gattsuru
1hr ago
I don't know those specific material, but I'd be surprised if the primer coat were intended as the main durability aspects, rather than acting as a bonding agent.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Mercedes Lackey is still, four years later, off the convention circuit.
gattsuru
1hr ago
From a prevention side, there's also just not that strong support for PrEP for heterosexuals in Africa, regardless. There were two major trials of traditional PrEP for use in heterosexual contexts for PEPFAR countries, and they were both shut down early because adherence was so low it wasn't even ethical to continue it. Even the combination of extremely high claimed detection rates, heavy ART usage, theoretically very strong viral load reduction, handing out PrEP, and even goofy stuff like voluntary adult circumcision, haven't been able to get transmission rates down that low. The information of dry sex is less robust (and more gross), but if the existing infrastructure isn't getting serious drops in new infections by discouraging it, it's not going to do so in the future.
There's been some efforts toward an injectable and long-lasting PrEP formulation, but even if that does work better, it's not likely to have significant impact on the broader epidemic, and the very ease of application that makes it useful also means it doesn't need PEPFAR-like administration to deliver.
But that still leaves the problem of ART. Even if you dropped current transmission rates to zero, there's still going to be over fifteen million people with HIV; you can't unfuck that goat. You don't have to bite that ethical bullet, but it's a major part of the PEPFAR program, probably the most clearly effective in terms of QALY improvement, and it is an ethical bullet.
gattsuru
3hr ago
Of the $150 million appropriated for America250
That's... not quite the congressional authorization:
"SEC. 50305.
CELEBRATING AMERICA’S 250TH ANNIVERSARY.
In addition to amounts otherwise available, there is appropriated to the Secretary of the Interior (acting through the Director of the National Park Service) for fiscal year 2025, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, $150,000,000 for events, celebrations, and activities surrounding the observance and commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, to remain available through fiscal year 2028."
gattsuru
7hr ago
The States Unfair
In an interview with me, Shapiro confirmed for the first time that Pennsylvania will not participate in Trump’s big planned gala celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary on the National Mall... Shapiro said his office had canvassed opinion among many Pennsylvania businesses about Trump’s gala. Shapiro’s aides enlisted the help of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce, which communicated with companies across the state, small and large alike, about whether to join the coming festivities.
“None were interested,” Shapiro said. “It reflects this sad state of affairs that we find ourselves in—that the president has politicized this to a degree that businesses don’t want to participate.”
This is, to be blunt, not plausible. It's a pretty obviously not plausible. Pennsylvania is not a small state, nor an economically insecure one, nor a state that leans entirely blue in population or businesses. An individual county was able to find sufficient support for New Jersey's booth; Pennsylvania as a whole has much more resources available. There are, in fact, no small number of Pennsylvania businesses that would drool over the opportunity to represent the state in the most Trump-partisan environment possible, including individual businessmen that have outright donated tens of millions of dollars in Trump-partisan funding.
It appears that Shapiro only began asking businesses shortly before ("the governor’s office approached the chamber less than two weeks out from the start of the fair to help get companies involved", "we were asked by Governor Shapiro’s office in mid June") the start of the event, when it had become both much harder and more expensive to act. Not impossible, since I've personally deployed a small business convention booth literally across the planet with less notice, while driving from the ass-end of Pennsylvania to Washington DC is about seven hours, and no international customs. Still exactly what you'd do if you wanted the request to fail, without admitting that you wanted the program to fail. There are individual high school sports teams who could have gotten this done, including fundraising, had they been given the six months Ohio gave out. It's not even clear that the requests were sincere, rather than perfunctory.
And to spell things out: the Chamber of Commerce businesses did not say they did not want to participate, just that they couldn't manage it. Shapiro's explicit words, that the "None were interested," just weren't true.
There's some fun exploration about where this falls from a Bounded Distrust perspective. Shapiro's office put out a 700k USD price tag that's outright laughable if you've done any serious work like this. But it's also since just been falsified by reality. Pennsylvania's senators put out a call for businesses in the aftermath of the initial reporting, and got response and volunteers and an arranged booth immediately, despite the shorter timelines. So it turns out you don't need die-hard Trump supporters; a variety of mining businesses, crayon merchants, construction companies, and a nutrition supplement seller were quite happy to jump in.
