the Anal Stage of Constitutional Analysis...

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the Anal Stage of Constitutional Analysis...

Post by rSin »

JUNE 24, 2022
the Anal Stage of Constitutional Analysis

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

+ In 1973 the Espionage Act case against Daniel Ellsberg for violating was dismissed by Judge William Byrnes after it was revealed that the Nixon administration had bugged Ellsberg’s phones and broken into his shrink’s office. There was also a plot by Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy to use a Cuban exile hit team to “totally incapacitate” (ie, assassinate) him. Surely, the CIA’s very similar plot to kill Julian Assange is at least as odious as what Nixon’s plumbers did to Ellsberg and the thinly manufactured case against Assange is deserving of the same peremptory fate.

+ PEN America on Julian Assange’s extradition: “The Biden Administration must return to its stated principles and drop these charges, in the interest of press freedom and the United States’ global standing with respect to human rights.”

+ The key thing in American politics is to be the first to wrongly interpret a result (ie., the recent elections were a clear rebuke to criminal justice reformers) and to loudly stick with your take long after it has been disproven.

+ Big city crime waves? NYC’s homicide rate is down 13.3% and shootings are down 11.5%, year to date. Murder numbers are the 8th lowest of past 50 years.

+ Thirty years after cities started imposing juvenile curfews, there’s no evidence that these measures reduce juvenile crime.

+ The Supreme Court is doing its part to increase the lagging murder rates.

+ Here’s Clarence Thomas invoking Justice Taney and his Dred Scott opinion in support of Thomas’ ruling to strike down NYC’s concealed carry law…

^^^ picture at the link
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/24 ... harges-58/


+ There’s nothing like applying an “historical test” for regulations governing weapons that didn’t exist in the historical epoch the Originalists fetishize. Here’s more from Thomas’ opinion: “Respondents do not offer any evidence showing that, in the early 18th Century or after, the mere public carrying of a handgun would terrify people.”

+ 83 million: the number of Americans who lived in communities were concealed carry permits were limited to those who had a demonstrated need for self-defense.

+ It’s official. 50 years of a Constitutional right to an abortion has been overturned in a 6-3 decision. So much for Chief Justice Roberts as a “moderating” force.

+ The National Right to “Life” Committee released model legislation for states to adopt after the Supreme Court overturns Roe. The language would criminalize providing information on self-managed abortion “over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication”. So much for free speech…

^^^ picture at the link
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/24 ... harges-58/


+ So states can’t regulate gun control, but can regulate when, where or whether you can get an abortion.

+ Stanley Cohen: “The SCOTUS has decided that the issue of what a woman chooses to do with regard to her bodily choices is up to each state. . . yet the state has no role to play in deciding how much or little a woman is to be protected from gunshot murder.”

+ In a week of gut-wrenching Supreme Court decisions, rulings which will irrevocably alter daily life in the Republic for millions, one of the worst, the gutting of Miranda, was supported by the Biden administration. Common ground with this court will be a death warrant for many, especially the poor, the infirm and the marginalized.

+ Meanwhile, in Vega v. Tekoh, the Supreme Court eviscerated what’s left of Miranda, with Alito concluding that you can’t sue cops who don’t provide you with your Miranda warnings and then use your statements against you in court. The Biden administration supported the ruling. During oral arguments, the DoJ’s attorney Vivek Suri told the court: “It isn’t a substantive right to receive the Miranda warnings themselves. A police officer who fails to provide the Miranda warnings accordingly himself doesn’t violate the constitutional right.”

+ In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, Thomas urges the Court to overturn Griswold (right to contraception); Lawrence (invalidating anti-sodomy laws); Obergefell (marriage equality)…

^^^ picture at the link
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/24 ... harges-58/


I’ve always thought Alito, the supreme egotist, leaked his own opinion. But if it was, in fact, leaked by a clerk for a liberal justice in order to give the Democrats time to prepare a massive response, think how deflated they must feel today at the risk they took, when NOTHING HAPPENED.

+ If Dobbs and Bruen are the kinds of rulings Alito and Thomas can come up with by consulting the Anglo-American history entries in World Book Encyclopedia (Junior Edition), imagine what they’re likely to cut-in-paste into their opinions after combing through Texas’ forthcoming Patriotic History textbooks.

+ Originalism is the anal stage of constitutional analysis.

