Trump administration to fight vote by mail,” Berman told Vox. “So I’m less concerned about the rhetoric, and I’m more concerned about the tangible thing that Trump and his allies are doing to try to make it harder to vote by mail, and to try to make it harder for votes to be counted.”

Even congressional Republicans — especially those representing rural areas in which people rely on the Postal Service for everything for medications to clothing — are uneasy with Trump’s detrimental changes to the Postal Service. Last Thursday, Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) wrote a letter to DeJoy saying that “delaying mail service is unacceptable. Do not continue down this road.”

“This action, if not rescinded, will negatively impact mail delivery for Montanans and unacceptably increase the risk of late prescriptions, commercial products or bill delivery,” added another Montana Republican, Sen. Steve Daines.

Those letters came the same day as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the changes “threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers and absentee ballots for voters — that is essential to millions of Americans.”

The USPS is very popular — it regularly tops the list of Americans’ favorite government agencies. Trump, however, is doing whatever he thinks necessary to maximize his chances of staying in power past next January.

The backdrop to all this is the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to rage out of control in large swaths of the country and makes it risky to vote at polling places that under normal circumstances can be crowded and feature long lines. But instead of embracing methods of voting that will keep people safe, Trump views voter suppression stemming from the pandemic as useful to his cause.

Republicans have suddenly gone to war with mail-in voting

Despite what Trump’s comments might lead you to believe, Republicans have a long history of doing just fine in systems that have lots of mail voting. Deep-red Utah, for instance, is one of five states that already conduct elections almost entirely by mail. Republicans in swing states like Florida and Wisconsin have also had lots of success with absentee voting.

But Trump, for whatever reason, has long been convinced that mail voting is bad for him. In April, for instance, he tweeted (falsely) that mail voting has “tremendous potential for voter fraud” and “for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” (Studies on vote-by-mail have shown no such partisan advantage.)

While Trump is wrong about whether mail-in voting favors Democrats in general, he appears to be correct in believing that mail voting could be bad for him this election cycle. According to Emerson College polling conducted late last month, a whopping 76 percent of voters who plan to vote by mail plan to vote for Joe Biden. By contrast, 65 percent of those planning to vote in person say they’ll vote for Trump.

A normal politician’s response to those numbers might be to work harder to appeal to voters who plan to vote by mail. Trump, however, is no normal politician.

“I think he’s concerned not about mail voting, but that more Democrats are going to vote by mail than Republicans,” Berman said. “I think that’s [the Trump campaign’s] big concern, because they had no problems with people voting by mail in 2012, or 2008, or any of the previous elections in which Republicans voted by mail and encouraged their own people to do so.”

Trump’s message to states trying to make it as safe as possible for people to vote during a pandemic: “See you in court!”

The Trump campaign has also been filing lawsuits against states like Nevada, where officials are expanding mail voting systems ahead of November’s election.

After Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) recently signed legislation to automatically provide all Nevada voters with a ballot in the mail, Trump responded with a tweet absurdly describing the legislation as “an illegal late night coup,” adding, “See you in court!”

Indeed, Trump’s lawyers quickly filed a lawsuit seeking to block the new law. As my colleague Ian Millhiser explained, the suit’s argument is a mess — but that doesn’t mean it won’t gain traction in federal courts dominated by Republicans:

Their legal complaint in Donald J. Trump for President v. Cegavske is not a model of careful legal argumentation. It claims, for example, that AB4 changed Nevada law to allow mailed-in ballots without postmarks to be counted so long as they arrive within three days of Election Day. In fact, Nevada law already allowed such ballots to be counted. An entire section of the complaint focuses on the fact that AB4 was enacted “on a weekend vote” — the state House approved the bill on a Friday, but the Senate passed it on a Sunday — without explaining how the day of the bill’s passage was relevant to its legality.

The Nevada lawsuit illustrates the Trump campaign’s broader strategy. CNN quoted an unnamed senior Trump campaign official who said “the game plan is to fight [new mail-in voting laws] at every turn,” and reported that the Republican National Committee plans to devote as much as $20 million to contest “voting laws and policies that they view as unconstitutional and potentially damaging to the President’s prospects of winning.”

“We’re not going to have election night in the traditional sense”

Amber McReynolds, CEO of the advocacy group Vote at Home, told Vox that one thing states can do to preempt the nightmare scenario of Trump prematurely declaring victory is pass laws allowing for the processing of mail ballots before Election Day.

