A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time.
But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea.
What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea?
First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent. But high tariffs would reduce imports, so tariff rates would have to go even higher to realize the same amount of revenue, which would reduce imports even more, and so on. How high would tariffs have to go in the end? I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using highly Trump-favorable assumptions and came up with a tariff rate of 133 percent; in reality, there’s probably no tariff rate high enough to replace the income tax.
And to the extent that we did replace income taxes with tariffs, we’d in effect sharply raise taxes on working-class Americans while giving the rich a big tax cut — because the income tax is fairly progressive, falling most heavily on affluent taxpayers, while tariffs are de facto a kind of sales tax that falls most heavily on the working class.
So this is a really bad idea that would be highly unpopular if voters knew about it.
But here’s the kicker: How did the Republican National Committee respond when asked about it? By having its representative declare, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Now, economists have been saying that tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers for the past two centuries or so; I guess they’ve been working for China all along. Yes, there are exceptions and qualifications, but if you imagine that Trump is thinking about optimal tariff theory, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy.
Anyway, look at how the R.N.C. responded to a substantive policy question: by insisting not just that Dear Leader’s nonsense is true, but that anyone who disagrees is part of a sinister conspiracy.
Don’t brush this off. It’s one more piece of evidence that MAGA has become a dangerous cult.
It barely got a mention in the press.
This is how Trump wins. He says ridiculous things, his cult lieutenants all chime in that the emperors clothes are beautifully tailored and the press moves on. No other politician in the world could get away with this.
Supreme Court building, Washington, DC, USA. Front facade. Photo by Daderot via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain.)
The National Review comments on the remaining decisions to come out of the Supreme Court:
The Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver opinions this Thursday and Friday. There should be 21 opinions remaining because there are 23 cases left, including two pairs (the Chevron challenges and the Florida and Texas social-media laws) that are consolidated and likely to be decided together. We will likely get at least five or six opinions this week, maybe as many as nine. The Court will need to schedule more opinion days next week, probably at least three of them if it intends to wrap up the term by the end of the week; otherwise, it could spill over to July 1 or 2.
NR provides a handy chart of what’s left. Notice what’s at the bottom:
For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.
On Feb. 28, the justices agreed to hear Mr. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. The court scheduled oral arguments in the case for the end of April. That eight-week interval is much quicker than the ordinary Supreme Court briefing process, which usually extends for at least 10 weeks. But it’s considerably more drawn out than the schedule the court established earlier this year on a challenge from Colorado after that state took Mr. Trump off its presidential primary ballot. The court agreed to hear arguments on the case a mere month after accepting it and issued its decision less than a month after the argument. Mr. Trump prevailed, 9-0.
Nearly two months have passed since the justices heard lawyers for the former president and for the special counsel’s office argue the immunity case. The court is dominated by conservatives nominated by Republican presidents. Every passing day further delays a potential trial on charges related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol; indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikely a verdict will be delivered before the election.
“As of Tuesday, 110 days had passed since the court agreed to hear the Trump immunity case. And still no decision,” Litman observes.
Who thinks this is an accident? What are odds SCOTUS issues the Trump decision July 2?
Daniel Dale of CNN by now has got to be burned out fact-checking the firehose of false and misleading statements made by the immediate past president at every rally. Dale’s ability to do it in near-real-time has always impressed. But to have that as a job? He runs through 30 of Trump’s lies/exaggerations/misstatements from his Tuesday rally in Racine, Wisconsin in the clip below.
Even more soul-sapping, as Tom Nichols puts it, is that millions of people who live next door lap it up like cream from a saucer, “willfully blinding” themselves to the truth, as Peter Wehner put it, or exhibiting “motivated unreasoning” as I did.
