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Tag Archives: Republican Party

How Right Wing Lawyers Get Guaranteed “Justice”

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If you want to start a lawsuit in a federal court, you file a complaint with the clerk of the court. It will cost you $350. But what if you want your case to be handled by a sympathetic judge? That can be more complicated. This is what the federal courts website says:

Judge assignment methods vary. The basic considerations in making assignments are to assure equitable distribution of caseloads and avoid judge shopping.

Shopping for a judge? That means trying to get your case in front of the judge or judges you want.

By statute, the chief judge of each district court has the responsibility to enforce the court’s rules and orders on case assignments. Each court has a written plan or system for assigning cases. The majority of courts use some variation of a random drawing. One simple method is to rotate the names of available judges. At times judges having special expertise can be assigned cases by type…. Sometimes cases may be assigned based on geographical considerations. 

But if you want to avoid those complications and be almost 100% certain of winning your case, there’s an easy way. From Stephen Vladek’s “Don’t Let Republican Judge Shoppers Thwart the Will of Voters” for the New York Times:

For the 26th time in two years, Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, recently filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Biden administration policy. The suit, which seeks to wipe out a new Labor Department rule…, wasn’t filed in Austin, the state capital, or in Dallas, where the Labor Department’s regional offices are, or anywhere else with a logical connection to the dispute.

It was filed in Amarillo. Why Amarillo? By filing there, Mr. Paxton had a 100 percent chance of having the case assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — appointed to the bench by President [Orange Menace] in 2019 and a former deputy general counsel to the First Liberty Institute, which frequently litigates religious liberty cases before the Supreme Court.

Judge Kacsmaryk is the Republican proponent of forced birth who recently ruled that no American woman should be allowed to end an early unwanted pregnancy by taking a pill. The group that filed the lawsuit wanted him to hear their case so they filed it in Amarillo, Texas, where Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge. They knew he’d be on their side, but they also knew something else. He would issue a nationwide injunction, not one limited to the panhandle of Texas, which he’s responsible for.

Mr. Vladeck explains why a plaintiff like the ironically-named “Alliance Defending Freedom” was able to get away with this assault on women’s freedom:

For decades, Congress has split up many of the 94 federal district courts into smaller divisions and has left it to each district court to decide how to divvy up cases among its divisions. Texas’ federal courts, in turn, have distributed their judges unevenly. Of the 27 divisions in Texas’ four district courts, nine have a single judge; 10 others have only two.

Although other states require judges to move around from time to time to avoid judge shopping, Texas doesn’t. Thus, any new suit filed in Amarillo is sure to go to Judge Kacsmaryk, any new suit filed in Wichita Falls goes to Judge Reed O’Connor, and any new suit filed in Victoria goes to Judge Drew Tipton.

O’Connor is the Orange Menace-appointed clown who ruled that the entire Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional in 2018 and most recently ruled “against a part of the law that promises free preventive services to every American who has private health insurance” (Washington Post). Tipton is the Orange Menace-appointed clown who decided Biden couldn’t issue a 100-day moratorium on deportations and more recently “threw out a Department of Homeland Security policy that limits who immigration authorities can arrest and deport” (NPR).

These rulings are sometimes overturned, either by the Republican-heavy 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, or the Republican-heavy Supreme Court in Washington, but not often enough. Even when they’re eventually overturned, they affect people’s lives in the meantime. (Did you know that the last time there were more Democrats than Republicans on the Supreme Court was in August 1969, before we landed on the moon?)

Can something be done to end this blatant right-wing manipulation of the federal courts? In theory, Congress could manage the situation. But how likely is it that Republicans in Congress would agree to prohibit this kind of judge shopping that serves their political interests so well?

Aside from electing more Democrats, one thing we might do is convince a certain Your Honor to do something honorable. We can remind her that “the basic considerations in making [judicial] assignments are to assure equitable distribution of caseloads and avoid judge shopping”.

The federal court system is geographically divided into 12 circuits. The 5th Circuit handles cases filed in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The chief judge of the 5th Circuit is Priscilla Richman. Her duties include the the assignment of judges and the control of court calendars. If she chose to, she could make sure that cases like the ones Kacsmaryk, O’Connor and Tipton got, which had no good reasons to be filed in Amarillo, Witchita Falls or Victoria, Texas — aside from blatant judge shopping — were randomly assigned to one of the many judges in her circuit.

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Her mailing address is:

Chief Judge Priscilla Richman
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
600 Camp Street
New Orleans, LA 70130

Just like gerrymandering, which allows politicians to choose their voters, judge shopping allows lawyers to choose their judges. It’s not how the system is supposed to work. Judge Richman should be reminded of that (yeah, she’s another Republican, but at least she wasn’t appointed by the Orange Menace).