But it got a nice slogan:
It shows that it’s possible for a Democrat to sustain enduring public support in a swing state—including nontrivial backing among voters who helped elect Trump—while casting Trumpism, appropriately, as an overwhelmingly destructive force in American life.
This is a trivial matter. The Fair seems to be a bit of a joke, the booth in question is a glorified convention stand, the weather means attendance may be lackluster, and few people will remember it in six months.
It's just that Shapiro, one of the moderates with the greatest reason to want to reach out across the aisle and show de-escalatory competence as an administrator, instead believed it more productive to punt on a glorified convention booth and then give an interview to TNR.
And in that interview, he said things that were false, so as to put the blame anywhere else, and people believed him.
The Shallow End of The Betting Pool
Green water, floating liner chunks, and workers dumping jugs of hydrogen peroxide. These are the images that have characterized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in the weeks since its reopening following President Donald Trump's ordered renovations.
Pool and environmental science experts told PBS News the algae bloom is a common and natural occurrence. Trump says otherwise.
Without evidence he has blamed people of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool by using a "box cutter or a knife" to make a 300-foot slit on the bottom of the pool and dumping "fertilizer in the water" to produce algae.
There he goes, making up conspiracy theories about malicious actors responsible for his own run-of-the-mill incompetence.
... there's (weak) photographic evidence, isn't there.
To be fair, damage to the liner would not, on its own, result in the algae bloom. To be charitable to the point of fault, the liner could both be subject to sabotage and poorly applied or requiring early maintenance. The algae blooms themselves are near-certainly downstream of phosphate levels, and while (contrary to the cited expert) it doesn't take a ridiculous bulk of phosphate fertilizer or a long period to cause an algae bloom even in a pool this size, there are a wide variety of other plausible sources of phosphate. Decaying leaves or grass clippings, run-off from people trying to repair a different vandalism, mechanical failures in a filtration system, or use of water which already had phosphate in it are all possible.
It's just hard to tell what the actual situation is, when the New York Times began with Raise Doubts about Trump's claim at the headline, only to not actually find positive contradictions in the documents, and far down in the story to notice a paraphrased:
Anthony Flett, the chief executive of U.S. Coating Specialists [...] said it appeared that the sealant may be peeling off the bottom in part because of the cut in the foam [ed: emphasis added], and in part because not enough material was applied. “I don’t want to totally blame the vandalism,” he said. “If they put more material down, maybe none of this would be an issue.”
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
But that is, ultimately, just a pool liner.
It's not a question with millions of lives on the line.
The Question With Millions of Lives On The Line
In this retrospective impact evaluation integrated with forecasting analysis, we used panel data from 133 countries and territories— including all low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs)—with USAID support ranging from none to very high... [W]e integrated the retrospective evaluation with validated dynamic microsimulation models to estimate effects up to 2030... Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14,051,750 additional all-age deaths, including 4,537,157 in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.
A better statistician than I has already gone over the modeling problems, and they're significant:
I have no love for the administration or many of its actions, but when the world’s foremost medical journal publishes work indicating that a policy’s results will be comparable in death count to history’s engineered mass-starvations by year’s end, I’m going to be skeptical. I’m going to be doubly skeptical when the same work also indicates this policy’s results will be comparable in death count to Maoist China’s policy results by 2030. I’m going to be triply skeptical when similar Monte Carlo modeling has led to inflated and incorrect death count prognostications in the past. And so on.
The BLUF is that the regressions in this paper are likely p-hacked in a way that probably undermines the conclusions.
It's a fun read if you like math, and better than I could write on the statistics side, so I'll not try. Instead, I'm going to hammer the model itself.
Some of the faults are simple and direct. A dose-response analysis is fundamentally taking a different perspective than any attempt to cut inefficient or wasteful spending. Some are more esoteric: many of the countries where USAID has the greatest significance are also those with the least state capacity to measure deaths. Instead, the public data sources are models that themselves use aid-dependent variables to estimate mortality rates. This circularity would just be a statistics problem on its own and explains some of the unusually convenient numbers that the LessWrong article notices, but there's a more critical problem: even assuming the aid-dependent modeling was correct, several of those programs were not stopped, only moved under the Department of State.
