China brokers deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia

The Eurasia Group's  Ian Bremmer provides a quick, multi-perspectival take on the recent peace deal between the Middle East's biggest rivals-- Iran and Saudi Arabia. Is it for real? What are the implications for the US, China, the Saudis, and Iran? How might it affect efforts at negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, given China's recent 12 point "peace plan" proposal? If the US is "against" all autocracies, what role do we have left in a MENA (i.e. mid east and northern Aftica) where democracies are all but extinct (with Israel hanging on by a thread as Netanyahu does his best to extinguish it there)? These and other questions are cursorily touched on in this 10 minute update by Bremmer. Might the Chinese, even if their own plan is rejected, change the tone of global discourse on the War in such a way as to make talk of sanctions and prolonged fighting, with attendant risks of escalation less palatable?  Are we seeing a "game-change" in MENA as Bremmer suggest, or just a tempest in a teapot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YpDYF-M2Fo&list=TLPQMTUwMzIwMjMph2hK17YBvw&index=2

The Truth Is Out There — Fox Viewers Don’t Care

 

Republican voters, especially those who get their “news” exclusively from conservative outlets, may be unique in history. While there have always been demagogues who have lied to their constituents — and in many cases used mass media to do so — what sets modern conservatives apart is that they quite clearly want to be lied to.

Never before has so much information been available to so many but used so little.

More:

https://whowhatwhy.org/cartoon/the-truth-is-out-there-fox-viewers-dont-care/

Conclusion:

None of that matters, though, to an audience of tens of millions conditioned to only accept as fact what conveniently fits into their belief that they, and their country, are exceptional.

At least they are right about that part. They are exceptionally prone to being lied to, and they are exceptionally ignorant. 

Bits about the Silicon Valley Bank failure

Among some other things, the failure of SVB is a great example of how modern politics and radical right propaganda works. The radical right spin monster is already lying through it’s teeth. The behaviors and moral rot of brass knuckles capitalists and corrupted politicians are crystal clear and undeniable. And, the corrupt nature of Republican Party brass knuckles capitalism and Democratic Party neoliberalism are also clear. Political power was no on the side of the public interest. It was on the side of unbounded greed and personal ambition driven by cynical moral rot and ideological fantasies.

The truth

The truth is needed for context. Some key points are these:

Runs on banks in the 1930s led to the creation of federal regulations and a regulatory agency, the FDIC.

Banks and Wall Street bitterly hated bank and financial regulations, attacking them as destructive, unnecessary, socialist and whatever other slander or stupid fantasy they thought would resonate with the public and idiot, incompetent and/or corrupt/cynical politicians and presidents.

Deregulation of banks and the financial sector led to the massive bank, financial and housing catastrophe of 2008-2009. Millions of people were seriously damaged, but 100% of criminal elites were untouched.

Democratic and Republican politicians bailed out some customers, but also investors in the face of the 2008 catastrophe. The regulatory system was never designed to bail investors out. It was there to protect depositors, not risk-taking investors.

New regulations to prevent bank failures due to runs on banks by panicked depositors passed in 2010 over vehement Republican opposition.

The banks lobbied relentlessly against the new regulations. Once the Republicans were back in power, they relaxed the regulations in 2018 by exempting mid-sized banks (up to $250 billion in assets) like SVB from the depositor-protecting regulations. Those banks were freed to take a lot more risk. Added risk increased profits, which led to huge payouts to bank executives. 

People like Elizabeth Warren warned that the dropped regulations would lead to bank failures due to runs on banks. Warren was 100% correct in her analysis. Greedy bankers took risks that regulations could have avoided and that led SVB to fail. The fiasco was aided by a the anti-regulation Federal Reserve under the brass knuckles capitalist Jerome Powell. Under Powell, the fed has been fully captured and neutered by banks and Wall Street, making regulations impossible or as weak as possible.

SVB failed because it had held too much asset in the form of low interest rate bonds, not because it was woke. When the fed started raising interest rates, those bonds had to be sold at a loss if there was a run on deposits. There was a run on deposits, $42 billion on one day, which caused SVB to collapse. 

A few hours before bank regulators took over SVB, the executives paid themselves one last big bonus for a job well done for themselves. Those morally rotted executives had no concern whatever about pain and damage their failure caused to depositors. That problem was no longer their problem once the regulators closed the bank down.  

