gattsuru
19d ago
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
I will also highlight the Teamster delivering face shields to rioters. Could just be coincidence, but the timeline I have been able to figure out for the LA riots is really tight, and the LA-area Teamsters and SEIU are both known to work together and for 'energetic' protest. Even if the DoJ does seriously investigate things I dunno if it could be proven, so no way to know whether the early parts of the LA protest were waiting for something to start rather than were outraged and surprised by Heurta's arrest and spontaneously acted.
And, from the other perspective, I'll point to characters like Judge Duggan, or the various Try To Arrest Me, ICE politician protests, or to the Dem nominee for New York City mayor having Luigi fanboys high in the communication and outreach ladder.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
Maybe, but I'll point out again that Lujan Grisham wasn't impeached, censured, indicted by a grand jury, called a fascist on national television or a nationally-syndicated paper, yada yada. She did technically receive a preliminary injunction, but it was immediately stayed. Fauci isn't under arrest. No lawsuit Carter Page could file would ever get to trial. Mahmoud Khalil is out on bail.
Maybe that'll change. Duggan could end up being the first swing of a very hard-hitting hammer. But every single attempt to bring these forces forward has a built-in time crunch. And there's a lot of ways to delay and slow and drop every single effort.
gattsuru
10d ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
gattsuru
15d ago
Trump v. CASA is very specifically about universal injunctions; none of the majority really delves into the likelihood of success in the merits, and I'm extremely skeptical that it could get more than two votes max on the merits of the underlying lawsuit.
I'm skeptical the EO will even avoid pretrial mass relief: the majority openly invites state-wide injunctions or class action lawsuits, and this would be one of the cleanest Rule 23 class actions possible. I'd be willing to bet 100 USD to a charity of your choice that there are at least three circuits where almost all children of illegal immigrants are covered by an injunction before the end of the year, and I'm only going that low because of friction effects.
gattsuru
25d ago
The procedural posture here is also weird, even if no one but Kagan wants to rest their opinion on it. This is an appeal of preliminary injunction that was denied, while other preliminary injunctions or final judgements against other trans minor laws were upheld. Including one where SCOTUS pared back a wide preliminary injunction... to just the plaintiffs).
So now there's a SCOTUS-approved preliminary injunction for an equal protection challenge that SCOTUS just said can't win, sitting in the 9th Circuit. Except they didn't really hold that, they just made it really clear what the breakdown of how they hold the balance of law. Except in this case, the only person treating it like it's not final judgement was Kagan, and that in a minority-of-a-minority dissent.
laws that classify in some other way, which only get rational basis review (almost impossible for a law to fail this one).
I'll caveat that there's two forms of rational basis review: the normal form a la FCC v. Beach Communications where the law is upheld even if the government provides no good reason for the statute, so long as the court can imagine a single even incorrect cause; and the Cleburne version where the law is held to be motivated by animus, and then the statute near-always falls even if there is a named good cause. Some of the finangling in the oral args were about that.
There is some wiggling around to deal with Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock (which is what causes Alito to concur in parts of the opinion rather than the full thing since he dissented from Bostock), but Gorsuch joined this opinion in full, so apparently he didn't have a problem with the Court somewhat limiting Bostock here.
Yeah, that's a mess, and I dunno how he's juggling it. Roberts says tries to distinguish by saying the law here distinguished based on a transgender diagnosis rather than sex, using the metaphor of hirsuitism, but since whether someone will be diagnosed with hirsuitism depends on their sex that seems transparently wrong (and he even spells out that this is often called "male-pattern hair growth"). Presumably he's done that because he knows a hard limit on medical exemptions recognizing sex will result in the same law coming right back up with the medical exemption excised, and that's worse from a pragmatic perspective, but as a matter of law it's clear as mud.
