The Supreme Court Upholds a Treaty with an American Indian Tribe

In an amazing 5-4 decision (Gorsuch + 4 dems vs the other 4 republicans), the court held that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was still a reservation after Oklahoma became a state. The state of Oklahoma is in shock. The sky is falling for people in Oklahoma who wanted to blow off yet another treaty with native Americans. The lands included in the decision cover a huge swath of land, almost half of the entire state of Oklahoma, including much of Oklahoma’s second-biggest city Tulsa. The New York Times writes:

“The case was steeped in the United States government’s long history of brutal removals and broken treaties with Indigenous tribes, and grappled with whether lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state. 

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a Westerner who has sided with tribes in previous cases and joined the court’s more liberal members, said that Congress had granted the Creek a reservation, and that the United States needed to abide by its promises. 

‘Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law,’ Justice Gorsuch wrote. ‘Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.’”

This is an amazing decision. The US government has been breaking Indian treaties for a long time, probably well over a century. The ‘sky is falling’ dissent by Roberts claimed that there would be great confusion in the Oklahoma’s criminal justice system. He also claimed that the decision has ‘profoundly destabilized’ state power in eastern Oklahoma. It is very likely that some past convictions (~200?) will be thrown out or need to be relitigated. But, that is the price to pay when the US violates its own written treaties.

The land at issue constitutes a huge swath of eastern Oklahoma. The NYT also commented that Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations are working on an agreement to present to Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice to deal with the issues this decision raised. This is one of the most important decisions regarding American Indian rights and lands in decades, if not the last century. 

One of the objections that Oklahoma raised was one of ‘inconvenience’ to the state. Gorsuch swept that argument aside.

Geez, who would have thunk that the US was legally bound to adhere to its legally binding agreements? Maybe there is some faint hope for the rule of law after all. Maybe.

A 4:15 interview broadcast today on NPR about the decision is here: 

The Supreme Court Protects the President

"There has existed for many decades a spirit and determination on the part of the makers of penal codes and the courts to measure the criminality of acts not only by their objective but their subjective qualities as well and to assess punishment according to the true responsibility of the offender. There is now a growing social tendency, a humane and laudable tendency, toward the enactment of laws providing for individualization of the punishment to be meted out to the offender, having reference not alone to the objective and subjective nature and quality of his act, but also to the true nature of the individual, to his age, his past record and the possibility of his re­demption to social and moral worth." -- Federal judge Edward R. Meek (ND-TX), Should the Punishment Fit the Crime or the Criminal?, American Bar Association Journal Vol. 8, No. 4, pages 212-214, 1922

The Supreme Court just announced a ruling that allows New York state prosecutors to get access to the president's private and business financial records, including his tax returns. But in a defense of the president, the court also denied House democratic demands to see the same financial records, at least until after the election. Inexplicably, the decisions were 7-2, and all four liberal justices voted to protect the president from congressional scrutiny

The court reasoned that there are “significant separation of powers concerns implicated by congressional subpoenas for the President’s information.” Based on that bogus concern, the court sent the case back to the lower court for further consideration of whether congress has the power to seek a president's financial records. In essence, this move delays a final decision until after the election. Because of that, the court is directly interfering in the election by hiding information that would damage the president. In my opinion, the court is working for the president's re-election.

The operating assumption is based on a small leap of logic. Specifically, the president has fought so hard to keep all of his financial records secret, he therefore has something illegal to hide. This logic is the same that the president has used to criticize people he attacks. During the 2016 election, the president argued this regarding Hillary and some of her aides in relation to emailgate: “The mob takes the Fifth. If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? .... She lied to Congress under oath, and her staff has taken the Fifth Amendment and got immunity deals. .... It's worse than Watergate; it's a bigger deal than Watergate.”

Abuse of power?

Some commentators are saying the decision to protect the president from congressional scrutiny for now is reasonable. The logic is that such power could be used by future hostile congresses against future presidents.

Does that logic make any sense whatever? So what if congress can scrutinize a president's financial records? Why isn't that a good thing? Is the court saying that since all presidents are crooks and liars, they all need to be protected from a hostile, politically-motivated congress? Why shouldn't the American people have the right to know what kid of person their president really is, especially one who is a chronic liar?

Over and over and over, there is a heavy bias in law enforcement and the courts to protect white collar criminals and liars. This pro-white collar criminal bias has existed for decades, but now the level of damage it can do is potentially catastrophic. The supreme court, including the four existing democratic justices are blind to this deadly threat. If those four democrats are not blind, but had to cut a deal to let the president off, it must have been one hell of a deal.