+ We’ve known about the Dobbs ruling for a month with almost no response. Rarely, if ever, has an overwhelming majority in any country that advertises itself as a secular democracy reacted so passively to the abolition of a fundamental right by a minority of religious fanatics.

+ With weeks to prepare, the most Biden could offer was to encourage people to vote for Democrats in November, pledge more money for Capitol Hill police to protect the Supreme Court and to rebuke protesters for being unruly. Biden: “I call on everyone, no matter how deeply they care about this decision, to keep all protests peaceful. Peaceful, peaceful, peaceful. No intimidation. Violence is never acceptable. Threats and intimidation are not speech.”

+ If protests don’t “intimidate,” they’re not protests but something like group therapy sessions.

+ What’s “peaceful” about forced labor and birth?

+ Aren’t these militarized cops, whose budget just boosted by Biden, Schumer and Pelosi, meant to “intimidate” and inflict “violence?”

+ They never showed up like this to protect access to abortion clinics, which had been the target of death and bomb threats…

+ We’re repeatedly told that our imperial wars are meant to “defend American freedoms.” After Friday’s ruling, it’s pretty clear that for the last 50 years a helluva lot of people have died and were killed in vain…

+ According to a new Gallup poll, American confidence in the Supreme Court has collapsed to the lowest level ever recorded. Most of them have been hated or ridiculed all their lives. Can you imagine Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Alito ever having any friends?

+ For decades he Democrats squandered their majorities & super-majorities with the politics of gestures. The Republicans leveraged their minority status by understanding how to exploit the constitution and the courts to achieve real power and once they got put it to devastating use.

+ Sen. Joe Manchin: “I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided …” Funny, Manchin’s never this much of a sucker when it comes to coal policy…

+ The leadership of the Democratic Party, which for 20 years has said the only reason to vote for them is to protect Roe, should resign en masse. Their failure is absolute.

+ The Democrats were willing to keep Roe under perpetual threat to raise tens of millions and maintain a justification for voting for them, even as their austerity economic policies and war-mongering, made them nearly indistinguishable from the Republicans. Now the last illusion is shattered.

+ What could be worse than Pelosi’s last recitation of doggerel by Bono? An ode to the perfectibility of the Zionist state by a liberal Israeli poet…

+ They never showed up like this to protect access to abortion clinics, which had been the target of death and bomb threats…

+ We’re repeatedly told that our imperial wars are meant to “defend American freedoms.” After Friday’s ruling, it’s pretty clear that for the last 50 years a helluva lot of people have died and were killed in vain…

+ According to a new Gallup poll, American confidence in the Supreme Court has collapsed to the lowest level ever recorded. Most of them have been hated or ridiculed all their lives. Can you imagine Gorsuch, Kavanaugh or Alito ever having any friends?

+ For decades he Democrats squandered their majorities & super-majorities with the politics of gestures. The Republicans leveraged their minority status by understanding how to exploit the constitution and the courts to achieve real power and once they got put it to devastating use.

+ Sen. Joe Manchin: “I trusted Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh when they testified under oath that they also believed Roe v. Wade was settled legal precedent and I am alarmed they chose to reject the stability the ruling has provided …” Funny, Manchin’s never this much of a sucker when it comes to coal policy…

+ The leadership of the Democratic Party, which for 20 years has said the only reason to vote for them is to protect Roe, should resign en masse. Their failure is absolute.

+ The Democrats were willing to keep Roe under perpetual threat to raise tens of millions and maintain a justification for voting for them, even as their austerity economic policies and war-mongering, made them nearly indistinguishable from the Republicans. Now the last illusion is shattered.

+ What could be worse than Pelosi’s last recitation of doggerel by Bono? An ode to the perfectibility of the Zionist state by a liberal Israeli poet…

+ The problem with a Lysistrata-type protest in response to the overturning of Roe is that no one wanted to have sex with these Incels to begin with…

+ “Next month!” It took them a couple of days to enact more police protection for the people who overturned Roe, weeks before the decision was officially announced….

+ William Koziarz told the Tampa Bay Times that two years ago he was walking on Pinellas Beach in Florida and noticed a sign: “It said ‘No motorized vehicles allowed,’ and 15 minutes later I get ran over by a police vehicle.”

+ The Texas public safety chief admitted this week that the classroom door in the Uvalde school shooting was not locked, even as police waited nearly an hour for the key. (If a street gang behaved with this kind of gross negligence and indifference to the lives of children they’d find some major crime to charge them with.)

