The radicalized Supreme Court deserves no more deference than any other institution: An opinion that MSNBC posted is interesting. I think some folks are waking up to what the Supreme Court has become and how freaking much power it has.
The opinion opines:
Normally, attention on the Supreme Court peaks in June, when the biggest decisions of the term are generally released. But this year, despite a paucity of rulings, people are already paying close attention. Eyes are on the court long before the big decisions — which will include rulings in cases on race conscious admissions in higher education, student loan forgiveness, immigration, the First Amendment and civil rights laws, voting rights, and more.
The early scrutiny is of the court’s own making — through several years of questionable, and often partisan, actions. Many decisions from the court over that time, in its cases and otherwise, strongly reinforce the idea that Americans have a responsibility to treat — and, for journalists, to cover — the Supreme Court and justices no differently and no less skeptically than we would treat any other government body.
The Burwell decision, of course, preceded the recent years of high-profile, politicized activity from the court that began in late 2020 when Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The shift was almost immediately obvious, when the court changed course in cases relating to Covid restrictions when the only real difference was who was voting in the cases.
And, then there was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The decision overruling Roe v. Wade after nearly 50 years, the draft opinion that Politico published in May that preceded it, the leak investigation that followed, the leak investigation report that did not find a leaker and was unclear about how much the justices themselves were investigated, and the subsequent reporting from CNN that the “independent” reviewer of the leak investigation and report runs a firm that had done more than $1 million of security work for the court all meld together to present an almost impenetrable argument that treating the Supreme Court as different from any other government institution, let alone infallible, is completely unjustified.
As usual, one can expect two mostly opposing reactions from the left and right to arguments like this. The most of the left mostly agrees, and most of the right mostly disagrees. Some poll data backs that assertion. So does most political rhetoric from both sides, at least so far.
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Radical right propaganda slanders clean energy: An opinion piece by Michael Bloomberg goes into some of the specific lies that the pro-pollution and/or anti-government radical right routinely deploys to slow clean energy growth as much as possible. Bloomberg's opinion was published in the Jan. 23, 2023 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (
posted in part at CleanTechnica). Here are the key points and lies:
- Polluters and pro-pollution ideologues routinely argue that solar panels and wind turbines are more unreliable than coal and gas and thus dangerous, but the opposite is true. About 90% of power outages in last December's cold snap were due to coal and gas power source failures, not clean energy failures.
- Clean energy is more reliable because, unlike giant coal and gas power stations, clean energy power generation is distributed. When there are clean energy interruptions, fewer people are affected compared to polluting energy outages from big generation plants.
- Electricity from solar and wind is now cheaper than from coal and gas. To protect profits by slowing growth of residential and commercial clean energy, (i) pro-pollution states make it hard to get permits to install solar, and (ii) coal and gas utilities relentlessly lobby state governments to block forced sale of excess solar to the grid. The net result is higher electricity and gas bills, blackouts more dangerous compared to clean energy failures more carbon pollution, which causes more human death and illness and more climate change.
- A weakness in clean energy is inadequate power transmission. The grid needs to be expanded and upgraded. That will be costly, but in the long run, carbon pollution, human deaths and climate change will be ameliorated. (I imagine the economic incentives for utilities favor not upgrading the grid to keep clean energy as hobbled as possible - that’s just brass knuckles capitalism as usual)
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Politically, the most crucial moment in President Biden’s State of the Union address was his declaration that “some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years.” Why did he say that? Maybe because Senator Rick Scott, when he was the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, released a fiscal plan last year with the bullet point “All federal legislation sunsets in five years.”
Seems straightforward, doesn’t it, despite cries of “lies” from the floor? But right-wing news media — well aware that Biden hit a nerve — has gone into overdrive insisting that his claim was false.
The basis for these denunciations, as far as I can tell, is the idea that calling a plan to sunset legislation a plan to sunset legislation is somehow misleading, because voters don’t know what “sunset” means. Indeed, just because the legislation authorizing a program comes to an end needn’t mean that the program will die; Congress can always vote to reinstate it.
But, of course, many Republicans do want to eviscerate these programs. To believe otherwise requires both willful naïveté and amnesia about 40 years of political history.
First of all, if Republicans had absolutely no desire to make major cuts to America’s main social insurance programs, why would they sunset them — and thus create the risk that they wouldn’t be renewed? As Biden might say, c’mon, man.
And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used.
Krugman then goes on to mention examples of GOP animosity to Medicare and social security. Examples include Ronald Reagan (1981), Newt Gingrich (1995), George W. Bush (2005) Paul Ryan (2010) and now in 2023, the modern GOP, as exemplified by MTG publicly calling Biden a liar for telling the truth during his State of the Union speech.
For me, this kind of easily debunked lying by elite Republican politicians shows one of the most cynically immoral and anti-democratic aspects of the GOP. Lying to the public about what a politician in power wants to do is deeply immoral, if not evil. Shameless mendacity and deceit simply does not faze congressional Republicans or most other GOP party elites. When citizens in a democracy are deceived by politicians’ lies and act on the basis of deceit-based false beliefs, their power to decide, and then consent or oppose what they believe the politician actually stands for has been taken from them. That taking came without citizen knowledge or consent. That mindset is authoritarian, not democratic. In my firm opinion, that is undeniable moral rot.
That is the frightening state of the current mendacious, immoral, authoritarian, radical right Republican Party leadership.