Gorsuch signed onto it, so I guess he must agree? Or maybe he didn't want a bunch of circuit court misreadings if this case ended up in a 4/1/1-3 mixed-majority. But the reasoning here's vague enough that red circuits can draw every other transgender case that isn't specifically a CRA thing (and maybe even some that are) as about Skrmmeti-like distinctions, and blue circuits can draw every other transgender case as more like Bostock.
Thomas or Barrett's distinctions are clearer, but in turn they're a lot more strict.
It's easier for straight cis guys (or even people like myself who are bi), but I think you overestimate how easy it is to walk into a relationship, depending on social class and work/life balance. This is an older poll, but you still end up with sizable percentages of unmarried adults having never had a date, and a much bigger group struggling to try to get a relationship; it's only gotten worse since.
Straight men can ask out anyone... kinda, and there's pretty strict social norms against doing so anywhere near work and several different classes of enthusiast hobbies. People try to set up straight men with friends and coworkers... if you're already the sort of person who has. You can hook up with random strangers... if you're in the tiny percentage of straight guys that can get a tindr date. There's a lot of ways for straight guys to set themselves apart to women... in the negative sense as easily as the positive: (het, cis) women are far more likely to get the ick for single 'red flags' that can end up being. Straight guys don't have anywhere near the expectations of attractiveness... but they're also dancing a very narrow line between coming across as too aggressive or not forward enough.
((and... straight guys are picky in a different way. The expectations are lower, but anything under them is far more strict limitation, in extreme cases to the point where even a guy that wanted to muscle through it in the interest of an orgasm or a relationship would find themselves 'pushing rope'.))
If you're able to make the first move, a lot of those problems disappear, but in turn a lot of the ways (straight, cis) men were allowed to make the first move have disappeared too. Of my social environments, there's maybe one in which asking someone out on a date would be accepted (and, uh, coincidentally this is also the gayest one, thanks FFXIV), and maybe three where it's not explicitly ban-worthy. I can't speak on straight guys getting set up by friends or family from personal experience, given the bi bit, but from what I've seen second-hand there's a lot of people where that either doesn't happen, or it only happens in situations that have developed the various taboos.
Some of that's downstream of selection effects as I've aged and been in a relationship for a while, but it's very different from the gay world or from what I can see of most of the trans-friendly dating world. A number of gay writers are pretty strong advocates of that model replacing the classical one for hets, but I'm not sure it's working out great for the gays: I have a hell of a time when quite a lot of my options are split between bars or dances, down2succ-level 'casual', or online stuff that's never going to graduate beyond RP and hard to even keep time synced. Where these options are unpleasant in a gay context, they seem unsolvable in a het one.
((And the dodges are so common that Scott Alexander had a post on how "you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation" explanations radicalize a lot of people who are very far from the central example of what I'm hoping are your actual focus, over a decade ago.))
Again, I'm not saying that het (cis) guys have it worse or even anywhere near as rough as you do, but I think you're running into a version of the lemon market problem in things like comp sci hiring; it's really easy for the absolute worst to get vastly over-represented, while a lot of those who are either slightly under-par or who are not as assertive won't show up much on your radar.
... depends a lot on your definition of 'national injunction' and 'gain value'.
This at Table A-2 provides the most expansive definition of both, in that they were injunctions applying beyond the bounds of a courts jurisdiction and applied for at least some time, though because it measures them by what President was in place when the injunction was applied, not what President's administration started the policy that was enjoined (eg, several 'Biden-era' cases revolve around preliminary injunctions about military prohibitions on HIV-positive membership or joining, Harrison and Wilkins). (Contrast Harvard's 14 injunctions under Biden). Smashing those two lists together and focusing on the Biden admin, I'd count :
- Texas v. United States, 515 F. Supp. 3d 627, Tipton's temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Biden's 100-day pause on immigration deportations. I don't think this ever got reviewed before it self-mooted, but I also don't think it actually stopped the admin from just doing it and saying it was enforcement discretion.