The Lancet paper does not actually consider a specific mechanism or group of mechanisms, but the underlying drivers of a significant majority are ART provisioning, and that runs into trouble when not all ART was under USAID to start with, and the parts that were had a waiver by February 2025, if not during the initial cuts and freezes.
Some disruption is plausible in early 2025. A complete cessation is not, and was not when the Lancet paper was published. The nightmare scenario that this paper treats as plausible isn't a genuine situation that could happen because of DOGE or the current USAID closure or extant or currently-proposed program cuts.
My problem here is not that this number is, ultimately, made up and dependent on counterfactuals, just as earlier predictions of 600k deaths were made up and counterfactual. It's not the Lancet's reputation: this is the paper that published Wakefield; it knows what it is.
There's a far more serious issue. These aid programs aren't getting less controversial, and they won't get more widely-supported if USAID floats back under the next administration to fund a stack of random scholarship programs and social events. There's no plausible scenario where putting ART programs under the Department of State results in this catastrophic cut from 2025 to 2030.
There is, however, reason to worry about it in the future.
The State Department itself estimates over 20 million people are getting ART through PEPFAR programs. While there's some fuzziness around the edges if you try to track down how they produce that number, since it's at least in part downstream of reporting by organizations that get money based on the number of treated patients, it's probably not off by 50%. Pulling ART from HIV-positive patients produces corpses within a half-dozen years, with very high reliability. And while it might be nice were the relevant governments able to fund their own people's treatment, a large portion of these countries aren't there and won't be there in twenty years.
((I'll caveat that it's not clear how much impact it would have on new infections; the data is pretty strong for it in individual cases, and very lackluster at population levels. While PEPFAR promotes high rates of testing and ART treatment as an HIV eradication tool, in practice even countries that have hit PEPFAR's 95-95-95 metrics officially have only seen modest reductions in new HIV cases that are hard to isolate from other potential causes. Studies have maxed out around 40% reduction. And, of course, ART as an 'HIV eradication' framework has conflict with 15- to 20-million-plus people who would keep having HIV for forty years even if new transmission went to zero.))
And there are a few other programs with other similar body counts and unsolvable problems. It's a little easier for a marginally-capable government to begin handling its own tuberculosis program than handle bulk orders of ART, but many of these countries are not marginally-capable.
The Lancet study is wrong because that ART rugpull isn't happening, yet. What happens if someone does propose it? What, if any, distinction would readers be able to take, when the Lancet gives a panicked paper worried about the next mass murder? Who's going to care?
Most media coverage focuses hard on the trolley problem: whether cutting funding is equivalent to murder. That's an interesting philosophical question, but it depends on a foundation that's falling out of the basement level: whether people would care even if it were.
Because there's a limit. After the third or fourth time you promise your political opponents are going to commit mass murder on scales previously reserved for the biggest genocides ever recorded, and then in the aftermath, have to revise down to unremarkable numbers, that reputation follows you. And it's going to keep following even if the claimed catastrophe's actual meat does show up. Given that several fudge factors that supported the ART program are starting to fray around the edges, with the HIV eradication framework becoming so clearly unachievable that, or the various financial arguments about it being cheaper to avoid infection running head-first into infections that won't go away, that's a concern that needs to be treated seriously, not rhetorically.
But it's more useful to twist the edges of the truth today, to show how one's political enemies are monsters.
gattsuru
11hr ago
Unfortunately, there's a plausible alternative explanation: dead leaf and grass matter will produce phosphate as a byproduct of decomposition, and it's fairly common for pool installations to have early-spring startup phosphate problems downstream of either water or piping contaminated by that decayed matter. It's a well-enough known problem that the implementing company during the repairs would do some purges as a matter of course, but depending on the size of the pump and filtration system, that may have been hard to actually do. And taking in water with moderate phosphate amounts is common: the Obama-era reworks took in Potamac water that was pretty gross about it.