This is a story about the essence and soul of unregulated brass knuckles capitalism and incompetent politicians who are corrupt, ruthlessly cynical and/or idiotically ideologically deluded into a belief that unregulated capitalism is best for everyone.

The radical right spins its poison lies and slanders

It seem fit to point out that the radical right propaganda Leviathan and the shameless jaw-dropping lies and slanders it routinely poisons American society with. Business Insider writes:

• Some Republicans blamed “woke” investment strategies for Silicon Valley Bank's downfall.

• The GOP has increasingly portrayed itself as against “wokeism” in all aspects even when the definition is unclear.

Conservatives are blasting their new boogeyman of wokeism after the second-largest bank collapse in US history, eschewing the more straightforward story of problematic balance sheets in favor of raw politics.

“SVB = too woke to fail,” Senator Josh Hawley tweeted (R-MO) on Monday.

To Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the culprit was “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The bank website says it was building a global workforce celebrating “greater dimensions of diversity.”

“This bank, they're so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff, I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis said on Fox News' “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Rep. Jim Comer, head of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, blasted "Democrat inflation" and called Silicon Valley Bank “one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing,” a reference to environmental, social, and governance policies. 

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, himself a former presidential candidate, announced last week that he’s penning a new book titled “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.”

That bullshit speaks for itself. SVB clearly failed due to the wrong assets on its balance sheet, not wokeism. The radical right blames wokeism and the left for its own failed policy choices. This is standard radical right authoritarian propaganda. 

Other commentary

The Financial Times writes:

It may stick in some throats that the US and UK financial authorities have had to engineer an emergency rescue for an institution, and an industry, that is so fond of railing against government intervention and lobbying against stricter regulatory oversight. 

The SVB fiasco also shines an unforgiving spotlight on the hypocrisy of some of the biggest venture capital players on both sides of the Atlantic, who privately urged their portfolio companies to pull their money from the bank and then later publicly called for government support. SVB collapsed on Friday as a result of a classic bank run after customers withdrew $42bn of deposits.

Well as we all know, hypocrisy does not faze the radical right or its brass knuckles capitalist supporters. Money is the only thing that counts. Democracy, truth and civil liberties can all go to hell as far as the radical right is concerned. 

Slate comments:

As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto. All weekend, they screamed that there would be an economic collapse, that they were concerned about the workers, that the Federal Reserve was responsible, that-that-that … until finally, on Sunday evening, they got what they wanted: the government promising full account access to all Silicon Valley Bank depositors.

By now, it is relatively clear what happened at Silicon Valley Bank. A pandemic bull run inflated the value of tech startups and the funds of investors, resulting in a tripling of deposits at the regional bank that specializes in the industry’s fledgling companies, from $62 billion at the end of 2019 to $189 billion at the end of 2021. SVB wanted to put that money to work, so it bought up U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds that would take years to mature but serve as a relatively safe place to park its cash—as long as interest rates didn’t rise. They did rise, however, multiple times.

Again the point is clear. Brass knuckles capitalists hate regulation. But when lack of regulation leads to a preventable disaster caused by unregulated greed, hypocrite capitalists scream to be bailed out by the government they hate so much. 

By now, it should be clear to everyone that brass knuckles capitalism is all about deregulated risk-taking and demands for bailouts when unregulated greed causes trouble. Capitalist dogma is clear and simple: Maximize wealth accumulation by privatizing and concentrating profits with the elites, but socializing risk and damage to the masses, the government and/or the environment, i.e., anyone or anything but lying, corrupt, hypocrite capitalist elites.

The NYT comments on the ongoing fallout: “Across the country, banks of various sizes are battling market turmoil as customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors, worried about more bank runs, dumped bank stocks.”

News bit: Radical right legal tactics update

CONTEXT

Textualism is the ruse that the radical right says it often uses to analyze laws passed by congress and legislatures. Originalism is the ruse that American radical right authoritarians sometimes use to interpret the Constitution. Originalism is interpretation of a written constitution or law allegedly based on what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have understood the ordinary meaning of the text to be. Experts constantly point out that finding original intent is impossible because both the drafters of the constitution and average people were deeply divided. 

Originalism sells itself as a way of constraining judges. But it’s more often a way of unleashing their partisan impulses and party loyalty. Originalism is related to textualism, which focuses mostly on the words instead of intent. The radical right relies on either alone or in combination to arrive at partisan decisions. 

The major questions doctrine holds that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations that concern questions of “vast economic or political significance.” The Supreme Court justifies this limitation with the non-delegation doctrine. The nondelegation doctrine seeks to distinguish the constitutional delegations of power to other branches of government that may be necessary for governmental coordination from unconstitutional grants of legislative power that may violate separation of powers principles. The radical right is leveraging the major questions doctrine to get outcomes that the controlling political dogmas demand.

Hypocrisy in legal reasoning

A Washington Monthly article discusses the unprincipled nature of legal reasoning by radical right authoritarian ideologue judges. This point has been raised by a number of legal experts who pay close attention to the state and federal courts, including the US Supreme Court. WM writes: 

With the rise of the “major questions” doctrine, conservatives' invocation of “textualism” has been exposed as hypocrisy.

Conservatives claim “textualism” is the only defensible approach to analyzing and applying a legal text. The term emphasizes the “plain meaning” of the text of a legal document and rejects the use of legislative history and other contextual resources to clarify vague or confusing language. Perhaps not surprisingly, this approach almost always leads to conservative outcomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality. But with the rise of the “major questions” doctrine, we can now see that “textualism” is synonymous with hypocrisy. The doctrine, which requires that agencies receive explicit direction from Congress to address a particular issue, gives the Court’s conservative supermajority a tool to achieve their preferred outcomes when textualism doesn’t get them there.

Here’s an example. It’s clear from oral arguments in the student loan case that the Supreme Court heard last month that textualism wouldn’t allow the panel’s conservatives to kill the administration’s plan, which provides relief to millions of post-secondary students.

That the loan relief costs a lot of money must mean that Congress had not actually authorized it, contended Chief Justice John Roberts at the arguments. But by passing a 2003 law signed by President George W. Bush, Congress authorized the education secretary to address emergencies. The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, known as the HEROES Act, states explicitly that the secretary of education may “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” to help loan recipients affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.” As Justice Elena Kagan said at the arguments, “Congress could not have made this much more clear,” adding, “We deal with congressional statutes every day that are really confusing. This one is not.” Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted that “waive” is “an extremely broad word,” and “in 2003, Congress was very aware of potential emergency actions in the wake of September 11.”

The late Justice Antonin Scalia was perhaps the foremost advocate for “textualism,” arguing that it would provide more “certainty in the law, and hence greater predictability and greater respect for the rule of law.” Scalia allowed that judges could consult dictionaries and use linguistic “canons of statutory construction” to elucidate vagueness but insisted that textualism was the only way to avoid judicial encroachment on legislative terrain.

Contrary to Scalia’s drivel, the unprincipled, often irrational way the American radical right interprets the Constitution and laws provides less certainty in law, less predictability and less respect for the law. The problem arises mostly from a mix of (i) authoritarian radical right ideology, (ii) open contempt for and rejection of inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning (e.g., the anti-woke movement), and (iii) disrespect for secular democracy, civil liberties, and principled rule of law. 

By its actions, the radical right has made it clear and undeniable that it will remake the law according to its corrupt radical authoritarian-theocratic dogmas. Talk of principled originalism and textualism is just a smoke screen to deflect from the morally bankrupt intellectual basis of what the radical right is, corrupt, authoritarian and theocratic. What it wants to do to American society, democracy, civil liberties, governance and inconvenient truth and history is not what most Americans support.

News bits: Radical right stealth tactics; Law firm sues robot for illegally practicing law; Woke definition

Mother Jones writes about the stealth tactics that radical right authoritarians and Christian theocrats sometimes use to minimize public backlash against anti-democracy extremism:

On a Saturday afternoon in August 2019, South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doctors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to introduce that would make it a felony for doctors to give transgender children under 16 gender-affirming medical care. “I have no doubt this will be an uphill battle when we get to session,” Deutsch warned the group. “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better.”

The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped Deutsch’s repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.

At the time, there was little precedent for such bills, and Deutsch’s legislation, called the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, was killed in the Senate after doctors showed up at the South Dakota statehouse to argue they should not be sent to prison for following the medical consensus.

“Please do not say that the South Dakota effort failed!!” Margaret Clarke, general counsel for the Alabama branch of the Phyllis Schlafly–founded Eagle Forum, replied. “You successfully inspired, encouraged and counseled numerous VCAP [sic] efforts around the country. You established the ideal witness list that we are all still following in our individual states…And, most importantly you connected us all to each other. This is just the beginning.”

Indeed, Deutsch’s bill has proved influential in the recent surge of anti-LGBTQ lawmaking. This legislative session, at least 18 states have considered bills containing language closely resembling the text of the Vulnerable Child Protection Act. The leaked emails reveal how Deutsch’s proposal helped proponents of the national movement to restrict gender-affirming care establish a playbook for their now-common attacks.

Sometimes the radical right is out in the open and sometimes it operates with as much secrecy as I can manage to get away with. It depends on the circumstances and location. 

Regardless, one can see this as another example of disciplined and coordinated efforts that radical right Christian nationalists are using to replace our secular Constitution with authoritarian Christian sharia law. 

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Lawyers sue robot: Business Insider writes: 

• DoNotPay, which uses AI [artificial intelligence] to provide legal information, is facing a proposed class action lawsuit.

• The complaint claims that DoNotPay has been practicing law poorly and lacks a license.

• DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder pledged to fight the lawsuit that he said had "no merit."

The complaint argues: "Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm. DoNotPay does not have a law degree, is not barred in any jurisdiction, and is not supervised by any lawyer."

DoNotPay claims to use artificial intelligence to help customers handle an array of legal services without needing to hire a lawyer. It was founded in 2015 as an app to help customers fight parking tickets, but has since expanded its services. DoNotPay’s website claims that it can help customers fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, find hidden money, and "sue anyone."  

"Time and time again the only people that win are the lawyers. So I wanted to do something about it, building the DoNotPay robot lawyer to empower consumers to take on corporations on their own," Browder said.

This is an interesting lawsuit. Legal self-help books and other legal texts and journals have been publicly available for decades. What’s the difference between reading a book written by a human and reading what a computer spits out? The AI can be programmed with all current law, making it probably more knowledgeable than the people writing the self-help books. 

And, the AI can also be programmed with (i) law treatises, court reporters (journals that publish every case that courts decide) and text books written by experts in their fields, and fact patterns, legal rationales and holdings in every court case that has been ignored, or partly or completely upheld or overturned since the founding of American courts after the Constitution started coming into effect in 1789 after its ratification in 1788.  

And, although it is probably usually a mistake, American law permits a person to be their own lawyer and practice law for themselves in court.

Josh Browder, peeving off human 

lawyers since 2015

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A concise description of the anti-woke concept - a two-headed thing, one bad, one good: Since anti-woke appears to be the centerpiece of the DeSantis presidential campaign and powerfully motivating to most of the radical right base, it seems timely to try to describe or define what it is and isn't. MSNBC discusses the concept:

Many Republican leaders have made “anti-wokeness” a cornerstone of their political agenda, but DeSantis has led the pack by upending the lives and liberties of Floridians through authoritarian book bans and speech codes. 

Following last year’s passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act -- also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law — banning discussion of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity in public schools, countless Floridians have lost their rights. Teachers in same-sex marriages left or lost their jobs. Children of gay parents now fear mentioning their parents’ sexual orientation at school. Librarians must undergo state training on the law, and face losing their livelihood if they lend books blacklisted by the state education board.

The governor’s war on K-12 programs has expanded since that bill: DeSantis banned a high school Advanced Placement class on African-American studies, claiming it was “indoctrination.” He is now angling to ban all AP courses in Florida, something surely anathema to parents hoping their children will attend reputable universities.

And DeSantis is also targeting higher education institutions, which most states strive to showcase as incubators of groundbreaking ideas, pedagogy, and research. He carried out a hard-right takeover of New College, a small liberal arts school within the state’s public university system, stacking its board of trustees with anti-critical race theory demagogue Christopher Rufo and other fringe figures from the Christian right and MAGA world. “The mission has been I think more into the DEI, CRT, the gender ideology rather than what a liberal arts education should be,” DeSantis declared, referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as well as critical race theory.

The MSNBC article points out that a poll conducted by Ipsos, shows that 56% of Americans consider “woke” a positive term, meaning “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” More than a third of Republicans agree with that definition. However, 39% agreed with a negative definition: “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” 

Maybe this anti-woke thing is not as good an issue as anti-abortion to rally the radical right as I had imagined. It seemed that all the cognitive and social factors that authoritarian radicals played on with the abortion issue were inherent in the woke issue. Maybe that’s is not so true if this poll data is probative. It feels like the definition the poll used does not really capture how the radical right base feels about this issue. Time will tell how the woke issue plays out.

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CLARIFICATION: I use the term Taliban here to mean something different from it's usual meaning, which is normally Sunni fundamentalist hardliners. Here I refer to Taliban as any hard core, religious zealot elites in any country who exercise power grounded mostly in any religion or theocratic dogma, not secularism. (see comments here)

From the religious zealot files: Iranian Taliban poisons school girls: The Jerusalem Post writes:

Poison gas attacks on schoolgirls in Iran have shocked the world for months, from with the first reports in November, at the height of the protests against the regime triggered by the death of a young woman in the custody of its morality police.

Sources inside and out of Iran have provided The Media Line [TML] with a true picture of the extent of the incidents, including the names of many of the schools singled out for attack, the exact dates on which many of the attacks took place and the number of people affected.

Iranian schoolgirls poisoned all over the country

More than 1,000 schoolgirls at more than 26 schools in 25 of Iran’s 31 provinces have now been hit by the poison gas since the first attacks in the city of Qom in November, when 15 schools were targeted. The victims reported a smell akin to rotten oranges, followed by nausea, headaches, and finally shortness of breath left them urgently seeking medical attention.

Evil targets for the righteous Iranian Taliban

Tacit support from the Iranian regime

In fact, TML’s Iranian sources and experts on the issue have suggested that the attacks are being carried out either at the behest of the government or at least with its tacit support. This, they say, is being done in order to distract the public from the ongoing protests against the regime and place responsibility for the causes of the unrest on a handful of “arbitrary Talibani extremists” who can be dealt with by the authorities “to exonerate the entire Islamic system.”

An atmosphere of terror

Similarly, [TML’s sources] suggest, the poison attacks could be a move to create “an atmosphere of terror” among protesters and therefore prevent growing numbers from joining them as Iranian society reels from poverty, corruption and an unaffordable cost of living.

This has been going on since last November? This is the first I’ve heard of corrupt, enraged religious zealots from the Dark Ages poisoning Iranian school girls. How did I miss this?

Q: Worldwide and in the US individually, has religion become more harmful than beneficial to the human condition and long-term human well-being and civilization sustainability, e.g., Christian nationalists in the US are anti-democracy, anti-inconvenient fact and truth, pro-climate change and rigidly authoritarian theocratic?

A funny but informative lawyer story

Stuff like this helps inform people about how the American justice system works for at least some non-elites. This a total hoot but packed with details about how it works:

When you’re a public defender, you’re pretty useless — until suddenly, you aren’t

I am a public defender.

I am the vanguard of justice. I am the bulwark against tyranny. I am a hoot at dinner parties. I am this author’s Tinder bio. I am venerated by the new progressive zeitgeist.

I am the corporeal manifestation of professional burnout.

I am useless. So fucking useless.

There’s a dull reality to my job, which is that my clients have almost always done the thing they’re accused of doing. And usually the evidence against them is overwhelming — not even a close call. Yet I am duty-bound to poke, prod, and bluff my way into exaggerating a weakness with the government’s case. This usually doesn’t work.

For example, one time a client was picked up for his sixth drunk-driving incident. He had been prohibited from driving eons ago, but that hadn’t stopped him before. In addition to DUI No. 6, he was charged with fleeing the scene after crashing into another car. The fleeing was ineffectual, if only for the fact that he literally imprinted his license plate number onto the other car. I saw the picture of the imprint, with a mirrored alphanumeric sequence perfectly legible on the metal body. Cops found his car billowing thick, black smoke in a parking lot in front of a nearby AutoZone. My client hadn’t gotten far from the scene: He was in the driver’s seat, having already passed out and pissed his pants.

So yeah, when I meet with clients I shrug a lot and give the “what-do-you-want-me-to-do?” look. I try to shift delicately into the gentle social worker persona and talk about damage control, which invariably means telling them that accepting a plea deal is the least bad option. This is one reason why almost everyone chooses to plead guilty. Ninety-four percent of state cases and 97% of federal cases are resolved by a plea deal, to be exact.

All this means I inhabit a different role than you may think based on TV shows or the occasional op-ed about the noble role of public defenders. I’m not a special agent who parachutes into the enemy hideout to orchestrate and negotiate an elaborate hostage release; I’m just the widget inspector. I’m there to sit at the assembly line with a checklist on a clipboard and make sure that my client’s rights are not violated too much throughout the process. And we literally used a checklist for DUI cases — six pages of potential rakes we could only pray a cop stepped on: Yes, yes, you have video of the guy swerving all over the road, his speech is as slurred as mud, and he has a small cargo ship’s worth of empty beer bottles in the back. BUT was the temperature of the liquid simulator solution utilized as the external standard for the breath sample machine measured by a thermometer which was properly certified by the state at the time? Hmmm?

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally the cops do fuck up. Sometimes they don’t notice the thermometer certification lapsed two days prior, and of course you pounce on that. But this almost never happens, and it also underscores how fungible my own contributions are. Anyone plausibly qualified could replace me and it would not make a difference for the most part.

I’m borderline useless, in other words.

But there are terrifying exceptions to this rote monotony that forever haunt me. Like the one time I cast a spell in court with eleven magic words.

***

This happened early, when I was still a baby public defender. My client (different from License Plate Man above) was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He was already on probation for one DUI when he was caught driving drunk a second time, seven years after the first. A judge released him from jail provided that his family fork over a small ransom for bail and that he agree to having his whereabouts monitored by an ankle bracelet. He would have to come back to address his probation issues in two weeks.

The ankle bracelet company sends me an update a few days later. My client had visited their office, informed them that he intended to flee the country because he was scared of jail, then underscored his statement with a flourish by taking out a knife and cutting off the ankle bracelet in front of them. In terms of the ratio between effort and impact, this was easily one of the simplest ways he could have irredeemably fucked himself over. But I did not have time to dwell on this. His actions meant I had one less client to worry about, since clearly he had decided to take his chances on the lam rather than in court.

Two weeks pass and I’m in court. Just a normal day: I review the sign-in sheet to see which defendants, of the cases I had prepped, did me the courtesy of showing up. Our caseloads aren’t always as bad as advertised because many of our clients don’t come to court, for reasons ranging from malicious (they’re reenacting a certain 1993 thriller starring Harrison Ford) to banal (the notice was lost in the mail).

Then I see his name — Bracelet Cutter. I turn and scan the row of benches in the gallery and he’s quietly sitting in the back, apparently oblivious to the shitstorm of his own creation he has walked into.

I motion for him to step out in the hallway and my first question is “What the FUCK are you doing here?” He looks down, ashamed, and explains he realized that if he had fled, his family would have remained liable for the bond they put up to get him released. “I am here to take responsibility,” he says.

There was no need for me to pillory him any further. He panicked and fucked up, but that was done. Unfortunately, I was completely ill-prepared to handle his case, as I had reasonably assumed he had successfully peaced out of the country (and out of the justice system’s grasp) by now. We went in front of the judge and I announced that my client was turning himself in to jail so that I could better prepare for his case. We’d be back in court in another two weeks.

***

In part because of those aforementioned stats on the frequency of guilty pleas, public defenders have garnered a reputation for being trial-averse, for pressuring clients to cop a plea just to keep the machine humming along. I think this reputation is ill-deserved. It’s completely counter to my own experience, at least, as few things are talked about with as much awed respect among one’s public-defender peers as the number of trials you have accumulated. It’s the functional equivalent of an attorney’s XP level.

Jury trials are sexy and cool and exciting, even despite the abysmal prospects for acquittal. But the understandable focus on dramatic moments can cause people to lose sight of potentially far more consequential proceedings that lack the luster and allure. Like probation hearings.

I hate probation hearings so much.

The gravitational center of the criminal justice system is not the judge, but the prosecutor. Prosecutors can summon criminal charges from the ether or dispel them into nothingness, if they so choose. The Trial Tax is real, so if you want to avoid getting resolutely fucked at sentencing, your best bet is to play nice from the start. This is what makes accepting a plea deal so irresistible to so many clients. Judges say they ultimately decide — sure, whatever — but in practice, a prosecutor’s offer recommendation is virtually guaranteed to be adopted. Judges are busy, and the vast majority used to be prosecutors themselves. A current prosecutor’s blessing on a deal is generally all the oversight a judge cares to invest. If the deal recommends no jail time, you’ll get no jail time. This is what I told all my clients, and it was always true.

But there’s a caveat, in that many little- or no-jail deals are paired with a laundry list of legal obligations that are monitored by the courts for many years. In addition to not committing new crimes, the obligations can be as simple as attending a class about how drugs are bad. Courts enforce this scheme by imposing the statutory maximum amount of jail time (a year for most misdemeanors), but simultaneously suspending nearly all of it. Think of it as setting aside a bucket of jail days that can be doled out as needed if a client didn’t adhere to the agreement.

Doling from the bucket was what the probation calendar was for. Clients who had already pled guilty were summoned back to court because they had fucked up somehow and needed to explain themselves to the judge.

During these probation hearings, the prosecutor would recite the list of violations and recommend a sanction. My job was to come up with a plausible-sounding justification and make a counteroffer for sanction, and the judge would probably just split it down the middle. Sometimes it’s 30 days of house arrest. Sometimes 90 days of jail. If jail, sometimes clients had a week to turn themselves in. Sometimes the court marshals were summoned to take them to jail immediately. All this in the span of 5-10 minutes per person, one after the other. Assembly line humming.

***

Generally, we had no way of knowing when someone would be summoned back to court for a probation hearing until it was scheduled. Our paralegals scanned the calendars and dove into our archives to retrieve a client’s file. I tried to call my clients prior to court appearances, but this was often a lost cause as numbers were frequently disconnected, out of service, or linked to full voicemail boxes. The best that you could eventually hope for was for the client to actually show up to court so that you could confer for the requisite five minutes in the adjoining hallways and stairwells before the proceedings.

But as much as Bracelet Cutter fucked up his prospects in other ways, at least there wasn’t any question as to whether he’d show up for his hearing — he was in jail, after all. I swung by with an interpreter (his English was passable, but not great) to fill him in on the details and answer his questions. I felt ready for the hearing.

The day came. Bracelet Cutter’s mother, wife, and children were in attendance in the gallery. The court churned through its list of cases until it was our turn.

Recall how plea deals are structured, and how the entire purpose of a suspended jail sentence is to dangle the anvil over someone’s head to “encourage” them to do the things they’re supposed to do. The bargain means you avoid jail time so long as you meet your obligations. But what if, perhaps through your repeated and extended frittering away of your opportunities to stay out of jail, there is no realistic expectation you’ll ever meet your obligations to the court? Rather than continue burning up the court’s resources, judges could instead impose a hefty jail sentence now and just close the file. This is affectionately known as “Impose & Close.”

On this day, luckily, the prosecutor was not feeling particularly bloodthirsty. He was going to recommend the mandatory minimum sanction of 48 hours in jail, which my client had more than already served by now, and leave the rest of the jail time suspended, meaning he wouldn’t have to serve it as long as he behaved himself. I was more than happy to cosign on that recommendation, excited to see the judge rubber-stamp our joint agreement.

Despite the good sign, though, I was still cautious — I had not walked into the hearing with much confidence. I knew that my client’s decision to cut off an ankle bracelet and threaten to flee to Mexico was going to be on the judge’s mind, and I knew that the worst approach with her would have been to ignore the issue completely. After effusively agreeing with the prosecutor’s recommendation, I got ahead of the issue. I started by acknowledging what happened, framing it from the standpoint of a poor guy panicking in a stressful situation, and highlighted the extended meeting I had with him while he was in jail. His family members in the gallery served as helpful props in my argument. After all, why would he flee the country when *gesturing widely* his family is right here?

This did not work. The judge said that she had no confidence that my client would be able to meet his legal obligations. She then turned to the prosecutor and asked what the recommended jail sentence was to close the file out. Which meant Impose & Close was happening.

This was a full-blown red alert moment, and by far the worst possible outcome. Now that a probation period appeared to be off the table, the prosecutor was no longer tied to asking for just two days in jail. The price to close the file would be 180 days. I stood up and did my best to slide in and emphasize that neither party requested to close out the file, and repeated my spiel.

The judge politely listened and then imposed 180 days in jail. The reactions came in waves — my client’s mom yelled out in anguish first because she could understand the judge, and then her son followed after the court interpreter delivered the bad news in Spanish. My client was handcuffed and slumped in his chair, disconsolate. This didn’t just mean six months in jail; ICE kept watch over the local jail rosters, so the sentence was not only long but virtually assured his deportation.