- Faust v. Vilsack, 519 F. Supp. 3d 470, Holman v. Vilsack, No. 21-1085-STA-JAY, and Wynn v. Vilsack, 545 F. Supp. 3d 1271, loan forgiveness for racial minority farmers. I think this one held for at least the original program until it was repealed. Biden did work around it by using other programs or having supposedly race-neutral programs that only racial minorities were informed about, though.
- Louisiana v. Biden, 543 F. Supp. 3d 388, ban on new oil drilling leases in public lands, preliminary injunction. Reversed on appeal to give more tailored restrictions, trial court drew it back to thirteen plaintiff states. Also an APA case. It's not clear if it actually worked; the EO in question didn't stop scheduled oil leases, but the plan for future auctions dropped dramatically.
- Texas v. United States, 549 F. Supp. 3d 572, DACA, preliminary injunction on new admissions to the program. APA case, overturned on appeal.
- Texas v. Biden, 554 F. Supp. 3d 818. Termination of Migration Protection Protocols (aka Remain in Mexico). Kinda an APA case? Overturned by SCOTUS and the Biden admin had just made a new memo terminating it anyway beforehand.
- Texas v. United States, 555 F. Supp. 3d 351. Whether "shall" requires the administration to do anything to criminal illegal aliens, preliminary injunction. This is the one I keep yelling at Ben_Garrison about, you know how it ended.
- Arizona v Biden, 40 F.4th 375, second verse, same as above except it was overturned at the circuit level.
- Georgia v. Biden, 574 F. Supp. 3d 1337, federal workers vaccine mandate on the contracting side, preliminary injunct. 11th Circuit scaled it back to just the plaintiff organizations, their members, and the seven plaintiff states.
- Feds for Med. Freedom v. Biden, 581 F. Supp. 3d 826, federal workers vaccine mandate on the employee side, preliminary injunction. Long procedural history, think the injunction was in place when the policy was repealed, mooting the arg.
- Nebraska v. Biden, 52 F.4th 1044. HEROES Act loan forgivness, preliminary injunction by the appeals court. Upheld by SCOTUS.
- Braidwood Mgmt. Inc. v. Becerra, 666 F. Supp. 3d 613. Contraception, abortion, and PReP mandate for ACA insurance coverage, weird procedural history since it's mostly a process question with RFRA stapled on the side, hence why it came up literally yesterday. The RFRA side got an injunction that looks like still applies but isn't universal? And the universal injunction on Appointments/APA was squashed early on appeal down to just the plaintiffs, overturned by SCOTUS.
- Monticello Banking Co. v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 6:23-CV-00148-KKC and Tex. Bankers Ass'n v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 7:23-CV-00144. Something about the CFPB being unconstitutional and injunctions against data collection rules. I'm not even sure if these count as real national injunctions rather than just applying to a large organization with a lot of members.
- Nuziard v. Minority Bus. Dev. Agency, 721 F. Supp. 3d 431. Another racially discriminatory aid program, preliminary injunction. I think they just made the discrimination a little more subtle, but technically the injunction applied to the end of the case and the plaintiffs got a result.
- Career Colls. & Sch. of Texas v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., 98 F.4th 220. Higher Education Act loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction on appeal, under the APA. Currently at SCOTUS.
- Alaska v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., No. 24-1057-DDC-ADM, SAVE higher education loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. Stayed on appeal, though Nebraska effectively covered the same ground eventually.
- Missouri v. Biden, 738 F. Supp. 3d 1113, FEEL higher education loan income-based repayment program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. I think upheld in 8th Circuit
- Associated Gen. Contractors of America v. U.S. Dep't of Labor, No. 5:23-CV-0272-C. Something really technical about treating truckers like mechanics for 'locally prevailing wages and benefits' rules? Preliminary injunction under the APA, appeals are currently stayed.
- Tennessee v. Becerra, No. 1:24cv161-LG-BWR. Including gender identity to Title IX (and indirectly, the ACA). Preliminary injunction under the APA. Probably mooted by the election.