+ An Oklahoma man in a tactical vest with an AR-15 and a holstered pistol prompted local businesses in the town of Broken Arrow to lock their doors. When people in a Target parking lot called 911 to say the armed man was headed inside, police said he wasn’t breaking the law. You have to wait until the shooting starts…unless he’s a black teen, then they’d shoot him on sight, no questions asked.

+ No Incel can feel like a man without one…

+ Biden’s budget doubles funding for the police (COPS) hiring program, from $157 million in Trump’s last year in office to $388 million.

+ The GOP is a lot more upset about the non-plot to assassinate Kavanaugh, than the ongoing plot to kill one of their own, Mike Pence. In part because the current Supreme Court is going to do more on its shadow docket to implement far-right ideology than any president or Congress.

+ Here’s Eric Greitens (wife batterer) calling on MAGA-chuds to attack “moderate” Republicans.

^^^ picture at the link
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/24 ... harges-58/


+Of course, they would cower for an hour behind an unlocked door while school children are being slaughtered.

+ A Naval intelligence officer with the unlikely name of Hatchett Speed assigned to the NRO in Chantilly, Virginia, has been arrested on misdemeanor charges for his role in the Capitol Riot. Speed had been assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia. In an affidavit, FBI agents allege that Speed “panic-bought” an arsenal of weapons after Jan. 6 and praised the Unabomber, the Olympic Park Bomber and Adolf Hitler.

+ The laborious and repetitive J6 hearings have become a recruiting ad for MAGA, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and whatever foul monstrosity is fermenting-into-being to their right.

+ Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark about his plan to help Trump overturn 2020 election:”Good, fucking a-hole, congratulations, you just admitted your first step you would take as attorney general would be committing a felony.” Of course, you’re not really Attorney General until you’ve committed a felony or violated the constitution. It’s practically a prerequisite for the job…

+ So here’s Stacey Abrams, heroine of the liberals, urging more money for cops.

+ The median salary of the Uvalde cops who sat on their asses while kids and teachers were being gunned down behind an unlocked do0r: $58,000 a year and nearly $80,000, when you include overtime pay.

+ The average salary of a cop in Georgia: $58,000; average salary of a teacher in Georgia: $48,000.

+ A New York Times investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Aklen pretty much demolished every scenario put forward by the IDF. According to the Times, 16 shots were fired from the location of the Israeli convoy, contradicting Israeli claims that the soldier had fired five bullets in the journalists’ direction. Moreover, there were no armed Palestinians near her when she was shot, disproving Israeli claims that, if a soldier had mistakenly killed her, it was because he had been shooting at Palestinian gunmen.

+ This is a disorder worthy of its own entry in the DSM: Rusty Bowers, the Arizona House Speaker who testified on Tuesday that he resisted former President Donald Trump’s strong-arm tactics to overthrow the 2020 election, said he’d still vote for Trump in 2024: “If he is the nominee, if he was up against Biden, I’d vote for him again.”

+ Ruby Freeman, Georgia election worker slandered by Trump and his legal goon squad: “The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small-business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton Co. run an election in the middle of the pandemic.”

+ Bidenism in a nutshell: After blasting oil companies for price gouging, Biden announced a suspension of the federal gas tax for three months, a move which will do almost nothing to reduce prices at the pump but will almost certainly provide an even bigger boost to oil company profits.

+ So much for that carbon tax…

+ If Biden was serious (he’s not), he would have called for a waiver of mass transit fares…

+ According to the latest FEC filings, two Republican billionaires, Paul Singer and Bernie Marcus, each contributed $1 million to the United Democracy Project in May, the new AIPAC-affiliated super PAC that has intervened in Democratic primaries in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Maryland and California.

+ If Garland wanted to investigate war crimes, he could have taken the Metro to Langley…

+ The Russian moves to restrict gas supply to Europe sent gas prices spiking by 60% in less than a week.

+ Putin’s air war doesn’t seem to be going all that well. Here are some numbers, as of the ned of May, from the normally reliable William Arkin: 20,000 Russian sorties, 3000 in Ukrainian airspace, 2275 long-range missiles expended, 630 from Belarus soil, 110 cruise missiles shot down, over all less than 40% success rate.

+ Substantial majorities in both Italy and Germany favor a negotiated peace in Ukraine over a protracted NATO-supported war against Russia.

+ Who will tell Zizek?




https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/24 ... harges-58/
the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured.