The Supreme Court as a Republican Cell and the luxury of having last straws
Along with other great things I found on the net this week.
Well as I’ve added to this update over the week, I’ve kept squeezing things in because they shouldn't be left out. The result — a longish, crackerjack weekly update. (Though I’ve held off on some things till the next update.)
John Nash: into the light …
I'm enjoying this book on John Nash - in bookshops now.
As a young artist he went to war and pained these famous cries from the heart.
At home in 1918 he painted this
For a further treat, follow this up with this article on Nash’s WWII artistry. Recognisably the same artist, but so very different.
The Supreme Court: Into the darkness …
I was alerted to how good this podcast was by the Australian Statistician (AO). I’m obviously going to follow up a recommendation from a source like that and I wasn’t disappointed. It is truly creepy how the right have betrayed the most fundamental tennets of conservatism (which, as you know is dear to our hearts here at I Know Nothing Headquarters in Port Melbourne).
Some of the most telling points for me:
1. When Republican appointed judges had a 5-4 majority, their judgements were quite likely to disappoint Republicans from time to time. You know, the way this is normal in every other democratic country to this day. But there’s clearly been a phase transition.
2. When Ezra discusses the ‘cheap punditry’ from Justice Kennedy’s Citizens United Judgement
So he writes, “we now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”
He goes on to say, “the fact that speakers — by which he means here donors — may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt.” Then, he goes on to say, “the appearance of influence or access furthermore will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” And I don’t understand how you can see that as anything but punditry — I mean, bad punditry. I would be embarrassed to make that argument.
But nevertheless, it is a crucial decision, that is not in any way that I can tell, truly a legal decision, much like John Roberts decides racism isn’t that bad anymore, Justice Kennedy decides political corruption isn’t that bad anymore.
Ezra calls what he quotes an ‘argument’, but to me anyway, it reads like a Papal statement of doctrine.
3. I had thought that, jealous of his legacy as Chief Justice, Roberts was more moderate than the other Republican operatives on the Court, but he’s certainly been amongst it in retreating from basic safeguards of democratic norms. Here’s Katie Shaw, Ezra’s guest:
Sure. So in [Shelby County v. Holder], the court … strikes down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had a couple of key provisions, … one of the most important of which was a requirement that [certain] states — … where there were serious histories of racial — and also later, language discrimination in voting, … were required to get permission either from the Federal Department of Justice or a federal court before changing … voting arrangements. And the court struck down … the formula that indicated what parts of the country were covered by this.
And again, as I said, it did it based on this completely invented constitutional principle. And in some ways, as troublingly, by substituting its judgment for the judgment of Congress, which had just virtually unanimously reenacted the Voting Rights Act, about what was necessary and whether continuing racial discrimination in voting warranted the continuation of this regime. And from a constitutional law perspective, one of the things that was the most disturbing about the case was that this is a Roberts majority opinion, and Roberts just basically says, well, I disagree with Congress. I disagree that the Voting Rights Act is still necessary. I disagree that racism endures, at least in the way that Congress decided it endured, in a way that warrants allowing this regime to continue. And there’s never really articulated what the standard of review is — like, I disagree has not ever been the basis for the court to strike down an act of Congress, right?
Breathtaking stuff.
The republic: a way forward?
This was a great conversation with a friend of mine Sam Roggeveen in which Sam solves the dilemma of how to get to a republic once and for all! Sam argues we're mistaking decline in the party system for the decline of democracy.
I think the foundations of democracy have been under attack for a generation or more. We both agree that social media has accelerated the decline.
What’s going on in the US is a crucial test for Sam's case (about which, more below!). We both think that citizens’ juries and similar institutions have a lot to offer.
Then Sam comes up with a novel solution to the republican dilemma! Allow the people to choose the president but rather than an election for the president, have them selected by a citizens’ assembly.
We then offer our advice to the government and to the independents. Apologies for the syching of Sam's sound and vision. Audio is available here.
Liz Cheney is Narrating the January 6 Story
“I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t.”
Woman from Arizona
With fast-foodification in the process of destroying our democracy, the January 6th hearings are being fast-foodified. I’m not sure I’d say that they’re engineered to maximise ‘trust’, but it’s an interesting new turn in our infotainment age. It certainly makes the hearings more effective.
The hearings offer not just a single point or argument that can be disputed, but instead seek to embed all of the different facts into a coherent narrative. This is an evolving story, a puzzle being put together using a range of different pieces. The story begins not when Trump lost the election, but when people whom he knew well—his daughter Ivanka, adviser Jared Kushner, and Attorney General Bill Barr being the most notable—told him that he had lost. Having established that truth, the committee went on to show how, despite having been told that he had lost, Trump sought to steal the election anyway. Each phase leads to the next, and all of them are bound together by one narrator: Representative Liz Cheney. …
Equally important is the fact that this narrative is being offered in a format that people can understand. Yes, these hearings are being run much like a Netflix series. They have a plot. It has twists and surprises—for example, the unexpected appearance of Cassidy Hutchinson, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s executive assistant, who happened to be in several rooms where things were happening on January 6. “Episodes” sometimes end with cliffhangers—for example, Cheney’s hints yesterday that later hearings may reveal attempts to intimidate witnesses. Each set of hearings is short, offering the story in bite-size chunks that people can absorb and then discuss before moving on. Bits of the story are sometimes leaked in advance on social media, in order to get the audience’s attention. Themes from one hearing recur in later hearings—for example, the many people around Trump who sought pardons, knowing that they had broken the law.
Meanwhile: from the fightback Liz Cheney is Narrating the January 6 Story
“I think what convinced me more that the election was fixed was how vehemently they have said it wasn’t.”
Woman from Arizona
With fast-foodification in the process of destroying our democracy, the January 6th hearings are being fast-foodified. I’m not sure I’d say that they’re engineered to maximise ‘trust’, but it’s an interesting new turn in our infotainment age. It certainly makes the hearings more effective.
The hearings offer not just a single point or argument that can be disputed, but instead seek to embed all of the different facts into a coherent narrative. This is an evolving story, a puzzle being put together using a range of different pieces. The story begins not when Trump lost the election, but when people whom he knew well—his daughter Ivanka, adviser Jared Kushner, and Attorney General Bill Barr being the most notable—told him that he had lost. Having established that truth, the committee went on to show how, despite having been told that he had lost, Trump sought to steal the election anyway. Each phase leads to the next, and all of them are bound together by one narrator: Representative Liz Cheney. …
Equally important is the fact that this narrative is being offered in a format that people can understand. Yes, these hearings are being run much like a Netflix series. They have a plot. It has twists and surprises—for example, the unexpected appearance of Cassidy Hutchinson, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s executive assistant, who happened to be in several rooms where things were happening on January 6. “Episodes” sometimes end with cliffhangers—for example, Cheney’s hints yesterday that later hearings may reveal attempts to intimidate witnesses. Each set of hearings is short, offering the story in bite-size chunks that people can absorb and then discuss before moving on. Bits of the story are sometimes leaked in advance on social media, in order to get the audience’s attention. Themes from one hearing recur in later hearings—for example, the many people around Trump who sought pardons, knowing that they had broken the law.
Boris
Helen Lewis takes up the story
And what a week. Within the space of ten minutes on Wednesday night, I both heard that Boris Johnson had sacked Michael Gove—revenge is a dished best served at the absolute last minute possible—and then saw this clip of Piers Morgan holding an actual greased piglet.
Nothing can beat British politics when things fall apart for sheer, parochial, smalltime weirdness. Take this clip: Steve Bray has been banned from shouting “stop Brexit” outside parliament—it qualifies as a “noisy protest” under new legislation—and so instead, because Hugh Grant yes THAT Hugh Grant dared him to, he played the Benny Hill theme tune every time a Tory minister tried to explain what was going on.
Two of my favourite moments there. A close third was when Nadhim Zahawi’s first act using his new Treasury headed notepaper was to call for Boris Johnson to resign after all. A reverse ferret for the ages.
Best of all, this being British politics not American politics meant that absolutely no one involved was carrying a weapon more deadly than a badly photographed letter. Just highly enjoyable. No notes. This must be what other people see in football.
Helen
PS. I wrote about what felled Boris Johnson in the end: lies, bad jokes and numbers.