The soul-sapping part of this is not that Trump is lying; he's emotionally unstable and that's what he does. It's the millions of people, as @Peter_Wehner wrote, who intentionally close their eyes to it and thus choose to live in the lies.https://t.co/NcFfi7nOMjhttps://t.co/GgZlHbKIUX
Brian Klaas posted Tuesday about “service magicians” still employed in Europe in the late Middle Ages:
But what we can know is that the service magicians of the medieval period—the cunning folk who professed an ability to harness magical forces to help others—were a more rational and effective form of recourse to manipulate the world to our whims than the modern multi-billion dollar industry of manifesting, the “laws of attraction,” and costly crystals allegedly infused with magical forces.
“Visualize Whirled Peas” lampoons the notion that thoughts can manifest reality.
Close your eyes. Visualize a pizza. With green peppers, onions, and pepperoni (that’s me). It’s right there on the coffee table. In an open pizza box from your favorite joint down the street. Smell it. Taste it, in your mind. Think hard. But you’ll still have to order it and pick it up if you expect to eat it.
Globally, roughly 40 percent of humans still believe in witchcraft, defined as “an ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Four-in-ten Americans believe in the power of psychics, with a similar number agreeing that spiritual powers can be embedded in physical objects. A quarter of Americans believe in the power of astrology and the global astrology industry was estimated to be worth $12.8 billion in 2021, growing to $22 billion by 2031.
More recently, the practice of “manifesting,” in which aspirational thoughts are said to exert causal power on the physical world, has exploded. TikTok videos attest to the power of “scripting”—similar to the usage of Abracadabra in the distant past—in which writing down desires for wealth, or a crush to text you back, is said to bend reality to the power of the word and the mystical force of mental energy. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on “healing crystals,” a practice that dates back to the writings of Plato and, perhaps, the Sumerians.
Interest in such methods of asserting supernatural control over the natural world surged during the coronavirus pandemic, as can be seen from Google search results below for, respectively, “manifesting” and “crystals.” Both spiked after March 2020—with manifesting remaining extraordinarily popular today.
It’s amazing how “Bible-believing” Christians decry witchcraft while thinking that by cranking in the right incantation from their holy book and believing really hard they can make the creator of the universe pop out of his box like Jack and give them what they want. Magical thinking is everywhere.
Alvin Toffler’s best-selling “Future Shock” (1970) postulated that “too much change in too short a period of time” leaves people (and whole societies) “disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation.’ ” What I witnessed in studying the New Age Movement (circa 1993) was a subculture disconnected from the modern world and retreating into a mystical, less-threatening past:
People are desperate for something in which they can believe. Communities have disappeared, replaced by subdivisions and condominiums. Terrorism and human rights abuses are more visible than ever. Anything you eat, drink or breathe might produce cancer. Science has reduced life to a cold set of mechanistic principles, demythologizing the world and stripping life of the meaning our myths once conveyed. The world seems to be coming apart and we are powerless to stop it. Nothing feels right anymore.
Is it any wonder people need something, some way to get control in their lives, some way to overcome our sense of powerlessness and paranoia? (Empowerment has become a hot term lately, both in enlightenment and legislative circles.) But in the absence of feeling that we can affect changes in our lives, we find solace in the notion that that power might exist somewhere else. It is as if we awakened to find ourselves locked in the trunk of a car careening down a mountain road. We desperately need to believe someone is behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is more comfort than no one at all.
Believing in a strong man on the heels of the country electing its first Black president has appeal for another subculture. And doing “your own research” into quack remedies for during a global pandemic. Science and pointy-headed intellectuals who know things are untrustworthy. “Is it any wonder” that in a changing America that the Trump cult yearns to manifest a less-threatening world in which they are once again unchallenged atop the social hierarchy.
Trump may have learned his bare-knuckles tactics from Roy Cohn, but he learned manifesting from Norman Vincent Peale, the guru of positive thinking who officiated Trump’s first wedding and whose sermons the Fred Trump family heard on Sundays in Manhattan (Politico):
“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.”
Subsequent rules tell the reader to avoid “fear thoughts,” “never think of yourself as failing,” summon up a positive thought whenever “a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind,” “depreciate every so-called obstacle,” and “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.”