“There are still some states that have outdated policies and laws around that issue. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, all don’t allow processing until Election Day, which is why they’re delayed,” McReynolds said. “So we’ve been working on various states to expand the timeline ahead of Election Day, so that, frankly, election officials aren’t so stressed with resources trying to get that work done.”

But McReynolds added that Trump’s degradation of the USPS will likely present problems no matter what state legislatures do between now and November.

“I’m very concerned, frankly, and it’s not just because of mail ballots,” she said. “The election process itself relies heavily on the USPS. So there’s required ballot issue notices, required poll worker notices, poll place notices, voter registration requirements — there’s all kinds of election notices that are required under federal and state law, and that’s really what’s going to be impacted if the Post Office gets destroyed.”

Berman said part of the challenge is mental. In the age of the coronavirus, people need to drop the assumption that we can always know winners and losers on election night.

“We’re not going to have election night in the traditional sense, and I think all the major institutions in the country should start preparing for that right now and informing people right now that it might take a little bit longer because of an unprecedented pandemic to count the ballots, and there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s nothing illegal about it, there’s nothing rigged about it,” he said. “That’s just how it’s gonna be. And it’s more important to get it right than get it quick.”

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Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we weren’t sure how it would go. Today, we’re humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. That’s never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone won’t let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.

President Barak Obama and Vice President Joe Biden wave to the crowd on stage at the end of three days of the Democratic National Convention at the Time Warner Cable Arena on September 6, 2012, in Charlotte, North Carolina. | Ken Cedeno/Corbis via Getty Images

Joe Biden, Barack and Michelle Obama, and Bernie Sanders are among the speakers for next week’s virtual convention.

The Democratic National Convention is going fully virtual this year.

Rather than days of full programming, the convention will be condensed into two hours of televised speeches spread out from Monday, August 17, to Thursday, August 20. Former Vice President Joe Biden is set to accept his party’s nomination on Thursday night from his home in Delaware, rather than the original planned location of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Fears about the Covid-19 outbreak and the potential to spread the virus even with a severely reduced crowd caused the Democratic National Committee to scrap its in-person Milwaukee convention.

Starting at 9 pm ET each night, the Democratic convention will be broadcast on all major television networks, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and streaming services like Apple TV and Roku. The convention will also be streamed live from the DNC’s website.

The DNC lineup features big Democratic names including former first lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. The convention will also feature former Republican presidential candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who will deliver an appeal to his fellow Republicans to support Biden for president. The week will culminate with Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris accepting their nominations to be president and vice president.

The lineup has not been without controversy. Ocasio-Cortez has been slotted just one minute to deliver remarks on Tuesday. Many progressives have criticized the decision — she is one of the highest-profile members of the Democratic Party and among its brightest young stars, and she is a compelling speaker. But Politico reported moderate Democrats worried giving her too high a profile would allow Republicans to paint Biden as a “vessel” of the left. The New York Congress member responded by tweeting out a poem by Benjamin E. Mays, “I have only just a minute,” which the late Rep. Elijah Cummings recited in his first speech to Congress in 1996.

There has also been outcry that former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, the only Latino candidate in the 2020 primary field, won’t deliver an address during the event. Initially, former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang was left off the list of speakers, but the entrepreneur said he has since been added. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been given a slot as well. Some progressives have expressed dismay at the DNC’s apparent prioritization of figures like Bloomberg and Kasich over Castro and Ocasio-Cortez.

But the show goes on. These bigger names will give speeches Monday through Thursday, alongside American business owners, teachers, factory workers, and front-line health care workers.

Here’s the full lineup of speakers at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

The DNC speaker schedule and lineup

There will be a slate of speakers each night, including former presidents and sitting US senators, governors, and US representatives. The themes for each day include:

• Monday: We the People
• Tuesday: Leadership Matters
• Wednesday: A More Perfect Union
• Thursday: America’s Promise

Here’s the list of speakers, broken out by day.