On the flip side, the amount of phosphate fertilizer necessary to produce an algae bloom in a 7m gallon tank is about the size of a milk jug if dumped directly in, and maybe the size of a backpack if just dropped in the grass near the pool, so the malicious explanation is pretty plausible, too.
gattsuru
12hr ago
I generally don't downvote and don't like the downvote brigade, but it's not a very good post, and one of a pretty long series of not-very-good post of a similar type magicalkittycat makes. The "victimization crisis" is just unfounded Bulverism, the "presumably there should be mass desire for movement somewhere if we're fucking something up in a significant way and we just don't see it" is one in a long series of actively refusing to see the evidence in front of his own face, and it doesn't actually interact with the claims of the post it's reacting to so much as just pretend that they didn't real to start with.
Which is why he didn't get responses: there's not much point in trying to debate with someone who's just going to deny the potential relevance of any evidence (this is, afaict, the last time I did downvote him) or going to duck out the second his point is demonstrated as vacant.
gattsuru
23hr ago
From here:
Several ways forward here given the choice of Roberts/Barrett to nullify the 14th Amendment and extra-constitutionally replace it with their own language:
1) Nullification. States issue birth certificates, and they can just stop issuing them to non-citizens. Roberts/Barrett can deal with the fallout and litigate each birth individually.
2) Pack the court. If Robert wants to be a politician who writes laws instead of a judge, then he can fight with 10 more unelected legislators in robes.
3) Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners.
4) Deny entry to all female foreigners.
5) Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.
6) Dissolution of the Union. A nation which can’t even restrict who gets to be a citizen isn’t a nation.
7) Amend the Constitution. This is pointless, because once a judge decides he can rewrite the Constitution at will (as Roberts and Barrett did today), the actual text is meaningless. But this is what most GOP politicians gravitate towards because they are useless.
If you think all these options are not great, understand that that is what happens when unelected judges decide that they are in charge of the country and get to write its laws.
I don't think Tracey's summary is accurate -- which shouldn't be a surprise, given Tracey's general behavior in other contexts -- and this is pretty explicitly a parade of horribles rather than a real proposal, but I don't think Davis is being particularly healthy as a response, either.
gattsuru
1d ago
There's something weird going on in it. There's the obvious dislike of the financial side, from the title on down, but if that were the real story, Midi Health (and any other competitors? but I've heard of this sort of thing happening from normal general-practitioner work, just less sexual and less formalized) would be a top-line item, not a footnote, and the BVC would just be scamming the rich people out of what 'everyone' should have.
A lot of it seems like it's borrowing from anti-woo stuff, and there is legitimate history there: a lot of men's sexual health stuff has been snake oil, sometimes literally, and women's isn't much better. But the specific claims here are relatively well-supported in the evidence, and the stuff that isn't (eg, estrogen supplementation post-cancer) is on better ground than the summary suggests.
The Bulverist take is that the writer hates (especially rich) men, sees this as a way for wives of rich men to trade their health to stay sexually desirable to men, and couldn't actually come up with the information to support that position. But that's not very charitable.
gattsuru
1d ago
I think the suspension is of the felony prison sentence. Still means he'll likely serve six months for killing a man.
gattsuru
1d ago
Grant to Viramontes and Grant, consolidated as a question specific to the AR15. Disproves the "waiting on ANJRPC" hypothesis, but doesn't leave any real valid explanation for why this took five months. It's now got the record for most relists before a grant.
No information on the rest, which is ... a decision. Lamont had significant overlap, so refusing to consolidate it with is a choice. Nothing on the magazine cases, which means Duncan's inevitably going to be punted down to the 9CA and back up again later.
All of the under-21 questions were denied cert, with no explanation. That's a real big mess, since it's a massive pool with a major circuit split, but I don't think any conservative's going to be making arguments to this court about consistency anytime soon.
gattsuru
1d ago
Leaving it as a statutory question would have given an out that did not demand taking the amendment process or ramming the hardest-right justices through the courts as the least escalatory answer.
Dred Scott, once issued, couldn't be reversed: even were Scott freed, he couldn't become a citizen. Indeed, under Dred Scott, Scott couldn't even sue anyone over anything in federal courts in the future. That's why Dred Scott made non-legal avenues the only available ones, either direct defiance of the holding (eg the Territorial Slave Act of 1862) or the eventual war.
