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Ketanji Brown Jackson Is My Hero; Writer’s Blocked; Another Bad Immigration Consequence [1]
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Date: 2025-06-23
Brown Jackson Shows Backbone In Calling Out the Supreme Court
The call is coming from inside the house.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson – one of the honest members of the court that’s controlled by a corrupt conservative majority – recently warned that the body’s actions may be giving some the impression that it favors the rich over the rest of us.
A court controlled by Republican ideology favoring the rich? Duh.
Still, it took a lot of guts to say what she did.
A New Republic piece on Substack titled, “Ketanji Brown Jackson Wants to Save the Supreme Court From Itself,” noted that in a dissenting opinion last week Jackson wrote that the court is hurting its reputation because of the impression by some that it favors “moneyed interests.”
The case – Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA – allowed a fuel-industry lawsuit targeting California’s vehicle emissions standards to go forward, overturning a lower court ruling that found the industry didn’t have standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.
The vote was 7-2, with liberal Justice Elena Kagan joining the conservatives. As Brown pointed out, the case is probably moot because the EPA has already begun the process of revoking the rule in question.
“I worry that the fuel industry’s gain comes at a reputational cost for this court, which is already viewed by many as being overly sympathetic to corporate interests,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson is right. This iteration of the court has already shown itself to be a pro-rich bunch, from its rulings to Justice Clarence Thomas accepting millions of dollars in gifts from a rich benefactor. (How is that legal? I still have no idea.)
As the New Republic story says: “The conservative justices have frequently formed majorities in cases to limit the federal government’s regulatory power, weaken protections for workers and labor unions, and strengthen wealthy Americans’ ability to influence politics in their favor.”
As the piece says: “For a Supreme Court justice to raise those concerns so bluntly in her official capacity is a potent sign of how dire the problem has become.”
Jackson also took the unusual step of discussing the court’s internal process for selecting cases, something it doesn’t reveal to the public. The process has no hard-and-fast rules, the New Republic reported.
Jackson wrote: “For some, this silence will only harden their sense that the court softens its certiorari standards when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests, looking past the jurisdictional defects or other vehicle problems that would typically doom petitions from other parties.
“This Court’s simultaneous aversion to hearing cases involving the potential vindication of the rights of less powerful litigants – workers, criminal defendants, and the condemned, among others – will further fortify that impression.”
You can read the New Republic story here.
Jackson deserves all the credit in the world for speaking out. The courts are a major front in the war of the rich against the rest of us, and, right now, our highest court isn’t looking too good in that regard.
The more the rich control the courts, the more dire the situation will become in our country for the middle class, let alone the poor. It makes you wonder how this will all end. How far it will go.
In reality, it’s already gone too far.
A Terrifying Account of the Trump Administration’s Assault on Free Speech
Freedom of speech is supposed to be the law, not a suggestion or an arbitrary standard to be changed to suit the situation.
But that’s just what corrupt governments do, so the story of an Australian man stopped by Custom and Border Patrol agents based on his writings about Israel-Hamas war protests is terrifying for anyone who values the consistent application of our Constitution and whose opinions don’t fall in lockstep with the White House.
Alistair Kitchen wrote about his experience in a New Yorker story titled, “How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation.”
Kitchen was detained by CBP agents at the Los Angeles International Airport during a stopover on his flight from Melbourne to New York. At the time an agent said to him, “Look, we both know why you are here,” Kitchen recounted.
When Kitchen said he didn’t know the agent told him, “It’s because of what you wrote online about protests at Columbia University.”
Kitchen, who describes himself as a “middling writer,” had previously attended Columbia on a student visa, where he wrote about the protests on a Substack blog “that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read.”
The agents demanded the passcode for his phone, Kitchen said. When he refused, he was told he would be immediately sent back home if he didn’t comply, which he ended up doing.
An agent interviewed Kitchen about his reporting on the Columbia student protests. He was asked about his opinion on things like Israel, Hamas, student protests, and the one- vs. two-state solution. He was asked if he was friends with any Jews. They sought information about student protesters.
Kitchen said that his writing “was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events in Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.”
CBP was able to find a reason to send Kitchen home – he admitted he had used drugs in the past and had purchased THC gummies at a dispensary in New York. Marijuana is legal in New York but not federally.
Another possible issue was he failed to acknowledge a history of drug use on the ESTA, which is
the system by which many tourists become eligible to visit the United States under the visa waiver program.
Eventually, Kitchen was sent back to Australia. You may say this was justified because he did violate the regulations involving drugs and reporting on them, but it’d be a big mistake to get caught up in that. That’s not the issue.
The issue is Kitchen was allegedly stopped for no other reason than he wrote something the government didn’t like. If that doesn’t cause you concern then you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in this country and you can’t understand the damage to our democracy that will result from this kind of attack on our free speech rights.
Kitchen wrote:
“Every year scores of Australians and thousands of others are denied entry to the United States. CBP has full discretion, after all. There is nothing new about the U.S. ferociously, arbitrarily, and cruelly deploying that discretion in order to keep out people the government does not like. What is new is the politically motivated deployment of that power to exclude speech that the government doesn’t want to hear.
“CBP ostensibly marked me for denial of entry before I arrived. Its officers told me explicitly why I had been marked. Then it used the powers at its disposal to make sure I did not enter the country.”
The Department of Homeland Security denied any allegations that Kitchen had been arrested for his political beliefs. You can believe them if you want.
You can read the New Yorker account here.
Home Sweet Home May Be Harder to Find
When we talk about the impact that mass deportation will have on our economy often the first thing that comes to mind is the agricultural industry, where so many migrant workers are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
A piece on the American Prospect website points to another sector that will suffer: construction.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were fewer housing starts in May than in any month since the 2020 pandemic.
Factors affecting this include Trump tariffs on Canadian lumber, high mortgage interest rates, and “now the administration is hell-bent on deporting a sizable chunk of the home construction labor force,” the American Prospect story said.
“Immigrants, documented or not, dominate the roofing workforce, constitute a majority of drywall installers, and may be a plurality of carpenters as well,” the story said. “Housing construction contractors and subcontractors get a sizeable share of their crews from the guys lining up outside the Home Depot – only, those crews aren’t so sizable these days, what with deportations and the threat of deportations hollowing out the shape-ups.”
You can read the American Prospect story here.
This is another example that makes you wonder if this administration ever actually thinks out what it’s doing before it does it. As you may recall, recently Trump paused raids and arrests in the agriculture, hotel, and restaurant industries, only to change his mind several days later.
If this clown show can’t get their act together on this, how in the hell are they going to be able to make the right decisions now that we’ve gone to war against Iran. How many will die because of their corruption and incompetence?
Fewer houses is one thing. More dead soldiers is another.
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