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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The bigger picture [1]
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Date: 2023-07-02
We begin today with Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore writing for The New York Times about the history and philosophy of amending the United States Constitution.
The consequences of a constitution frozen in time in the age of Evel Knievel, “Shaft” and the Pentagon Papers are dire. Consider, for instance, climate change. Members of Congress first began proposing environmental rights amendments in 1970. They got nowhere. Today, according to one researcher, 148 of the world’s 196 national constitutions include environmental protection provisions. But not ours. Or take democratic legitimacy. Over the last decades, and beginning even earlier, as the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in a forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” nearly every other established democracy has eliminated the type of antiquated, antidemocratic provisions that still hobble the United States: the Electoral College, malapportionment in the Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. None of these problems can be fixed except by amending the Constitution, which, seemingly, can’t be done.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan endorsed a balanced-budget amendment. In the 1990s, Republicans proposed anti-flag-burning amendments, fetal-personhood amendments and defense-of-marriage amendments. Lately, amendments have been coming from the left. “Nationally, Democrats generally wish to amend constitutions and Republicans to preserve them,” The Economist proclaimed last month, on the same day that California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would regulate gun ownership. “I don’t know what the hell else to do,” he said, desperate.
The U.S. Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971. Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification in 1972, but its derailment rendered the Constitution effectively unamendable . It’s not that people stopped trying. Conservatives, especially, tried.
(FTR, the oldest “affirmative action” programs in the world are India’s and those programsembedded in their constitution, although I confess that I don’t know how they work at a practical level.)
For the most part, amendments to the U.S. Constitution have occurred every 40-60 years in clusters of 2-4 amendments, with the exception of the Bill of Rights. Dr. Lepore is correct, we are overdue. The Constitution truly “lives” in that process of amending. However, we are also living in a time where amending The Constitution is seemingly impossible.
Frank Shyong of the Los Angeles Times writes about what Asian American students may have just lost in the overturning of affirmative action in college admissions by SCOTUS. There is no guarantee that Harvard or any other elite university will admit more Asian American students. My guess is that a transitional patchwork of different diversity strategies will actually make the college application process more confusing and less transparent. And all methods of producing a diverse student body are more vulnerable to legal challenges, now that the case against Harvard succeeded in the nation’s highest court. It’s still too early to know how college admissions by race will change. Colleges will still attempt to produce racially diverse student bodies, but considering race in the process is not allowed. It’s like trying to take a test blindfolded, but failing is illegal. One predictor is what happened after California’s affirmative action ban in 1996. White and Asian student enrollment throughout the University of California system rose slightly, while Black and Latino enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley fell by 40% the first year the ban was implemented. But even those gains in Asian student enrollment can’t be attributed entirely to race-blind admissions. At the time, cash-poor universities and colleges in California were drastically increasing their admissions of international students, largely from Asian countries, because those applicants paid premium tuition fees. So we have to ask ourselves, truly, what have we won? Every Asian American and anyone else who considers Thursday’s decision a victory should wonder. An easier question to answer is what we have lost.
Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times looks at the dissent of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in Biden v. Nebraska, the student loan forgiveness case.
“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” Kagan wrote. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.” She continued: “That is a major problem not just for governance, but for democracy too. Congress is of course a democratic institution; it responds, even if imperfectly, to the preferences of American voters. And agency officials, though not themselves elected, serve a President with the broadest of all political constituencies. But this Court? It is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic. That is why the Court is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies, and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.” The court, Kagan concluded, “exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.” It’s a remarkable statement. To say that the Supreme Court can violate the Constitution is to reject the idea that the court is somehow outside the constitutional system. It is to remind the public that the court is as bound by the Constitution as the other branches, which is to say that it is subject to the same “checks and balances” as the legislature and the executive.
Erin Douglas of Texas Tribune looks at the surge of emergency room visits and deaths related to the severe heat wave in Texas.
At least nine people have died from the heat in one South Texas county, the local medical examiner reported, eight of them older than 60. In sweltering Texas prisons, at least nine inmates, including two men in their 30s, have died of heart attacks or unknown causes in facilities that lack air conditioning. And in one particularly harrowing incident, a 14-year-old boy and his stepfather, 31, died after hiking in Big Bend National Park last Friday. The stepfather died after crashing his car as he raced to get help after the boy lost consciousness on the trail, while the boy’s 21-year-old brother attempted to carry himback to the trailhead on a day when temperatures in the area reached as high as 119 degrees, according to the National Park Service. The unrelenting 100-degree temperatures across the state shattered weather records this month amid a heat wave that’s stretching into its fourth week in some parts of Texas. The heat dome is moving east, so Texans could finally see some relief after weeks of oppressive heat. Such heat waves and the record-breaking temperatures they bring are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, scientists told The Texas Tribune.
Keith Gessen of The New Yorker assembles a variety of experts to determine whether Russian President Vladimir Putin could lose his hold on power.
Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it’s there; the next day, poof—it’s gone. The Moscow-based historian, who asked that his name not be used since he was still in Russia, recalled what it was like to observe the Politburo in the early nineteen-eighties. “They looked like a totally homogeneous mass,” he said. “There was no indication, in their public statements or in anything else, that any of these people thought differently from one another.” But Gorbachev, it turned out, did think differently. In the years to come, he undertook a series of reforms that ended with the Soviet Union ceasing to exist. Authoritarian regimes could seem very stable, until suddenly they weren’t. On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kendall-Taylor convened a group of experts to compile a “stability tracker” for the Putin regime. The tracker identifies ten “pillars,” ranging from “Absence of an alternative to Putin” to the idea, among Russian citizens, of “Russia as a besieged fortress,” and tries to indicate whether these are growing stronger or weaker. As of this spring, several factors were going in the wrong direction for Putin: his élite was becoming fragmented; his economy was suffering the effects of the war and of sanctions; and his military, historically apolitical, was being pulled into the political arena by concerns over Prigozhin’s rising influence and its access to military resources. But the factors going in the other direction were more numerous: according to Kendall-Taylor’s experts, Putin had strengthened his control over the information environment; the people most discontented with his rule were leaving the country; and the idea of Russia as a besieged fortress was gaining rather than losing adherents. Most important, there remained no viable alternative to Putin: his warlords were politically unpopular, and his heroic opponent, Alexey Navalny, was being denied food, sleep, and medical care in a Russian prison. In the absence of an alternative, the status quo would continue.
Rokhaya Diallo writes for the Guardian that police brutality against minorities in France is nothing new. At all.
The numbers of cases of police brutality grow relentlessly every year. In France, according to the Defender of Rights, young men perceived to be black or of north African origin are 20 times more likely to be subjected to police identity checks than the rest of the population. The same institution denounced the absence of any appeal against being checked as a form of systemic police discrimination. Why would we not feel scared of the police? In 1999, our country, the supposed birthplace of human rights, was condemned by the European court of human rights for torture, following the sexual abuse by police of a young man of north African origin. In 2012 Human Rights Watch said: “the identity check system is open to abuse by the French police … These abuses include repeated checks – “countless”, in the words of most interviewees – sometimes involving physical and verbal abuse.” Now, after the death of Nahel, a UN rights body has urged France to address “profound problems of racism and racial discrimination” within its law enforcement agencies. Even our own courts have condemned the French state for “gross negligence”, ruling in 2016 that “the practice of racial profiling was a daily reality in France denounced by all international, European, and domestic institutions and that for all that, despite commitments made by the French authorities at the highest level, this finding had not led to any positive measures”. More recently, in December 2022, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination denounced both the racist discourse of politicians and police ID checks “disproportionately targeting certain minorities”.
Silvia Blanco and Andrea García Baraja of El País in English looks at the worldwide backlash against LGBTQ+ rights.
The offensive can be clearly seen in several countries of the European Union, fueled by a far right that has found that attacks on LGBTQ+ rights can be a powerful electoral and ideological tool. This is the case in Hungary and Poland, where there are doubts about the administrations’ democratic rigor, and in Italy, where the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni is seeking to block the legal recognition of families with same-sex parents. Spain, which has been consolidating LGBTQ+ rights for almost two decades, recently approved one of the most progressive laws to protect the LGBTQ+ community, but the so-called trans law is now under attack by the conservative Popular Party (PP) and far-right Vox, which have put it in the spotlight ahead of the general elections on July 23. If in democracies, hate speech and the political use of LGBTQ+ rights are being utilized as an ideological weapon that poisons public discourse and puts the physical safety of LGBTQ+ people at risk, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships such as Russia and Saudi Arabia are penalizing — with the death penalty in the case of Saudi Arabia and Iran — marginalizing and erasing any expression of sexual diversity. In 32 of the 54 countries in Africa, homosexuality is prohibited, as an ultra-conservative religious trend sweeps the content and grows, almost contagiously, in more tolerant countries such as Senegal. The world map of LGBTQ+ rights is immense and uneven. “What is really new is that more and more countries are experiencing legal setbacks and worsening legal situations,” explains Julia Ehrt, executive director of Ilga Mundo, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, which is made up of more than 1,800 organizations from 160 countries. “There are countries that are moving forward and changing law and policy in a positive direction when it comes to protecting people from discrimination and violence. But more and more places are going backwards,” says Ehrt. “Our feeling is that hostility against LGBTQ+ people is on the rise,” she says.
Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer about the things that bad grammar can hide.
Recently, the New York Times dropped the bombshell that Trump’s fundraising apparatus had increased tenfold the percentage of each donation that’s diverted to pay his legal fees, rather than to his campaign. Sounds like something his campaign would want to respond forcefully to, right? His spokesperson Steven Cheung had only a written statement that said: “Because the campaign wants to ensure every dollar donated to President Trump is spent in the most cost-effective manner, a fair-market analysis was conducted to determine email list rentals would be more efficient by amending the fund-raising split between the two entities.” Bless you if you managed to stay awake through that 42-word statement. I got bored just copying and pasting it. It’s a grammatical mess — abstruse legalese that any casual reader is bound to get lost in. Which is exactly the point.
Have the best possible day, everyone!
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