In what could have been a fairly rapid end of meaningful voting rights in American elections, three of the six Republicans on the Supreme court, Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett, and all three democrats decided that democracy and voting rights for citizens still counted for something more than cynical authoritarian lip service. The Christian nationalist authoritarians Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented, showing their undeniable, blatant hostility toward democracy and voting rights. The decision came down yesterday in the Harper v. Moore case. The full opinion is here.
The opinion by Roberts states that the Constitution “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.” In other words, the independent state legislature (ISL) theory is dead for now. In view of this court opinion, it is clear that radical authoritarian Republican elites have no choice but shift their tactics by obliterating state laws that protect voting rights or by going back to the Supreme Court to resolve disputes about state laws. The radicals had hoped that Moore would have cleared the way for them to kill democracy and replace it with a corrupt, single party, Christian theocratic Republican dictatorship-plutocracy. Now, radical Republican elites will have to fight it out state by state and law by law to achieve their corrupt dictatorship.
In my opinion one thing is certain, pro-corruption radical right elites will not stop trying to set up some form of dictatorship. This decision doesn't end it for democracy. It buys democracy defenders some time to get their freaking act together.
The case concerned the “independent state legislature” theory. It is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organs of state government — not courts, not governors, not election administrators, not independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections.
Chief Justice Roberts rejected that position. “The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” he wrote.
The ruling soundly dismissed the theory, one that an unusually diverse array of lawyers, judges and scholars across the ideological spectrum viewed as extreme and dangerous. Adopting the theory, they warned, could have profound consequences for nearly every aspect of federal elections, including by erasing safeguards against partisan gerrymandering and curtailing the ability to challenge voting restrictions in state courts.
But some election law specialists cautioned that Tuesday’s decision elevated the power of federal courts in the process, allowing them to second-guess at least some rulings of state courts based on state law.
“This gives the U.S. Supreme Court the ultimate say over the meaning of state law in the midst of an election dispute,” Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in a blog post. “This is a bad, but not awful, result.”
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A intense heat wave has engulfed parts of the Midwest and much of the Southeast. It looks set to stay nasty hot for several days more. The heat map for today looks like this:
Climate science experts point out that a heat wave is weather and a heat wave usually cannot be directly attributed to climate change. The question boils down to a matter of statistics. Reason Magazine comments:
News outlets have long cited extreme weather events as examples of how greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate. In response, experts typically would emphasize the distinction between weather and climate, warning that any given hurricane or heat wave cannot be attributed to long-term changes in average temperatures. But it turns out that climatologists and meteorologists sometimes can establish such causal relationships.
"First of all, it's important to highlight that every climate extreme weather event has multiple causes," Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate researcher associated with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) collaboration, told MIT Technology Review in 2020. "So the question of the role of climate change will never be a yes or no question. It will always be, 'Did climate change make it more likely or less likely, or did climate change not play a role?'"
Consider the massive heat wave in June 2021 that produced record-breaking temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, including highs of 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon; 108 degrees in Seattle, Washington; and 121 degrees in Lytton, British Columbia. Under pre-industrial conditions, WWA researchers found, the chance of a heat wave like that was essentially zero. "Western North American extreme heat was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change," they concluded.
Waddabout the current warm spell is Texas and elsewhere? A 2 minute NPR segment broadcast yesterday says that at the least, climate experts are not surprised by what is going on:
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Dolphin baby-talk: Researchers accumulated 30 years of acoustical recording data of dolphins talking to teach other in Florida’s Sarasota Bay. It turns out that dolphin moms use higher pitched sound to communicate with their babies sort of like humans do. The AP writes:
A study published Monday found that female bottlenose dolphins change their tone when addressing their calves. Researchers recorded the signature whistles of 19 mother dolphins in Florida, when accompanied by their young offspring and when swimming alone or with other adults.“They use these whistles to keep track of each other. They’re periodically saying, ‘I’m here, I’m here’,” said study co-author Laela Sayigh, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine biologist in Massachusetts.
When directing the signal to their calves, the mother’s whistle pitch is higher and her pitch range is greater than usual, according to the study published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“That was true for every one of the moms in the study, all 19 of them,” said biologist Peter Tyack, a study co-author from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.Why people, dolphins or other creatures use baby talk isn’t certain, but scientists believe it may help offspring learn to pronounce novel sounds. Research dating back to the 1980s suggests that human infants may pay more attention to speech with a greater pitch range. Female rhesus monkeys may alter their calls to attract and hold offspring’s attention. And Zebra finches elevate their pitch and slow down their songs to address chicks, perhaps making it easier to learn birdsong.
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A WaPo opinion piece opines that taxpayers should not have to pay for religious schools. Christian nationalists are hell-bent on forcing taxpayers to pay for their religious schools and replacing secular public education with Christian fundamentalist "education." This is a case that is going to wind up before the Christian nationalist Republicans on the Supreme Court in a couple of years. The opinion comments:
The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s recent decision to allow a Catholic archdiocese to operate a public school is both illegal and unconstitutional.
A charter school “shall be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations,” Oklahoma law states.
Public schools “shall be open to all the children of the state and free from sectarian control,” the Oklahoma constitution declares.
Publicly funding a Catholic school so clearly flouts both of these provisions that the state attorney general, Republican Gentner Drummond, accused board members who voted to do so of violating their oath of office and promised to take legal action once a contract with the school is signed.
I have repeatedly pointed out that two highly cherished goals of the hyper-radical Christian nationalist (CN) wealth and power movement are to (1) sink its greedy claws into tax revenues, and (2) eliminate all, and I mean literally all, secular public schools. Secular public education is to be replaced with mandatory hyper-radical Christian fundamentalism.
Despite the clear illegality of the Charter School Board’s decision, God's infallible command is to go ahead and break the law to try to put this case before the CN Supreme Court. Maybe the Board will back down and not go ahead. Or maybe because their goals are sacred and infallible, they will stick with this effort to try to force Christian fundamentalism down everyone's throats. The goal here is not just for Oklahoma. CN dogma is aimed at all states. Hence the sacred march to the CN Supreme Court.
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