The New Age, positive thinking, etc., were once isolated to powerless subcultures and, as Douglas Adams quipped, “mostly harmless.” Not now, Klaas continues:
These practices, which some may dismiss as useless and backward, often form a patchwork of valuable, meaningful rituals for the participants. They have intrinsic value as a social bonding exercise and a way of articulating shared aspirations. It doesn’t really matter, per se, if they work.
But the crucial point is this: scared soldiers carrying talismans in trenches, or islanders constructing fake radar dishes to erect physical embodiments of their hopes, do not directly harm others, nor do they cast blame on victims for lived misfortune.
The same is no longer true of our mysticism.
This creates an upside-down interpretation of how we normally consider the superstitious past, in which we wrongly presume that we, not our ancestors, are the rational ones. But from service magicians to ordeals, medieval superstitions were both more rational and less harmful than many spiritual practices that dominate modern culture.
Alvin Toffler theorized that too much change in too short a time can produce physical illness. Maybe. And maybe not just physical illness. Carl Jung spoke of a collective unconscious. If it exists, perhaps it is not so adaptable to rapid change either. What might it look like to go through life in the 21st century with a collective unconscious lagging a couple of centuries behind the times?
Setoodeh: Trump seemed to think he still had some foreign policy powers. There was one day where he told me he needed to go upstairs to deal with Afghanistan even though he clearly didn’t pic.twitter.com/e17xnz3okg
It’s the Summer of Trump in the House of Representatives, where Republican lawmakers have flooded the chamber with bills and resolutions honoring the former president, convicted felon and 2024 GOP frontrunner.
These largely symbolic gestures are a way to get noticed by the Republican powerhouse, who can make or break politicians with his endorsements, according to a former member of Congress.
Earlier this month, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., introduced a bill requiring the U.S. Treasury to start printing $500 bills again after 79 years, with the pricey legal tender now “featuring a portrait” of Trump in place of the late President William McKinley. Gosar said the proposal was meant to draw attention to high inflation under Joe Biden.
There’s cash, and then there’s gold.
In May, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., pushed a bill to award Trump the Congressional Gold Medal for his administration’s foreign policy successes.
“They’re all trying to curry favor from the former president,” said Fred Upton, a Republican who represented southwest Michigan in the House for 26 years before retiring in 2023. “They want to be recognized by him.”
Some are literally trying to put him on the map.
The real estate and reality TV billionaire has slapped his name on everything from skyscrapers to sneakers and Bibles, to a purported university that closed in 2010 and had to pay $25 million restitution over fraud allegations.Now, in the heat of a neck-in-neck presidential election, some members of Congress are looking to place important national real estate under the Trump brand.
On June 14, Rep. Greg Staube, R-Fla., put forward legislation to name the country’s coastal exclusive economic zone – an area of more than 4,383,000 square miles, bigger than the total U.S. land mass – for the former president.
Meanwhile, a bill to rename Dulles International Airport for Trump is awaiting action by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The Virginia airport is currently named for John Foster Dulles, who served as secretary of state under President Harry Truman in the early days of the Cold War.
Democrats have proposed naming a Florida federal prison after him. I think that’s fitting. Some garbage dumps could use a new name. But other than that, nothing.
These people are beyond help, I’m afraid. How embarrassing for their families.
According to the latest FBI data, violent crime and property crime are down sharply in 2024. The new data shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%). These declines follow steep drops in violent crime and property crime in 2023.
There are two key factors. First, high-profile politicians are constantly making false claims about crime rates in the United States. For example, speaking at a Black church in Detroit last Saturday, former President Trump said the following:
We’ll bring back public safety and defend our communities for law-abiding American citizens. The crime is most rampant right here in African American communities. And more people see me, and they say, “Sir, we want protection. We want the police to protect us. We don’t want to get robbed, and mugged, and beat up, or killed because we want to walk across the street and buy a loaf of bread.” They want it so badly. Fake news doesn’t talk about it.
