Here’s just a sliver of what the Supreme Court did in the past two weeks of decisions. It doesn’t even count the atrocities it rolled out earlier in the session, including all of the destructive shadow docket decisions that were made without hearings, without any transparency, and often even without the Court’s extremists signing their names.
In one term, the extremist Supreme Court: -overturns Roe v.
The six extremist justices on the Supreme Court furthered their coup over Congress, the White House, and the Constitution on Monday, and continued their hatchet job on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Trump-packed majority ruled that it was perfectly fine for a public school employee to make a display of his religious beliefs while on the job, and further, to exhort the students in his charge to participate in his public prayers. In Kennedy v.
Democratic lawmakers’ response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s destruction of reproductive rights for the nation has been, let’s say less than urgent. Less than cognizant of the absolute earthquake that just rocked us. Less than aware that we are all looking to them to DO. SOMETHING.
Start with canceling recess. Start with acknowledging that the nation is on fire and that it is their job to start putting the fire out.
When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was confronted over his support for the bipartisan bill addressing elements of gun violence, he defended his Second Amendment record, telling reporters: “I spent my career supporting, defending and expanding” gun rights, and stressing that he had “spent years” confirming conservative judges.
A raft of MAGA Republicans advanced to win their primaries, fueled by the Big Lie that the 2020 election, voter fraud, and the nefarious deep state have ensured that all the elections are rigged. But as this AP report details, they are cynically silent about their own victories. The elections that absolutely couldn’t be trusted can apparently be trusted just this once, at least among the primary winners.
The nation is growing increasingly anxious about inflation, and that’s freaking Democrats out, because everyone knows it’s the party in power that gets blamed for a bad economy. Except this time, maybe there’s something Democrats can do about it: join the majority of Americans who are putting the blame on corporations.
Polling trends suggest that voters don’t believe inflation is President Joe Biden’s fault.
The movement to expand the Supreme Court keeps growing, with the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) the most recent group to call out the dangerous, extremist court and demand change. “Our nation’s highest court has been packed by far-right interests waging an unprecedented judicial assault on our environment, our democracy, our equality, and our reproductive rights,” the League said in announcing their stand.
More than two years into society and the economy being upended by a global pandemic, there are a lot of lessons to be learned if our government and specifically Congress is willing to pay attention. Just about every other economically advantaged country in the world gave everybody money to live off of, to keep people from falling through the cracks. Business owners got money to live on. Their employees got money to live on. Their landlords got money to live on. Basic needs were covered.
The forced birth movement is thinking big now, having secured the U.S. Supreme Court and set up at least a dozen states to completely ban abortion as soon as the court overturns 50 years of precedence in Roe v. Wade. That’s not nearly enough for them, because it would mean that dozens of other states would still allow the practice and pregnant people would be able to travel to them for the procedure.
The Biden administration has been working hard to make the Affordable Care Act, and health insurance in general, work better. They’ve lowered premium payments all the way down to zero for many people in Obamacare (a measure that needs to be passed again before the November election to avoid a bad October surprise of premium hike notifications).
In a historic 53-47 vote, the Senate has confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court. The 51-year old Jackson will take the seat of the justice she once clerked for, Stephen Breyer, when he retires before the October term. Vice President Kamala Harris—who represents two firsts as a woman and person of color to serve in that office—presided, making the moment doubly historic.
Jackson’s impeccable qualifications have been well-documented.
The Washington Post and CBS just broke a bombshell of a story: a series of text messages sent between Ginni Thomas, spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows from early November 2020 to mid-January 2021, in which conservative activist Thomas urged Meadows to keep up efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. CNN broke the story that the Jan.
President Joe Biden is delivering his first State of the Union address. You can watch it on every broadcast news station, and on cable where it is televised and streamed widely across news networks.
NBC News has confirmed that Associate Justice Stephen Breyer will retire at the end of this term, paving the way for President Joe Biden to name his successor.
Breyer, 83, is the court’s oldest member. He has served for 27 years on the court, and had given few indications that he was seriously considering stepping down.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will be stepping down at the end of the current Supreme Court term in June or July. Which has to be a blow to Mitch McConnell, who has been harboring nefarious plots for making sure President Joe Biden never had the opportunity to seat a Supreme Court justice.
Those plans weren’t even secret.
Tax filers in 2022 will face the same frustrations and delays that have characterized tax season for years now, heightened by the pandemic. Treasury officials recently spoke to reporters in a conference to begin the process of lowering taxpayers’ expectations.