Monday:

• Former first lady Michelle Obama
• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
• Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo
• House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn
• Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
• Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
• Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security
• Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL)
• Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI)

Tuesday:

• Dr. Jill Biden
• Former President Bill Clinton
• Former Secretary of State John Kerry
• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
• Former US Attorney General Sally Yates
• Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE)

Wednesday:

• Former President Barack Obama
• Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) accepts the nomination for vice president
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
• Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
• Former Rep. Gabby Giffords, a prominent gun control advocate
• New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham
• Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers

Thursday:

• Former Vice President Joe Biden accepts the Democratic nomination for president
• Members of the Biden family
• Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ)
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom
• Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms
• Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg
• Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
• Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
• Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)

Why the DNC is virtual this year

In previous years, the national party convention would be a moment for unity and celebration. But amid a once-in-a-century pandemic that’s claimed more than 163,000 American lives and counting, Democrats are hoping their virtual convention sends a larger message about how their nominee plans to govern in a time of national crisis.

With an absence of federal leadership from President Donald Trump, the Biden campaign and national Democrats are portraying themselves as the party of responsibility.

“I’ve wanted to set an example as to how we should respond individually to this crisis,” Biden said at a recent virtual fundraiser, speaking about the virtual convention. “From the start of the process, we’ve made it clear. ... Science matters.”

Democrats have known for months that the coronavirus meant the normal throng of thousands of cheering delegates was out of the question. A recent public health order from Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett would have limited the convention’s in-person capacity to 250 people, but coronavirus cases in Wisconsin are also still on the rise, and interstate travel comes with risk.

Even with stringent safety measures like mandatory masks and daily temperature checks already in place, some Democrats feared even the sparsest indoors convention could still potentially spread Covid-19. After Trump’s June rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, coronavirus cases in that city surged, and former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain died of Covid-19. Democrats didn’t want to risk any new cases emerging from their national convention.

“From the very beginning of this pandemic, we put the health and safety of the American people first,” DNC Chair Tom Perez said in a statement. “We followed the science, listened to doctors and public health experts, and we continued making adjustments to our plans in order to protect lives. That’s the kind of steady and responsible leadership America deserves. And that’s the leadership Joe Biden will bring to the White House.”

Democrats want one message to dominate their convention: Where Trump has failed, Biden will lead America out of its current crisis.

“People care about one thing: They care about being safe,” former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe told Vox. “It’s a totally different dynamic; we have one message to come out of that convention.”

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Chief Justice John Roberts speaks before presenting US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg the American Law Institute’s Henry J. Friendly Medal in Washington, DC, on May 14, 2018.  | Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

How the Supreme Court hides major conservative victories in plain sight.

Last week, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision blocking a lower court’s order requiring a California jail to take several steps — such as socially distancing inmates and providing them with “hand sanitizer containing at least 60% alcohol” — to prevent the spread of Covid-19 within the jail.

I have no idea why the Supreme Court would do such a thing, and neither does anyone else who isn’t a justice or one of their closest advisers.

The reason for our ignorance is that the five justices in the majority — all five of the Court’s Republicans — didn’t bother to explain their decision. The entirety of the Court’s order in Barnes v. Ahlman is a single paragraph of boilerplate language, informing the reader that “the district court’s May 26, 2020 order granting a preliminary injunction is stayed pending disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition” of a petition asking the justices to fully review this case.

Hundreds of incarcerated people could become infected with a potentially deadly disease. And the Supreme Court won’t even tell us why.

Welcome to the Court’s “shadow docket.”

The term “shadow docket” was coined by University of Chicago law professor William Baude in an influential 2015 article. It refers to “a range of orders and summary decisions that defy [the Court’s] normal procedural regularity.” Often these orders are handed down without any explanation from the majority, or without much advance notice from the Court. Frequently they are handed down on Friday evenings, after at least some of the Supreme Court press corps are already a couple of beers into their weekends.

Because shadow docket cases are often released without a majority opinion explaining the Court’s reasoning, they have less impact on legal doctrine than most ordinary decisions. Judges are bound by the Court’s majority opinions, but a lower court judge can’t follow an opinion that doesn’t exist.

Nevertheless, the stakes in shadow docket cases — which often arise after a party files an emergency request asking the Court to block a lower court order — can be enormous. The decision in Barnes endangers the health of thousands of inmates. Other shadow docket decisions concern billions of dollars. Or they can effectively lock thousands of immigrants out of the country.

The ideological cast of the shadow docket, moreover, is even more conservative than the Court’s regular docket. Though the Court’s recent term featured several high-profile — though often very narrow — victories for liberals, the Court’s party-line decision to lift safeguards against spreading Covid-19 within a California jail is more typical of its shadow docket.

The Trump administration has a particularly high win rate in shadow docket cases. And it knows it. It asks the Supreme Court to block lower court orders far more than any recent administration.

The Court, meanwhile, has shifted an increasing share of its output to this often inscrutable shadow docket. In the past year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor has written several strongly worded dissents warning that her colleagues are bypassing safeguards intended to prevent the Court from handing down cursory, insufficiently thought-out decisions — and that they often do so to benefit the Trump administration.

Her most recent dissent was in Barnes, the jail case. “The District Court found that, despite knowing the severe threat posed by COVID–19 and contrary to its own apparent policies, the Jail exposed its inmates to significant risks from a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease,” Sotomayor wrote. And yet the Supreme Court “intervenes, leaving to its own devices a jail that has misrepresented its actions to the District Court and failed to safeguard the health of the inmates in its care.”

Perhaps there’s an explanation for why the Court’s Republican majority felt intervention was appropriate. But if there is one, they aren’t telling us.

Because they are decided so quickly and often without explanation, moreover, shadow docket cases will tend to fly under the radar. But, with so much at stake in many of these cases, they deserve far more attention than they often receive.

The Supreme Court’s normal process for hearing cases, explained

Before we jump into the shadow docket, it’s helpful to understand how the Court ordinarily decides cases. The famous cases that you’ve most likely heard of — cases like Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education — reach the Court through a long, drawn-out process that privileges careful decision-making over speed. Because the Supreme Court has the final word on all questions of federal law, including interpretations of the Constitution, the Court’s ordinary procedures call for it to act with great care to avoid making mistakes.

For starters, the justices are extraordinarily selective about which cases they hear through their ordinary docket. In a typical year, lawyers file 7,000 to 8,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari, the formal name for a petition asking the Supreme Court to give full review to a lower court’s order. The Court typically grants fewer than 80 of these “cert” petitions.

Once such a petition is granted, the justices spend months pondering the case. Lawyers on either side of the dispute file lengthy briefs and voluminous collections of documents culled from the case’s overall record. In the most high-profile cases, dozens of amicus briefs may be filed on either side of the case as well — leaving the justices and their law clerks with hundreds or even thousands of pages of legal arguments to ponder before reaching a decision.

And all of this typically happens after the case has already received considerable attention from lower court judges. The Supreme Court’s rules warn lawyers that, unless their case presents an unusually “important question of federal law” that demands the justices’ attention, the Court rarely grants cert petitions unless necessary to resolve a disagreement between two federal courts of appeals, two state supreme courts, or a federal court of appeal and a state supreme court.

Thus, by the time the justices hear a case, the legal question presented by that case has typically been pondered by many lower court judges, and judges who disagree about the proper answer to that question have written their own opinions that the justices can rely on in thinking through the case themselves.

As Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, told me, the “usual view” among judicial experts is that “you want that kind of percolation effect.” When there are “more eyeballs” on a legal question before it reaches the justices, the Supreme Court benefits from “more viewpoints,” and that tends to lead to better decisions.

There’s also a very good reason the Supreme Court ordinarily moves so slowly, and typically spends so much time thinking about cases before handing down an opinion. There is no higher court that can correct the Supreme Court’s errors, so if the justices botch a case, that decision could linger forever. It will bind all future judges who are confronted with similar cases, and can only be overruled by a subsequent Supreme Court decision.

Shadow docket cases receive little of the careful deliberation that goes into the ordinary docket

Which brings us to the Court’s shadow docket.

Unlike cases on the Court’s regular docket, shadow docket cases receive very limited briefings and are rarely, if ever, argued before the justices. Though the justices will often discuss these cases among themselves, they frequently do so on an extraordinarily compressed schedule — leaving far less time for reasoned debate. That’s often true because shadow docket cases frequently arise from emergency requests asking the Court to grant swift and immediate relief, meaning that the justices will only spend days or even hours pondering how to rule on such a request.

Because many of these cases are resolved in brief orders and without a written opinion explaining the majority’s reasoning, shadow docket cases often have less impact on legal doctrine than cases on the ordinary docket. Lower court judges are bound by the reasoning memorialized in the Supreme Court’s majority opinions, but they can’t be bound by an opinion that doesn’t exist.