Death comes for the Downing Street Entertainer
[Written before death did finally come!] I’ve always admired good journalists’ ability to pump out highly readable, thoughtful stuff at incredibly short notice. Like this excellent piece from Bernard Keane which seems to be unpaywalled. He points to the parallels between Boris and our very own #ScoMo, their complete lack of interest in anything beyond the impression the next media grab makes. But behaviour that extreme is very likely to end in tears.
Yet for me what the switch to entertainment shows is how little damage the endless chaos does the entertainers’ political fortunes compared to what you’d expect and hope for. In other words all that’s needed to finish the job for these guys is a modicum of competence or even the ability to delegate to the competent. Boris will be removed and the Conservatives will get themselves a new leader and
If the end of the Johnson era is now in sight, the Conservative party should not expect to find much closure in it. For everything that can be said of Boris Johnson’s appointment of Chris Pincher – that he knew enough to guess this would become a political problem, that he should have thought about the example it set, that political expediency shouldn’t trump the wider interest – is uncannily also true of the Conservative party’s appointment three years ago of one Boris Johnson. They knew what he was, hired him anyway, and have yet to take responsibility for the consequences. How ironic, if this is what it takes for the penny to start dropping.
A classic worthy of John Clarke
The Delightful Implosion of Boris Johnson
A perspective from the NYT in the failed state:
Both Pincher and Johnson obviously behaved egregiously. The quaint part is the near universal condemnation of their behavior, and the widespread acknowledgment that, after years of bullying and dishonesty, Johnson’s dissembling was the final straw. Imagine having final straws!
I felt similarly wistful contemplating Partygate … Americans largely became inured to hypocrisy, even if they still felt the need to denounce it. Everyone I spoke to, though, told me that the outrage was real. … Intolerance of hypocrisy implies a democratic sensibility …. Johnson’s career is ending, at least for now, the way Trump’s should have ended — with public revulsion leading his own party to oust him. Like Trump, Johnson initially wanted to cling to power when it was no longer feasible; unlike with Trump. … “We deserve a better class of bastards,” Dunt said on the podcast. We all do. Still, as an American, I have to say: Be thankful for what you’ve got.
Boris is off and running on voter suppression
Correction on Friday “Boris WAS off and running”. Still I presume conservatism won’t be what the Conservatives are thinking about.
This spring UK democracy suffered a severe setback. The Elections Bill—which slid onto the statute book in late April—contains the most draconian electoral provisions seen in living memory. It will introduce photo ID in polling stations, which could effectively disenfranchise millions of Britons. … The new law will make voting impossible for those—disproportionately poor and from ethnic minority backgrounds—who do not have identification and are unwilling, or unable, to navigate the bureaucracy for obtaining it.
Voter fraud in the UK is vanishingly rare, so the new measures seemed like a solution in search of a problem. … But there is genuine public concern about the risk of fraud in elections.…
[However] In future, the UK government will issue a regular strategy and policy statement outlining its electoral priorities, which the Commission will be bound by law to follow—whether these relate to political finance, guidance for electoral administrators or anything else, and no matter how objectionable they are. All commissioners but one objected to this proposal in a letter to ministers in February; it was pushed through anyway.
Some downtime at the Candidates
Meanwhile the Candidates tournament — which determines who plays the World Champion Magnus Carlsen for the World Chess Championship has been going on in Madrid. The greatest female player of all time Judit Polgar was passing some time in the park (she’s easily my favourite commentator on the games, spotting astonishing tactical possibilities in seconds. Much better than the others.) And who should she bump into? The greatest male player of all time (maybe!).*
* If Bobby Fischer wasn’t the greatest player of all time, he was certainly the most astonishing!
Apology: From the Department of D’Oh!
My friend David Charles responded to my podcast with Peyton last week.
Having just got back from 2 weeks in Switzerland I was intrigued by your comment about no-one knowing the names of Swiss Prime Ministers.
Perhaps that’s because they have a President of the Federal Council which is the National Cabinet. They don’t have a Prime Minister.
There have been some pretty interesting Presidents. Carefully chosen to be German, French and Italian Swiss and in recent times women as well as men.
He is right of course as I replied:
Oops!
I meant presidents!
And the point of what I said was to highlight the tradition of rotating presidents of the council through one year terms.
But I promise to brush up before making any further comments on the subject!