The IRS, they told reporters, is dealing with the pandemic and the fact that it has just 15,000 employees tasked with customer services, expected to handle more than 240 million calls.
While President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been stymied in the Senate and by the courts and by a vengeful universe (the second year of COVID-19, which is ramping up with variants for the next year and beyond), there’s one first-year achievement worth crowing about: judicial appointments.
It’s that time again: time to snuggle up in front of your virtual fire, listening to the crackle and pop or maybe your favorite holiday standards, and maybe sip on your favorite holiday libation (this one’s mine).
YouTube Video
If you want to know why watching a fire burn on an electric screen is a thing, here you go. And if you want to see the original, or a bunch of creative spinoffs, you can find them here.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer notified Senate Democrats he is prioritizing an effort to “restore the Senate,” and do something about the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation. Politico has a bit more information on what “restore the Senate” means, and also why Schumer is so intent on trying to get the budget reconciliation for President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) plan done before Christmas.
A large group of advocacy organizations has penned an open letter to “Reporters, Editors, Producers, and Anchors” pleading with them to actually try to inform the public about the Build Back Better plan. They are very polite about it, acknowledging that it’s a difficult thing to do.
As chair of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee, Sen. Maria Cantwell has a lot of work to do on nominations and not much time to do it. There are several weeks of purely concentrated hell before the Senate, starting when they return next week (they’re taking this week off) and then resuming again after they take the Thanksgiving week off.
Sen. Joe Manchin’s big effort to find “10 good people” in the Republican conference in the Senate will fail Wednesday. The Senate will hold a cloture vote on the Freedom to Vote Act, Manchin’s alternative voting rights and elections reforms bill for which he promised Republicans votes, and Republicans will filibuster it.
Republicans were in total disarray Thursday after leader Mitch McConnell blinked and decided to allow a floor vote on saving the country from economic disaster by raising the debt limit. McConnell made that decision but apparently didn’t do a vote count beforehand. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer scheduled the vote for 7:30 p.m. ET Thursday. Within an hour of the vote, it’s not at all clear that McConnell can pull it off.
America has been Facebookified. You need look no further than the rash of people poisoning themselves using livestock dewormer to see the reach of the self-identified experts spouting conspiracy theories and quackery—not just on Facebook, but through all the channels and social media available. Distrust in the establishment has become so entrenched that they’ll turn to someone their aunt’s choir director’s cousin talked to for medical advice.
The Supreme Court just made it absolutely clear that they’re ready to toss the one thing Democrats have been running on since 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided—protecting women’s right to choose an abortion and have control over their own bodies. By refusing to act to uphold Roe in Texas, the conservative majority played their hand.
House committees are presumably hard at work now, trying to meet a Sept. 15 deadline for completing their parts of the budget reconciliation bill that will fund President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, the $3.5 trillion companion bill to the $550 billion hard infrastructure deal agreed to in the Senate. The reconciliation bill will originate in the House, but passage in the Senate requires that they work closely with committees there to avoid pitfalls.
For 15 hours overnight Wednesday into Thursday, Texas state Sen. Carol Alvarado stood and talked on the Senate floor. She could not break for a drink of water. She couldn’t sit. She couldn’t even lean against her desk. For 15 hours, she stood in the senate chamber in the Austin statehouse and fought Senate Bill 1, a voter restrictions bill that is the companion to the one that Texas House Democrats have blocked by leaving the state, denying the body a quorum.
The Senate worked late into Thursday night attempting to wrap up amendment work on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, but failed. It recessed until Saturday so that many members could travel to Wyoming for the funeral of their former colleague, Republican Mike Enzi.
Following the advancement of the bipartisan infrastructure package, one which drastically reduced the commitment in President Joe Biden’s original American Jobs Plan to combat climate change, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made a bold claim: “As Majority Leader, I will not pass an infrastructure package that does not reduce carbon pollution at a scale commensurate with the urgent climate crisis we face. And that’s exactly what Democrats will do.
In the news today: Senate Republicans really, really don’t think anyone who can afford to pay lawyers and accountants to help them avoid paying taxes shouldn’t have to pay taxes and people who can’t afford to pay them are having a harder and harder time affording a home. Being a fat cat can save you from justice even when you’re one of Trump’s biggest corrupt grifters. Sen. Ted Cruz remains a racist asshole.