The Court does sometimes hand down majority opinions when it resolves cases on its shadow docket. To date, for example, the Court’s only majority opinion governing the rights of voters who are afraid of contracting Covid-19 if they go to the polls is Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee (2020). That decision, which effectively required Wisconsin to toss out many ballots cast in its election last April, was decided just two days after the GOP requested an emergency order from the Supreme Court.

“It’s hard to imagine that [the justices] have the same deliberation or time to think about the varying arguments by each party” in many shadow docket cases, according to Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, a professor and associate dean at Penn State Law. Yet when the Court hands down a majority opinion in a shadow docket case, lower court judges still must obey that decision.

When the justices in the majority do not explain their reasoning, a different but also troubling problem arises.

There’s a common phrase within the judiciary. When a judge initially thinks a case should come down one way, but then they start writing their opinion and realize they can’t come up with a legally sound argument justifying that outcome, they say that the opinion “won’t write.” The ordinary requirement that judges explain their decisions in reasoned opinions can be a tremendous check on judicial power. It discourages those judges from ruling in arbitrary ways.

As Margulies told me, “there are some opinions that just aren’t going to work out” once a justice has taken sufficient time to reason through how to decide the case. But if the Supreme Court pushes too many of its decisions onto its shadow docket, the justices in the majority may never figure out that their first instinct regarding how to decide a case was flawed.

Cases on the Court’s ordinary docket, moreover, receive a great deal of public scrutiny. Consider, for example, June Medical Services v. Russo, an abortion decision the Court handed down in June. Vox covered the Court’s decision to hear this case, its oral argument in this case, and its ultimate decision to strike down a Louisiana anti-abortion law as separate and important news events — and that sort of coverage is typical of outlets that cover the Supreme Court. We also probed the history of June Medical and similar cases. We reported on the political fallout from the Court’s decision. And that’s just a small fraction of our coverage of this highly newsworthy case.

Shadow docket cases, by contrast, almost never receive this kind of attention. How could they when they are often decided so quickly that even many veteran Supreme Court journalists do not realize the Court is considering an important case until after a decision is handed down?

For many of these reasons, the Supreme Court has historically applied a strong presumption against second-guessing lower court judges when a case arrives on the Court’s shadow docket. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion in Wolf v. Cook County, one of several recent decisions where she criticized her colleagues for being too eager to stay lower court opinions, “stay applications force the Court to consider important statutory and constitutional questions that have not been ventilated fully in the lower courts, on abbreviated timetables and without oral argument.”

A Supreme Court order blocking a lower court decision has historically been considered an “extraordinary” event, Sotomayor explained. But they’ve become increasingly common in the Trump years.

Since the Court’s most recent term began last October, the justices have handed down at least 10 emergency orders decided by a 5-4 vote. Eight of these shadow docket cases granted full or partial relief to a party seeking to curtail a lower court order.

The Court’s shadow docket decisions often have severe consequences for the most vulnerable communities

The Court’s decision to, again borrowing from Sotomayor’s words, lift public health restrictions on a jail that “recently reported 15 new cases of COVID– 19 in a single week” is fairly typical of its recent shadow docket decisions.

Though liberals sometimes prevail in these cases, the Court’s shadow docket cases far more frequently benefit conservative litigants and conservative causes, at least when the justices divide on the proper outcome. Of the 10 cases mentioned above, eight were decided along party lines with the Republican justices in the majority. And these decisions benefit conservatives at the expense of some of the most vulnerable communities subject to the Court’s jurisdiction.

Republican National Committee, for example, forced many Wisconsin voters to make a devilish choice — give up their right to vote or risk becoming infected with a potentially deadly disease. The Court’s decision in Dunn v. Ray (2019) ruled that an Islamic death row inmate could not have his spiritual adviser present at his execution, even though the prison permitted Christian inmates to have a minister present to say last rites.

And then there are the Court’s immigration decisions, where the Court has repeatedly blocked lower court decisions protecting immigrants in cases that arose on its shadow docket. Among other things, the Court’s shadow docket cases reinstated a Trump administration policy restricting low-income immigrants’ ability to enter the United States. They permitted Trump to spend billions to build a border wall. And they reinstated a policy that makes it so difficult for victims of persecution to seek asylum in the United States that, according to Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, that policy has the effect of “virtually ending asylum at one shot.”

“When the Supreme Court acts to stay an injunction by the lower courts,” Wadhia told me, “it’s often at the expense of vulnerable people and, in this case, immigrants.”