PS: For more on this issue, see “How Right Wing Judges in Texas Are Erasing Americans’ Rights Everywhere” by Michael Hiltzik for the Los Angeles Times.

They Call It “Polarization”

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During the pandemic, before Biden was elected, the unemployment rate for Whites peaked at 14%, while the rate for Blacks hit almost 17%. The rate for Whites is now 3.2% (almost the lowest in 50 years) and for Blacks is 5% (the lowest ever recorded). Despite this being the so-called “Information Age”, the overall rate for high school graduates who never went to college is only 4%. [Washington Post, Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Inflation is still high, but trending down. In June 2022, the consumer price index (CPI) reached 9%, meaning prices were 9% higher than in June 2021. As of this February, prices were 6% higher than a year before. The rate would be lower except that “housing costs are a key driver of the inflation figures [and] it typically takes six months for new rent data to be reflected in the CPI. The quirk in how housing cost data are collected contributes to overstating current inflation.” [CNBC] Meanwhile, inflation has been somewhat offset by the growth in wages. “In the 12 months through March, wages increased 4.2%.” [Reuters]

Companies and local governments are beginning to take advantage of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “the largest package of climate investments in US history”. [Sierra Club]

America is leading the international effort to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression. That’s been made easier by the fact that, after 20 years, we finally stopped fighting a war in Afghanistan.

And a month’s supply of insulin is now only $35 for millions of diabetics. [CNN]

Meanwhile, over on the other side:

Congressional Republicans are threatening to cause a financial crisis by not allowing the government to pay all of its debts. They are also demanding big cuts in spending without being able to agree on which cuts they want (after realizing that they couldn’t get away with cutting Medicare and Social Security, as they’ve wanted to do for years). [NBC News]

Republicans in some states are making it easier for schoolchildren to have jobs by loosening child labor laws. [Vox.com]

A Republican Supreme Court justice and his wife have been receiving lavish travel gifts from a right-wing billionaire for decades, although the justice has failed to report them. [ProPublica]

A Republican judge in Texas issued a nation-wide ban on the most popular way to end an unwanted, early pregnancy, even though the drug in question has been used for 23 years and is safer than Tylenol. In addition to banning its use, he would make it a federal crime to deliver the drug via the US Mail or any other delivery service. [Politico]

Republican legislators expelled two black members of the Tennessee House of Representatives after they interrupted the normal course of business to demand action on gun reform in the wake of the recent mass murder at a school in Nashville. [NPR]

Republican-controlled states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, have instituted statewide rules that require administrators to remove specific books from classrooms and school libraries. [CNN]

Republicans in Florida passed a law intended to prohibit classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity. [NBC News]

Republicans in Kansas now permit a student or their parent to sue a school if they believe they weren’t chosen for a sport because a transgender girl was chosen instead. [Verify]

Yes, America is indeed “polarized” because the Republican Party has become a radical, reactionary enemy of freedom, democracy and good government.

Greg Sargent of The Washington Post recognizes the problem but sees a silver lining:

Red states are sinking deeper into virulent far-right culture-warring — banning books, limiting classroom discussion of race and gender, and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender youth. [Republican] legislatures are also finding onerous ways to use power to tamp down on the unexpectedly ferocious dissent their culture war has unleashed among numerical minorities, largely concentrated in cities and suburbs in red states.

As analyst Ron Brownstein argues, this often pits an overwhelmingly White, older, rural and small-town Republican coalition against an increasingly diverse, younger and more urban coalition.

“These Republican legislatures are stacking sandbags against a rising tide,” Brownstein told CNN. Call it the retreat into Fortress MAGA.

This takes many forms. [They] have become particularly aggressive in pushing “preemption” laws restricting cities and counties from making their own rules or policy choices. In some cases, these could functionally block those localities from governing themselves democratically in more socially liberal ways on all kinds of issues.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis concocted a phony rationale to fire a local elected prosecutor over his abortion stance. DeSantis is also scrambling to exert power over Disney’s local governance structure to punish it for opposing his “don’t say gay” law, in effect using the state to retaliate against a corporation for responding to a genuine shift in the culture….

Yet this retreat into Fortress MAGA faces a problem: Whenever state-level Republicans undertake another reactionary lurch, it often goes national in a big way. Attention has poured down on everything from insanely broad book bans to shockingly harsh proposed punishments for abortion to anti-transgender crackdowns with truly creepy implications.

If the adage was “all politics is local,” we can now say that “all local politics is in danger of going viral.” And the more onerous the use of state power in these situations, the more attention it gets.

Tennessee illustrates the point: If Republicans hadn’t sought to expel the Tennessee 3, you might never have heard of them. As commentator Charlie Sykes puts it, Republicans both “look horrible” and have turned the Tennessee 3 into national “superstars.”

This sort of thing only perpetuates youthful awareness of — and resistance to — ongoing [right-wing] radicalization. Young voters often get their political news through this sort of viral circulation. All this will surely color their perceptions of the national [Republican Party]. Is this what Republicans want, after losing a Supreme Court race in ultra-divided Wisconsin by a stunning margin, partly because abortion rights drove uncommonly robust youth turnout?

The Republican retreat into Fortress MAGA will continue apace. But how high will Republicans have to build those walls?

And how hard will we have to fight to bring them down?

They’re Hard at Work All Around the Nation

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The political party that claims to support workers and “family values” is thinking not enough school children work in slaughterhouses. From The Guardian:

The governor of Arkansas signed a bill that rolls back protections against child labor, eliminating state requirements to verify that children are at least 16 before they receive a job.

In Ohio, lawmakers are considering a bill that would let 14- and 15-year-old children work year-round until 9pm each day.

Lawmakers in Minnesota have filed a bill that would permit children aged 16 and 17 to work construction jobs.

In Iowa, legislative proposals would allow children at least 15 years old to sell alcohol and children at least 14 years old to work specific jobs in meatpacking plants. The Iowa bill would also protect companies from liability if a child got sick or injured or died while at work.

Reports by the New York Times have exposed the hiring of migrant children to work dangerous jobs at factories and elsewhere, flouting federal law.

Meanwhile, the forced birth movement forges ahead. Who else can we jail when a woman ends a pregnancy, aside from doctors, nurses, pharmacists and Uber drivers?

For decades, the mainstream anti-abortion [i.e. forced birth] movement promised that it did not believe women who have abortions should be criminally charged. But now, Republican lawmakers in several US states have introduced legislation proposing homicide and other criminal charges for those seeking abortion care.

The bills have been introduced in states such as Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Some explicitly target medication abortion and self-managed abortion; some look to remove provisions in the law which previously protected pregnant people from criminalization; and others look to establish the fetus as a person from the point of conception.

Finally, the Sunshine State’s mini-Mussolini promises great things ahead. From press critic Margaret Sullivan:

The Florida governor Ron DeSantis likes to brag that he’s just getting started with his rightwing agenda…. He means it as a promise, but it ought to be heard as a threat. That’s particularly true for women whose abortion rights already are being dangerously curtailed and for gay and transgender students who are already being treated as lower life forms. It’s particularly true for those who care about voting rights and press rights, and for those who cherish the power of books and free expression as a foundation of societal well-being….

“DeSantis rules by an authoritarian playbook,” wrote Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago….

Let’s review some of what has happened on his watch with the help of a rubber-stamp Republican state legislature.

The Parental Rights in Education Act, better known as “don’t say gay”, prevents teachers from talking about gender identity and sexual orientation in some elementary-school grades.

The so-called Stop Woke Act restricts how race is discussed in Florida’s schools, colleges and even private workplaces.

Another law pulled a slew of books from public school libraries while they are reviewed for their supposed suitability…. 

Florida’s medical boards now bar transgender youth from gender-affirming medical care such as hormone therapy. State law bans most abortions beyond 15-weeks gestation; a new bill would tighten that to only six weeks.

And, of course, never forget that true liberty means ready access to guns: Florida residents may soon be able to carry firearms without a state license.

Governor courage-to-be-free also wants to limit press rights, including supporting a challenge to the landmark US supreme court decision that for decades has given journalists enough protection from defamation lawsuits to let them do their jobs.

When DeSantis signed into law new restrictions on voting rights, he did so in a room where local reporters were shut out. Fox News, however, got special access….

DeSantis also got his legislature to establish a new and completely unnecessary election crimes office. After the first few cases turned into a legal embarrassment, he got his rubber-stampers to change the law again.

That’s why it’s appalling to see the media lavish him with so much fawning coverage…. The media should be delving into the substance of [his] record, including the kitchen-table economic issues that have nothing to do with performative anti-woke nonsense, instead of letting DeSantis play at will on his favorite field of divisive social issues….

Given all of this, it’s a scary thought that he’s just getting started.

It’s said that the individual states of the Union are “laboratories of democracy”. They’re where policies are often proposed and tried out before they reach the national level.

It’s bad enough Republican experiments like these are happening all over the country. We’ve got to make sure they never escape the labs.

You’ve Probably Never Heard of “Murc’s Law”, But You’ve Seen It in Action Lots of Times

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Murc’s Law is “the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics”. In other words, Democrats are responsible for  Republicans being the way they are and doing the things they do, either because Democrats provoked them or failed to control them.

It came up recently because of an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled “My Liberal Campus Is Pushing Freethinkers to the Right”. (This widely-ridiculed article was written by a young man the Times identified as a “senior at Princeton”, not mentioning he’s a Republican activist).

Remember when people who live in the real world, especially Democrats, pointed out that not getting vaccinated would cause more people do die from Covid? And that hearing such a thing supposedly upset many Republicans who then decided not to get vaccinated?

Amanda Marcotte wrote about this peculiar phenomenon for Salon last year:

“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D____ T____’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012:

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Republicans are about to take power in the House of Representatives once again, and so, with exhausting predictability, we return to a Beltway narrative where none of the choices they will make with that power are their fault: It is somehow all because Democrats have failed to manage Republicans properly. Unsurprisingly, the latest example comes from Politico, which pins the blame for the rise of right-wing superstar Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene not on the voters who sent her to Congress or the GOP leaders who indulge her or the conservative media that celebrates her. Instead, Greene’s popularity with Republicans is laid at the feet of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

“Biden World once ignored Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now it’s making her the face of the GOP,” announces a headline in Politico. But of course Biden had nothing to do with that, because Republicans had already done it.

Going back to the Times article, David Roberts of the Volts podcast says it’s a perfect example:

Murc’s Law says, basically: only the left has agency; the right is merely reacting, having its hand forced, being “pushed” or “shaped.”

This is not some quirk, it is central to reactionary psychology. Every fascist (and fascist-adjacent) movement ever has told itself the same story: our opponents are destroying everything, they’re forcing us to this, we have no choice but violence.

It is, at a base level, a way of denying responsibility, of saying, “we know the shit we’re about to do is bad, but it’s not our fault, you made us.” Once you recognize the pattern it shows up *everywhere*. (If you know an abuser, you’ll also find it in their rhetoric.)

It’s one thing for reactionaries to cling to this … but what’s irksome is that right-wingers playing the refs have basically trained mainstream political journalists to echo it. It is laced throughout US political coverage.

One of my favorite examples … is the notion that Al Gore “polarized” climate change and thereby forced the right into decades of lies and demented conspiracy theories….  Why’d you do that to them, Al?!

Another instance is when it’s assumed that Democrats could have stopped Republicans from doing something bad if only they’d tried or tried harder or made stronger arguments. A commentator once joked:

… A few more BLISTERING speeches [from Democrats] and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have totally realized that upper-class tax cuts are wrong!

Headlines that obscure who did what are consistent with Murc’s Law. “Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades” — no, it was Supreme Court Republicans who did that. “Out of 18 pro-democracy bills in 2022, the US Senate filibuster torpedoed 17 of them” — no, it was Senate Republicans who torpedoed them. “What could happen if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit?” — no, what could happen if House Republicans don’t vote to raise it?

Likewise, there are events that mysteriously take place. I had one in the blog a few days ago:

The Washington Post said “the [train] derailment [in Ohio] erupted into a culture battle”, as if culture battles simply happen without any help from the people who specialize in starting them and getting them in “the news”.

Here’s an even more recent one. From Investopedia:

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing refers to a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments.

Environmental criteria consider how a company safeguards the environment, including corporate policies addressing climate change, for example. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates. Governance deals with a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

Senate Republicans and two Democrats (Manchin and Tester) voted to kill a Labor Department rule that allows investment managers to consider ESG. From Talking Points Memo:

We talk about this stuff a lot as part of the “culture wars,” but that bestows a legitimizing gloss on it, as if there is some deeper, truer cultural dispute. There’s not. This a Republican tactic, and a highly effective one… It gets treated like these things just happen, as if Democrats or Fortune 500 companies stumble into previously unseen cultural war ambushes because they lack a feel for flyover country….

Note the passive voice here: “The business world has been pulled into partisan politics”…

This doesn’t just happen. Republicans and right-wing activists make it happen. They devote a lot of time, energy and resources to it. 

By almost any measure, Republicans have already won once they’ve “made it a partisan issue.” What seems to get misunderstood is that that’s the actual goal. Corporations and institutions don’t want to pick sides. They want to play it down the middle. So Republicans keep shifting the “middle” farther and farther right. By this point in these controversies, the game is basically over already. What’s maddening is that everyone keeps getting played.

Finally:

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Where Do You Go in a Handbasket?

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The excellent Tom Tomorrow indicates our possible destination.

TMW2023-02-27colorXLYour better handbaskets have wheels.

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