I tried to focus, to ignore the sudden cacophony reverberating around me. I remained standing and stared at nothing in particular. Fifteen seconds passed. What now? Was there anything I could do? Was there anything I should do?

Thirty seconds passed, and the only audible sound was the shuffling of paper and murmurs across the gallery. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try, so I strung together a hastily improvised request to the judge — hereafter known as the Eleven Magic Words:

“Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?”

There are words recognized within legal circles to have near magical properties. The Supreme Court will tell you that all you need to immediately and forcefully end a police interrogation is to unambiguously ask for a lawyer. Declarations etched in steel by a dying man have the power to move trillions in assets. Even the lowly comma, or the absence thereof, can overturn entire industries. But the eleven words I uttered that day are not valorized or dissected by any scholars. They shoulder no inherent legal significance. And yet, they earned their title for what happened next.

Nothing but silence now. The judge peered directly at me over her glasses. She then asked for the file back from the clerk and barely even opened it before announcing, “All right. Mr. Meskhout, I’ll go ahead and give him an opportunity. Since you have asked.”

The judge then imposed two days in jail. Two days instead of one hundred and eighty.

The cacophony started up again — outcries of joy (and some confusion) this time rather than anguish. I gathered that neither my client nor his mom quite understood what the fuck had just happened. I certainly didn’t.

“Since you have asked.”

My heart rate skyrocketed and my eyes twitched. I remained standing and did my best to maintain composure.

“Since you have asked.”

I kept replaying that sentence over and over in my head. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. I was not supposed to have this much power. I’m supposed to be useless, remember? A widget inspector. There was something thoroughly unconscionable about what had just transpired. I uttered eleven magic words in the right combination and this man’s life trajectory shifted radically, likely from near-assured deportation to continued freedom in the United States. I am not supposed to have this much power.

To say that I felt fear is an understatement. But I kept all of this to myself. This was my last hearing for the morning and I could go back to my office now and process at my pace.

I hastily scrawled my signature on the court order and walked out of the courtroom. My client was escorted out by the jail guard right behind me. Normally, inmates get their hands and feet shackled together before they step out. My client was completely unshackled. And normally, the jail guards waste no time heading to the security elevator they have exclusive access to, but my client was headed in the opposite direction.

I saw where he was going. His children had been sitting on a bench in the hallway. My client ran forward and bent down to embrace them both, and all I remember him exclaiming was “¡Niños!” The jail guard was calmly walking right behind this unfolding security breach beaming and carrying the shackled chain in his hands. My client finished hugging his children then promptly stood up and placed his hands behind his back to be shackled again. The guard and my client continued taking the long way to the security elevator.

I was awestruck by the unexpected display of humanity by the guard. I have no idea when they negotiated this, but he broke all kinds of protocol just to let my client have this brief embrace with his children.

I walked into the main elevators by myself, watched the doors close, and waited for the cab to start moving. Once I knew I was alone and safely insulated by several layers of steel and concrete, I finally let out the primal scream I had been holding in this whole time.

Once the heart palpitations calmed, I reflected on what transpired. I certainly would love to believe it was the Eleven Magic Words that did the trick that day — that would reflect well on my legal acumen and provide me a modicum of agency within this chaos. But that is a self-serving delusion that would also imbue the criminal justice system with a patina of legitimacy it has no rightful claim on.

In all likelihood, the judge changed her mind because fuck you — that’s why. They’re human after all, subject to the same tempestuous emotional storms as the rest of us, including the same impulses that might prompt you to idly fantasize about a horrific vehicular rending of the guy who just cut you off on the road. Despite that human fallibility, they’re nevertheless endowed with a terrific amount of real power over other people’s lives. Maybe if they’re addressed as “Your Honor” enough times per minute, they’ll believe it and act accordingly.

Or maybe I should jettison the fake humility and just take credit. Based purely on the sequence of events (I said something, a thing happened), I have a legitimate basis to exploit this story to flatter myself and impress attractive individuals. Yet this too has horrifying implications.

Either way, every day since, I wonder whether I will clock out at the end of the day as the mild-mannered widget inspector I normally am. Every morning I wonder whether that day has Eleven Magic Words and, if it does, whether I’ll be able to figure them out. And every day that potential scares the shit out of me.

And yet, I still do the work. I’m still a public defender.

Well, at least I thought that was funny.