Prior to the Trump administration, the Justice Department typically understood that the justices viewed a Supreme Court stay of a lower court order as an extraordinary form of relief, and it rarely applied for such relief as a result. According to a November 2019 paper by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications — averaging one every other Term.”

By contrast, “in less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).”

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has rewarded the Trump Justice Department’s behavior. Vladeck finds that the Trump administration achieved a full or partial victory in about two-thirds of cases where it seeks to temporarily block a lower court opinion. What was once extraordinary is now quite ordinary.

The Trump administration, for what it’s worth, often argues that Supreme Court intervention is necessary because individual trial judges have handed down an unusual number of nationwide injunctions — orders blocking a federal policy throughout the entire country — since Trump became president. And there are good reasons to be cautious about such injunctions. If Joe Biden is president next year, many Republican judges could try to halt literally any action taken by the new administration.

But according to Gelernt, there’s a good reason why lower courts have so frequently blocked Trump’s immigration policies — and why litigators often feel compelled to seek such relief. “The reason why there have been more national injunctions in the immigration area,” he told me, “is because the Trump administration has enacted so many policies that harm so many people immediately, leaving no choice but to seek immediate national relief.”

It remains to be seen whether the Court will be equally zealous in policing lower court injunctions once Democrats control the elected branches of government. For the moment, however, it is hard to escape the impression that the Court is reaching out to do favors for the Trump administration, even if doing so means ignoring rules intended to prevent the Court from deciding cases too rashly.

As Sotomayor wrote in her Wolf dissent, the Court’s “has been all too quick to grant the Government’s ‘reflexiv[e]’ requests,” at least when those requests come from Trump’s lawyers.

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George Conway, disaffected Republican, Lincoln Project adviser, and husband of White House aide Kellyanne, has published a Washington Post op-ed using dozens of Trump lies and foibles to construct an “endorsement” of the president which results in total mockery of the president and the supporters who have been sucked in by him.

Here’s a sample: “I believe former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was conflicted because he quit one of the president’s golf clubs, and that he and his Angry Democrats conducted a Witch Hunt to destroy the president. But I believe Mueller’s report totally exonerated the president, because it found no collusion and no obstruction. … I believe it would be okay for the president to say he grabs women by their p—–s, because he is a star, and stars are allowed to do that. But I believe he didn’t say that, even though he apologized for it, because I believe the “Access Hollywood” tape was doctored, because he said it was. … I believe the president is a good Christian, because TV pastors say so, and that it’s okay he doesn’t ask for God’s forgiveness, because he doesn’t need to, since he’s the Chosen One. I believe the president knows the Bible, and that two Corinthians are better than one.”

And it goes on. Check it all out here.

The post George Conway, Husband of Kellyanne, Uses Trump’s Mountain of Lies in ‘Endorsement’ Op-Ed That Results in Total Mockery appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Liana Finck for Man Repeller draws out the new timeline. I’m a couple of decades removed from this timeline, but it doesn’t look very fun. I’m always down to plant some scallions though. [via swissmiss]

Tags: coronavirus, dating, humor

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has called for the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), describing nearly two decades’ worth of “violence, the stoking of fear and a lack of oversight” that have now culminated in the brazen, public kidnappings of demonstrators protesting police violence in Portland, Oregon.

“The tactics deployed by DHS agents are unlawful and shocking, but they are no surprise,” ACLU president Anthony Romero writes in a USA Today op-ed. “Back in 2002, we at the ACLU called the initial blueprints for the behemoth bureaucracy ‘constitutionally bankrupt.’ And for nearly 20 years, we have seen many of our warnings about DHS become tragic realities.”

“The fearsome tactics of DHS are well known to the communities against whom they are used,” Romero writes. “Its dysfunction is one of the Beltway’s worst kept secrets. DHS’s overbroad mandate and unchecked powers have turned it into a tinderbox, now ignited by a president willing to trample on the constitutional limits of presidential powers.”

Among the wholly untrained federal agents unleashed on Portland protesters by the Trump administration were members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, referred to by retired border agent Jenn Budd as among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement,” The Guardian reported. Just days after wreaking havoc in Oregon, the unit then assisted in a raid against a humanitarian organization whose mission it is to prevent the agonizing deaths of migrants in the deserts of the U.S/Mexico border.