But most people do not watch Trump deliver remarks live. The second factor creating misconceptions about crime is how these comments are covered by major media outlets. Here is how Trump’s remarks were covered in the Washington Post:
Note that if readers simply read this headline, they would not know that Trump’s claims about “rampant crime” are false. Worse, you would not know that Trump’s claims about crime are false if you read the entire article. You do learn that “recent polls show Trump has made gains with Black men, alarming some Democrats because even a small change in Black turnout or preferences could tip such pivotal states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.”
The Washington Post also notes that the event included two Black men Trump is considering as his running mate, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson (R) and Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL). The piece also criticizes Trump for “playing on racial stereotypes, such as his suggestion that Black voters will look more favorably on his candidacy now that he has a mug shot and has faced criminal prosecution.” But accurate information on crime in Detroit — and the nation — is completely missing.
It should have been in the headline and it should have been blaring. It’s not just irresponsible journalism, it’s a huge disservice to their readers. It’s downright cruel to amplify this liar’s fear mongering and help him scare the hell out of the population when things are actually getting demonstrably better. It’s very good news that the crime rate is plunging but I guess it isn’t as sexy as passing on Trump’s lies.
It shouldn’t be this hard to tell people the truth.
The result, hitting TV sets across the country on Monday, was the campaign’s unleashing of its sharpest attack ad yet, depicting Trump as a “convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.” And the campaign says it’s just the start. Biden advisers say they plan to hammer Trump over the coming weeks — aiming to both set up a favorable narrative ahead of next week’s debate and keep Trump’s felony conviction top-of-mind for voters who haven’t yet fully tuned into the election.
“We’ve seen in polling since the conviction that the more the conviction is front and center in voters’ attention, the worse it is for Trump,” said a Biden campaign pollster granted anonymity to describe internal polling because they were not authorized to do so publicly.
The pollster said their research concluded that Trump’s conviction could effectively be used in a broader depiction of Trump as being self-centered and unwilling to take responsibility for his actions.
“Trump has dug his own hole deeper on the convictions,” the pollster said, “and we’re seeing him pay the price for that in the polling.”
Twenty-one percent of independents surveyed by Politico and Ipsos said they believe the verdict is an important issue in determining their vote and that they are now less likely to support Trump.
Among other independents who consider the conviction an important factor, 10% said it would not impact their vote while 5% said it would make them more likely to back Trump. Sixty-five percent of independents said the verdict is not important to how they will vote.
While Republican voters have largely continued to express support for Trump since the verdict and Democrats have remained critical, the poll sheds light on how independents — the all-important swing voters the candidates are vying for — view Trump today.
Among all voters, a plurality of 38% say Trump’s conviction is unlikely to affect their support for the presumptive Republican nominee. But about twice as many respondents — 33% — said they are less likely to support Trump than those who said they are more likely to support him — 17%.
It’s a problem for him, no doubt about it. And it’s not just the conviction. It’s the message that he cares more about himself than he cares about the country, which is obvious. When you put that explicitly as we hear him whining incessantly about how unfair everything is and his ongoing denials of ever doing anything wrong, it just has the ring of truth.
Republican voters know that, they just can’t admit it. They bought the line of a criminal conman and that’s really hard to come to terms with.
I mentioned this the other day but now it’s official. President Biden is announcing today that he will legalize the undocumented immigrant spouses of American citizens:
President Biden on Tuesday is announcing a large-scale immigration program that will offer legal status and a streamlined path to U.S. residency and citizenship to roughly half a million unauthorized immigrants married to American citizens.
The Department of Homeland Security policy will allow these immigrants to apply for work permits and deportation protections if they have lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years and meet other requirements, senior administration officials said during a call with reporters.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Mr. Biden’s move will unlock a path to permanent residency — colloquially known as a green card — and ultimately U.S. citizenship for many of the program’s beneficiaries. The policy, if upheld in court, would be the largest government program for undocumented immigrants since the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, which currently shields 528,000 so-called “DREAMers” who were brought to the U.S. as children from deportation.
Mr. Biden is slated to announce the measure at a White House event on Tuesday marking the 12th anniversary of DACA, alongside another move to make it easier for employers to sponsor “DREAMers” and other undocumented immigrants for work visas.