- Tex. Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Garland, No. 4:24-CV-478. Corporate Transparency Act beneficial owner rule. Commerce clause challenge, the poor bastards. Stayed by SCOTUS, with Kavanaugh specifically writing this as an example of universal injunctions bad.
- EDIT: All. for Hippocratic Med., 668 F. Supp. 3d at 560. Abortion pill FDA approval under APA, technically a nation-wide stay, but had the effect of an injunction. Got smacked down by SCOTUS./EDIT
Honorable mentions:
- Price v. Barr, 514 F. Supp. 3d 171, permanent injunction against rule requiring permit to film in national parks, reversed on appeal. Not really a red-tribe-blue-tribe thing, at least directly; one of the few places I'd put myself and Merrick Garland on the same side.
- Arizona by and through Brnovich v. Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention, 2022 WL 1276141. If you want to find anything on this, look for "Title 42 Immigration Case", or this clusterfuck. The preliminary injunction itself was against a Trump-era rule about immigration under COVID, but Biden hadn't officially stopped it, but Biden was defending or 'defending' it.
So there's a lot of cases, here. How you analyze them's going to depend on what you're looking for. Literally any case with an injunction broader than the plaintiffs that wasn't immediately stayed? I think you get somewhere around 15-17 cases, on about five major topics. Cases where this actually worked, if only until final review, cuts out at least five. In one sense it's damning that some of these injunctions got overturned by higher courts... but does that mean that the lower court got it wrong, the higher court got it wrong, or just that SCOTUS was trying to push the CASA button then?
Cases that would have changed if CASA was decided first? A lot of these are APA challenges that CASA specifically sets aside for future discussion, another handful were already being drilled down to their plaintiff states.
Cases that mattered? I dunno.
I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
gattsuru
15d ago
The specific law here holds that a "commercial entity" (some carveouts for Google) that serves material on the internet "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must use either commercial or government identification of age, or be subject to fines up to 10k USD per day plus 250k if a minor sees it. There's pretty widespread potential to interfere or discourage adult-to-adult speech that is only obscene to minors, or even some speech that isn't obscene at all so long as it comes from one of these companies.
There's also a compelled speech problem in the original bill, 14-point font inclusion of a substance addiction help line level. This is currently blocked, though it had a weird period where that block was under an administrative stay for nearly six months.
gattsuru
18d ago
Yeah, there's a basically no chance if they (or even a not-joke Republican candidate) split the not-Mamdani vote. The sane option to my eyes would be organizing behind Adams, sad as that sounds, but it's also a massive coordination problem. But I don't get why they tried Cuomo in the primary to start with, so maybe there's something that would overrun the 'already lost this fight once' problem. And my low opinion of Cuomo is part of why I don't think they can coordinate.
gattsuru
9d ago
gattsuru
5d ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
This one's weird.
The law is probably reasonable enough or close to reasonable enough (if not necessarily my idea of well-designed), but the lower court just set it against rational basis review. Previous SCOTUS decisions either put restrictions on adult content either fully in strict scrutiny (Ashcroft I and II, where restrictions were on the basis of the content's adult nature) or rational basis (obscenity to minors, movie theatres). And strict scrutiny, at least in a free speech context, is ruinously hard to achieve, in ways that even Thomas probably doesn't want to water down. The closest obvious parallel in previous law was adult theatres, which was admittedly a pretty jank decision of its own by pretending it was separating the effects of the content from the content to justify rational basis review. But that'd be the same as no review at all.
I guess this case didn't fall close enough to the commercial speech restriction cases for the adult theatre side to be even remotely palatable? But it's Thomas, and his willingness to go to the bat for bizarrely aggressive paternalism (eg, en loco parentis) is one of the bits that's long been a go to, for better or worse. Instead, he reaches (through BSA v. Dale for some reason) to the draft-card burning regulations from US v. O'Brien, saying restrictions on speech here are incidental to restrictions on behavior, so intermediate scrutiny. From that view, it's not unreasonable.