This isn't quite that bad, but the calculus for immigration restrictionists is still far uglier than Roberts had to make it.
gattsuru
1d ago
I don't think Yglesian popularism necessarily involves tactical lying (although all politicians, populist, popularist or otherwise do a lot of it), and I don't think Yglesias personally is engaging in tactical lying about his political views.
gattsuru
2d ago
Yeah, fair. And some circuits have rejected geofence warrants as general warrants, so it's not implausible.
Fourth Circuit opinion
Thanks, corrected.
gattsuru
2d ago
Why wouldn't it be a reasonable search, given that the police in Chatrie had a warrant?
My personal read of the Fourth Amendment is that the warrant clause is disjoint from the right to be secure from unreasonable seizures, and a warrant does not automatically make a search reasonable. But, to be clear, SCOTUS does not agree with me. McNeely holds that a blood draw is perfectly valid as a subject of a warrant. I think this leads to very bad places, as evidenced by what rubber-stamp warrants often lead to, but that's just my position.
And, yeah, it's a punt-of-a-punt from SCOTUS.
gattsuru
2d ago
I haven't followed the politics closely, but my impression is that Bukele was also a mayor of a major city and had pivoted to a hard anti-crime posture a few years before he got the presidency, so it's not like he or his policies were just showing in El Salvador completely fresh, either.
Chatrie joins a host of other weird post-Carpenter lower court cases (pole cameras, mosaic cases, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore) where connection between the 4th Amendment's text and a more general free-standing limit on police action gets messy. If the rest of 4th Amendment caselaw wasn't such a clusterfuck, this wouldn't be so rough, but instead simultaneously a) if you're guilty, you can get out of it by arguing the police searched someone else too aggressively, b) if you're innocent, you have no recourse but being found not-guilty, and c) a host of other actual search of you specifically still don't count because mumblemumble. And it's just a punt onto the merits: I fully expect the 5th ED: 4th to go "okay, it's a reasonable search", maybe even snark about how technically precedent doesn't require warranted searches to be reasonable, and then SCOTUS to deny cert on the eventual appeal.
Watson is one of those cases where the textualist and originalist arguments could genuinely go either way. In theory, Congress could answer the question, in practice it won't. And military ballots make the election day cutoff hard to abide by (even if the Clinton-era mess makes everyone hypocrites).
Cook is... ugh. It's an important enough case that, as much as I bitch about Kavanaugh's results-oriented position, I at least have sympathy for it here. But on top of the questionable legal grounding, it's a decision answering arguments not even at question before the court, while punting the actual matter in question into an unsolvable procedural gimmick so it'll go away and not come back.
gattsuru
5d ago
FCfromSSC was talking about FRTs, which don't fall under the strict definition of machine guns.
((uh, arguably. I am not a lawyer, no guarantees that the ATF won't shoot you and your little dog too anyway.))
But the FOPA1986 specifically prohibited the transfer or possession of machine guns unless authorized by a state or federal agency, unless they were lawfully possessed before that period (the ATF further regulated this to require a tax stamp). Combined with the other exceptions and regulations, this basically made new manufacture or transfer illegal for normal people.
Except transfer or possession that the ATF authorizes are excluded, because they're a federal agency authorizing FFLs. And while the ATF has a lot of discretion for giving out FFLs, once they've done that, the SOT that authorizes transfer or manufacture of NFA weapons is just normal tax documentation, and the ATF has no authority to reject it. You just can't sell any NFA weapons to anyone that isn't in the same category. It's really stupid, and it's the sort of thing where you're giving the federal government your home address and fingerprints, but it's... pretty much just straight-up legal.
gattsuru
5d ago
Generally have to deal with the paperwork for an FFL-SOT to (legally) buy the actual automatic component. It's in a kinda messy legal area, but more because of the legal overhead and warrantless searches from the FFL side than anything with the SOT.
You can by forced-reset triggers without any paperwork (other than any other gun purchase), but how close they match 'real' full automatic is in the eye of the beholder, and the feds are kinda schizophrenic about them. Some states also separately prohibit FRTs/
Birthright citizenship has the awkward situation where there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the modern read isn't the same as the historical one - most clearly with needing explicit statutory authorization to make Native Americans citizens - but the modern one has been around and has so many massive ramifications that the stare decisis arguments vastly overwhelm a bare EO.