You will note that this, like all policies, must be upheld in court so who knows if it will actually come to pass. (And people will inevitably blame Joe Biden for being the failure who couldn’t get it done.) It would be very much be preferable to have this done legislatively but I think we know that MAGA will not let that happen right now.
This is the right thing to do. If someone has been in the US for 10 years and is married to an American — and in many cases has American children — they should be allowed to stay and work here. It’s the practical and humane thing to do.
The other side, by the way, wants to deport them and if they have to deport their American spouses and kids too, well that would just be collateral damage. Trump is all prepared for it saying often on the campaign trail that they’ll be deporting “beautiful women and children.”
John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.
I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it's too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB
Project 2025 is hundreds of pages long and it’s difficult to get through. And that’s just for starters. There’s more in it every day. So this run-down by John Oliver is about as short and succinct and explanation possible. If you have a few minutes it’s well worth watching. You might want to have a drink handy…
Cutman Jacob “Stitch” Duran administers treatment to fighter Vladimir Klitschko. Photo via Wkimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
A high school friend was raised a good Southern Baptist. “We couldn’t cuss in the house,” he said. “Except you could say ‘damn yankee,’ because that’s just what they were.”
The Biden campaign is taking that approach with Donald Trump: A convicted criminal is just what he is.
Donald Trump is only out for himself. I'm fighting for the American people.
Ankush Khardori, a senior writer for Politico Magazine, speaks with Greg Sargent about a Politico poll “with some pretty big surprises: A larger-than-expected percentage of Americans say Donald Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan makes them less likely to vote for him.”
Thirty-three percent of respondents said that the conviction made them less likely to support Trump, while only 17 percent of respondents said that it made them more likely to support Trump.
“Support” is one thing. Voting is another.
Twenty-two percent of respondents said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them less likely to support Trump. Only 6 percent of respondents took the other side of that question — reporting that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
A nearly identical net-negative effect showed up among independents. Twenty-one percent of independents reported that they were less likely to support Trump and that the conviction is important to their vote. Just 5 percent of them said that the conviction is important to how they will vote and that it makes them more likely to support Trump.
Trump is cut over the eye. Now, work the eye, people. Retweet, repost, re-whatever on every platform you follow. (Biden-Harris is not on all platforms.)
“The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees — two more. [Trump has] already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of the rights of individuals,” President Joe Biden told Jimmy Kimmel during a Los Angeles fundraiser over the weekend (CNN):
“The idea that if he’s reelected he’s going to appoint two more flying flags upside down,” Biden said in an apparent reference to a flag that once flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. Asked by Kimmel whether he considered this the scariest part of a second Trump term, Biden responded, “It is one of the scariest parts.”
Federal courts are not the only ones on the fall ballot. Only a handful of state do not elect judges in some manner. After Republicans won a 5-2 majority on North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, they quickly reversed cases decided in the last court session, “one blocking a photo ID law and one striking down partisan gerrymandered maps.” Justice Anita Earls, a former civil rights attorney, decried the move as a “process driven by partisan influence and greed for power.”
“In a single blow, the majority strips millions of voters of this state of their fundamental, constitutional rights and delivers on the threat that ‘our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench.’ ”
Your state similar? Pay attention to those down-ballot races.
ProPublica has been busy examining conservative thumbprints on the scales of justice. In North Carolina, just by coincidence:
Last fall, out of public view, the North Carolina Supreme Court squashed disciplinary action against two Republican judges who had admitted that they had violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the decisions.
One of the judges had ordered, without legal justification, that a witness be jailed. The other had escalated a courtroom argument with a defendant, which led to a police officer shooting the defendant to death. The Judicial Standards Commission, the arm of the state Supreme Court that investigates judicial misconduct by judges, had recommended that the court publicly reprimand both women. The majority-Republican court gave no public explanation for rejecting the recommendations — indeed, state law mandates that such decisions remain confidential.