Then Thomas differentiates it from the strict scrutiny CDA cases by saying those "effectively suppresse[d] a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive”. But the analysis is just limited to privacy concerns and stigma (aka, more privacy concerns). Yet these restrictions have potentially massive costs to speakers, not just receivers, on adult-content sites or even mixed-content that don't go up to that mark. Likewise, he tries to distinguish the CDA as regulating noncommercial sites that would not readily take up credit card processing, but HB1181 applies to all commercial entities, not just commercial sites. Burden can't drive level of scrutiny up, but this sort of perfunctory analysis gives little idea of what the actual analysis is, especially since intermediate review is a little ad hoc to start with.
Some of that burden review is probably because the Free Speech Coalition advocate comes across as kinda a nutcase during oral args. He mentions costs to site managers once in oral arguments and it's a stunning 40k USD per 100k users, and then spends much more of his time ranting about the motivations of anti-porn people. But then intermediate scrutiny's biggest bite is specifically in the prong of the O'Brien test that asks if the government interest is tied to the suppression of information, which is where the whole anti-porn thing rises anyway.
It rounds out to normal -- Thomas does everything short of wink-and-nod to say that pretextual restrictions on obscenity-to-minors that try to cover restrictions on adults are invalid -- but it's just such a bizarre way of getting there, and it's going to invite a lot of mess from lower courts.
Gutierrez v. Saenz - ... My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years
Yeah, probably. I'm really skeptical that a DNA test with no return of Gutierrez's DNA from the few samples available would factually demonstrate that he was outside of the trailer (or for a positive result to have his advocates want him in the chair), and while I could kinda see the arguments for allowing it anyway, it's hard to care. There's a chance Texas will just punt on killing him, but it's Texas, so that's a real far outlier. The process and procedural stuff might matter for other cases, perhaps? The court just didn't like the lower courts ignoring past dicta?
gattsuru
16d ago
Yeah, they're not even subtle about it.
gattsuru
9d ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
For the purpose of federal law, unless theres' been intervening changes to the law or caselaw, 302s don't count, because they're not adversarial or judicial hearings and often run ex parte. They do count for state law, though.
The mental defective side of the bar has been used very widely, if not consistently. And some places will ingest someone who comes to them voluntarily as if they weren't willing (or even treat a voluntary admission as involuntary without undergoing the normal procedures), though thankfully that's one of the few places that courts have been willing to push back on.
But otherwise, yes; federal regulations require that it be involuntary.
I will caveat that many states have separate rules that trigger on voluntary commitment, or don't even require commitment at all (hey, Hawaii!). New Jersey is one such state; applications for a purchase permit require applicants to complete a consent to mental health record search form. While the statute only specifically prohibits giving permits to people with a voluntary or involuntary current committment (no, I don't know why), both state courts and police generally treat it as a blanket prohibition, along with many inpatient procedures. T.B. here isn't even getting to that point, so he can't challenge it, either.
gattsuru
16d ago
[disclaimer: IANAL]
The rule is that all administrative remedies must be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed (successfully).
This has actually historically had some awkward results. For the VA example below, there was a VA-internal administrative appeals system required by the NIAA, but it would routinely sit on appeals for years. NICS itself has an ATF Relief From Disability program authorized by statute that has been defunded since 1993 and wasn't fast before that. Sometimes this precluded judicial review entirely, other times required demonstrating constructive denial.
That said, this court case here is the lawsuit after exhaustion of administrative appeals. You aren't required to (and are actively discouraged from) bring each matter individually. There's actually a bunch of really complex res judicata rules about bringing a lawsuit over the same legal matter without having a different underlying act, though I don't know them well enough to be absolutely confident that they'd preclude a second lawsuit here.