It looks to me that the "spirit and determination on the part of the makers of penal codes" is using this tradition to protect white collar crooks and liars, presumably because most of them are whites in the same class as the judges and often the same race. This looks a lot like a form of systemic reverse racism in favor of while collar crooks and liars due to their potential for redeemed social and moral worth.

Moral worth is not a concept that applies to our president. Neither is social worth. 

Regarding the SCOTUS decision on employee-paid birth control…

Personally, I think the SCOTUS made the right decision yesterday, July 8th.  Their ruling:

Employers who are morally against paying for birth control should not be obliged to do so, as previously mandated under the Affordable Care Act.

However, and philosophically related, I do think that bakers should NOT be allowed to discriminate against the LGBTQ community by refusing to sell their wedding cake products or other goods to them.  If they are IN THE BUSINESS of a product, they are obliged to sell it to whomever wishes to purchase it, regardless of sexual orientation.

These two scenarios are different (enough) to me.  One involves terminating what some people consider “life.”  The other is pure discrimination against a faction of the populace with whom they philosophically disagree, and use their product as a sort of “weapon.”

Argue with me. :)

And thanks for posting and recommending.

On the Anti-Science Bias

Context

Variations of this discussion have been posed here before, but in my opinion, the topic of flawed reasoning and anti-science bias has become critically important and urgent in view of the pandemic and the upcoming election.

Anti-science bias

In an article posted by Live Science, Humans are hardwired to dismiss (coronavirus) facts that don't fit their worldview, philosopher Adrian Bardon writes on comments by Anthony Fauci, expressing an ‘inconceiveable’ anti-science bias among Americans. Fauci sees ‘science as truth’ and thus cannot understand why many people reject knowledge. Bardon writes:

“It is Fauci's profession of amazement that amazes me. As well-versed as he is in the science of the coronavirus, he's overlooking the well-established science of
‘anti-science bias,’ or science denial. Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes. Within segments of the political blogosphere, global warming is dismissed as either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, the science of vaccine safety, fluoridated drinking water and genetically modified foods is distorted or ignored.”  

Motivated reasoning

In the 1950's, the prominent psychologist Leon Festinger commented on the human condition, asserting: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”

Festinger’s observation was prompted in part by how a cult responded after their predicted day of apocalypse. That day, December 21, 1954, came and went without the end of the Earth, or the saving of the cult members by aliens. The cult truly believed that would be the day the Earth ended. In preparation, some quit their jobs and prepared to go with the aliens in their space ship. 

They rationalized the failed apocalypse and turned it into a success. Instead of admitting that they were wrong, the cult responded by saying that the aliens told them their belief had shed light and saved the world. Festinger commented: “The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” 

That shows the awesome power of the human mind to defend strongly held beliefs. That kind of thinking is called motivated reasoning. The label makes sense.

An article in Mother Jones, The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science, commented on motivated reasoning:

“Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a ‘basic human survival skill’, explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.”

When people consciously think about something, they are thinking emotionally, logically, intuitively, morally and in biased ways all at the same time.[1] When we think we are reasoning about inconvenient truths, we are usually rationalizing a defense of prior beliefs, even if they are false beliefs. When someone hears about a new discovery that contradicts a strongly held belief, their mind usually instantly mounts a negative, defensive subconscious response. That response guides memories and associations in the conscious mind that are consistent with supporting the prior belief. That mental process tends to lead people to build an argument and challenge or reject the new knowledge.

Footnote:
1. Psychologist Johnathan Haidt commented on motivated reasoning and related biases, e.g., confirmation bias (acceptance of evidence we want to believe) and disconformation bias (skepticism of evidence we want to disbelieve):

“The reasoning process is more like a lawyer defending a client than a judge or scientist seeking truth. Kuhn (1991) found that most people have difficulty understanding what evidence is, and when pressed to give evidence in support of their theories they generally give anecdotes or illustrative examples instead. Furthermore, people show a strong tendency to search for anecdotes and other “evidence” exclusively on their preferred side of an issue, a pattern that has been called the “myside bias” (Baron, 1995; Perkins, Farady, & Bushey, 1991). Once people find supporting evidence, even a single piece of bad evidence, they often stop the search, since they have a “makes-sense epistemology” (Perkins, Allen, & Hafner, 1983) in which the goal of thinking is not to reach the most accurate conclusion; it is to find the first conclusion that hangs together well and that fits with one’s important prior beliefs.”