North Carolina’s disciplinary procedures are unusually opaque, ProPublica reports (note my bolding):
Since 2011, North Carolina’s Judicial Standards Commission has referred 19 cases to the Supreme Court for judicial discipline, according to the court’s annual reports. In that time, the court has issued 17 public disciplinary orders, ranging from reprimands to suspensions without pay.
Had the Supreme Court followed the commission’s recommendations in the cases of the two Republican judges, it would have meant publicly reprimanding them ahead of elections for both in 2024. Judge Lori Hamilton, a longtime Republican, had campaigned with the slogan, “the ideal conservative.” Judge Caroline Burnette had previously been a Democrat — but she switched her registration before her case got to the Supreme Court, according to public records.
See ProPublica for the details of those cases. But ICYMI:
Months after the Supreme Court decided in the fall of 2023 to let Hamilton and Burnette off without public consequences, it issued its most recent disciplinary order. In March 2024, the court concurred with the commission’s recommendation for punishment of Angela Foster, a Black Democratic judge who had pressured a court official to reduce a bond for her son and had taken over a courtroom reserved for other court officials, thereby delaying over 100 cases. The Supreme Court suspended her without pay for 120 days.
By the way, Earls has been a target:
In March 2023, Earls, the Supreme Court’s lone Black justice and a Democrat, received a letter from the commission informing her that she was under investigation. The letter stated that Earls had been accused of disclosing “confidential information concerning matters being currently deliberated in conference by the Supreme Court.” If the commission found evidence of a serious violation, it could send the case to the Supreme Court, which would make a final determination and could go as far as to expel her.
At the center of the anonymous complaint was the allegation that Earls had told lawmakers and state bar members at two different meetings about proposed rule changes that would give more power to the Republican justices. The complaint, which was made after WRAL News published an article describing the meetings, also alleged that she’d provided confidential information to a reporter.
In her response to the letter, which later was filed in court, her lawyer argued that it had been standard practice for justices to discuss the court’s rule changes with affected parties and that no information had been leaked. Earls’ lawyer also wrote that if the matter proceeded to a hearing, Earls planned to make the investigation public and subpoena “current and former Justices” about their “actions.” In May, the commission dismissed the complaint, providing Earls with verbal and written warnings “to be mindful of your public comments,” according to court documents.
In June, Earls, the only person of color on the court, gave an interview to Law360 in which she criticized Chief Justice Paul Newby and other conservative justices for refusing to address the lack of diversity in the state’s court system. She revealed that Newby had effectively killed its Commission on Fairness and Equity by not reappointing its members and that he had ended implicit bias trainings for judges, which Earls had helped set up. Much of the interview was framed around a Law360 analysis and an outside study that found that the vast majority of state appellate court judges, and the attorneys arguing before them, were white and male. In reference to the findings, Earls said that “our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.” She said that her five Republican colleagues “very much see themselves as a conservative bloc” and that “their allegiance is to their ideology, not to the institution.”
In August, Earls received another letter from the commission alerting her that it had “reopened” the former investigation. The letter warned: “Publicly alleging that another judge makes decisions based on a motivation not allowed under” the code, such as racial or political biases, without “definitive proof runs contrary to a judge’s duty to promote public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.”
Rather than letting the investigation proceed in secret again, Earls sued the commission in federal court, seeking an injunction to stop “an on-going campaign” by the commission to “stifle the First Amendment free-speech rights of Justice Earls and expose her to punishment.”
Two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Democratic state lawmakers held a press conference to call the investigation into Earls “a political hit job” — and one state representative accused Newby of pushing it, though he said he could not reveal his sources. Four sources knowledgeable about Newby’s or the commission’s actions told ProPublica that the chief justice encouraged the investigation. The sources requested anonymity because the inner workings of the commission are confidential and because they feared retaliation.
I live in one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy” in which a GOP-legislative offense wreaks havoc in the capitol while minority Democrats are perpetually on defense. I spent 2016 telling progressives President Hillary can’t solve my legislature problem; President Bernie can’t either. WE have to solve that problem. Here.
That doesn’t just apply to red legislatures but to red courts in your state too.