That said, there's basically zero chance of a successful Second Amendment lawsuit on this matter. SCOTUS has already had fairly sympathetic plaintiffs available, such as Mai v. United States; they've punted. Most successful lawsuits have depended entirely on process or statutory definitions regarding who counts as disqualified to start with. The one exception is the Sixth Circuit, notably distant from New Jersey, and that case depended on the government completely disavowing any current finding of dangerousness or similarity to currently-mentally-ill people.
gattsuru
15d ago
Basically credit card transactions or services using those transactions. It might allow MindGeek-like auth, but the US doesn’t really have that. Presumably with a good faith effort to validate that the credit card holder’s name is above 18, though it didn’t come up in any args I could see.
gattsuru
10d ago
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's tongue-bathing Hamas anti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.
Edit: I was tempted to use hating the Joos above, but couldn’t find a good summary to support it. Not a problem anymore! /EDIT
There's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.
One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.
Another is that Washington’s ED: Minnesota's /ED state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.
Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.
gattsuru
26d ago
They have wide discretion because most of the INA is subject to "may" clauses instead of "shall" clauses right now.
And this guy has been told, repeatedly, that the very specific law he claims has "may" clauses had "shall" clauses, already; that there was a massive court case over it, and it didn't do jack or shit.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
gattsuru
15d ago
Problem in this case is that it's possible that any DNA under the victim's fingernails match one of the Gutierrez's compatriots, and Gutierrez still entered the trailer and participated in the murder -- just without being scratched. Indeed, because one of his compatriots lived with the victim and had 'found' the victim's body, some of the samples should be reasonably expected to be not-Gutierrez's even if he was totally guilty as can be.
There's been fact-based determinations before focusing on guilt (even, rarely, ones that raised serious nontrivial questions of guilt: McCollum is pretty embarrassing to Scalia). I'm hard-pressed to see how that'd happen here.
gattsuru
15d ago
Given that we could end up in situations where newborns in certain states acquire citizenship and other newborns don't, I would've thought the Supreme Court would issue a decision on birthright citizenship within the present term. Is it just that there's not enough time?
They don't have a current case on it; almost everything is early in preliminary process at the district or appeals level. The oral args brought up cases in the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuit, there's no chance of the feds winning the 9th Circuit barring pod people, and the feds committed to requesting cert if they lost (for whatever a lawyer's promise is worth, lol). Bondi's statement, charitably, would involve a fast resolution to one of those cases, an October term hearing, and decisions months after that. This timeline might not give us an answer until Spring or Summer 2026 (although I think it'd be obvious before then).
But I don't think CASA prohibits all preliminary protections. The majority opinion openly invites class certification and class-wide relief, and the extent that the feds tried to argue against class certification during oral args was kinda a joke:
KAVANAUGH: If you were to oppose it, on what basis would you plausibly oppose [classwide certification]?
GENERAL SAUER: There may be problems of commonality and typicality, for example. For -- for example, there's two different sets of groups that are affected by the Executive Order. There are those where the mothers are temporarily present and those where the mother are illegally present, and in both cases, the father is neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident. So there might be issues of typicality. Adequacy of representation might very well be an issue. So there would have to be that rigorous application of those criteria. Now the argument may be this is a case that is a natural candidate for a Rule 23(b)(2) certification. That may well be true. The government hasn't taken a position on that. Our position is not that class certification will necessarily be granted.
((I'm increasingly thinking SCOTUS picked such a broad case because the more grounded alternatives for preliminary relief are fairly straightforward.))
What are the chances that the Supreme Court actually strikes down birthright citizenship? My impression from the start was that this was always going to be a losing case given how far back the precedent goes, but I'm far from an expert.
It's pretty low. The legal arguments aren't as obviously wrong as at first glance, but they're still a long reach, and mixing that, the reliance interests, the seeing-as-a-state problems, everything like that... I don't want to say zero, because zero isn't a probability, but it's low low. I'd honestly consider 9-0 more likely than 6-3 or 7-2.
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
One would think! And yet.
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