If the court finds a birthright citizenship not only supported but required by the Constitution, I could see a 7-2 or even 6-3 breakdown (though they might be styled as concurrence-in-judgement). Roberts has a lot of motivation to constrain the bounds of the decision and to get a 9-0 or 8-1 if at all possible, though, and limiting the opinion to just 'existing statutes say people born here are citizens, change the law and then we can talk again' is both easily available and bypasses a lot of the messier questions, if only because the statute (despite using the exact same words) was written in 1952 ED:the 1920s, so it simplifies all of the originalist arguments. But it would be a really obvious punt.
gattsuru
5d ago
I don't have a position on the general question, but "jurisdictional land-grab" is a pretty common expression in discussions of law. See here for a 2015 example on pages 2 and 4; here for 2014. I think the Waters of the United States rule popularized it as a more literal term-of-art than its historical use, but the only thing I can say, and with weak confidence, is that it was coined sometime after Kelo v. New London because otherwise the libertarians would have used it everywhere.
It's heavily focused on connotation, as normal "land grabs" in the resource extraction business world usually meant large-scale destruction of natural environment and/or displacement of peoples, but the applicability here isn't that much of a stretch. The state commanding internal behavior of religious, moral, and ethical institutions is something that was both initially disclaimed and completely replaces whatever moral codes those institutions were able to field on this particular matter.
((Conversely, this is probably the stronger argument for it being bad AI-gen: a remotely questioning approach with a 23B LLM and maybe a 7B one can give concrete examples of this process: CLS v. Martinez, Rotary Club of Duarte, Bob Jones University, these are not new cases.))
gattsuru
6d ago
In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.
Ah, thanks. I glossed over that one. That's... a lot more of a discrepancy than I would have expected.
How did you get the correct link?
The raw text is https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_%21JrTm%21,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf803be8-5743-4154-be73-d753d4d02a59_1725x394.png, but the https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_%21JrTm%21,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/ block is a helper that probably only works in combination with other code (javascript?) on the substack webpage proper.
The real CDN location is the https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf803be8-5743-4154-be73-d753d4d02a59_1725x394.png block, but it has some URL-encoded characters. %3A is a :, and %2F is /. If you don't want to manually decode it, there's a bunch of web pages that will do the change for you.
gattsuru
6d ago
I think the screenshot link needs to be this to work. Do you mind spelling out where is the 71% coming from?
But yeah, this has been a long-standing problem, and not one specific to the UK. There's also a tendency for people to get marked as white who... well, I'm not great at telling race, but it doesn't take a lot of effort for these examples. You can even get progressives to admit it happens when it's useful to their arguments. And then on top of that, many jurisdictions outright try to avoid convictions that could have immigration consequences, so two people with the same actual bad behavior might get marked down into different categories based on what their recorded race is.
I don't want to go to full radical skepticism on the numbers, here, but it's hard to take the public numbers seriously.
gattsuru
6d ago
Wolford v. Lopez Dropped
Holding: Hawaii’s law prohibiting licensed concealed-carry permit holders from carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the property owner’s express authorization violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
Alito, 6-3.
Hawaii's statute here was not unprecedented. As one of multiple jurisdictions with a post-Bruen tantrum bill, it joined New York City, Chicago, New Jersey, California, and Maryland. It was unusual only in the sense that the 9th Circuit did not offer an injunction, even as the California law had been enjoined by the same court and panel.
In that sense, this case will not have broad impact: only Hawaii had a standing version of the statute, Hawaii has separately made possession and lawful carry near-impossible in ways this case didn't touch, and the holding is specific to this case. On the other hand, this sticks a fork in the other five lawsuits, as much as anything can be a sure bet when it comes to law or judges doing their jobs, and there's a lot of dicta that has broader implications. On the gripping hand, this court has been shipping broadsides and warning shots on the Second Amendment for over a decade; it's hard to expect the actual holding and clear rule to stick, and implausible any amount of hinting dicta would.
Some general notes:
- The majority is even more straightforward than I expected. Alito is, bluntly, padding the majority, it's still only 24 pages, and even then it's still half history lesson and a couple pages of a lengthy hypothetical to explain the statute's impact on the law-abiding.
- It's also very loud about it. Alito's a grumpy writer at the best of times, and there's a lot of the text that's telegraphing his dislike of the lower court and state legislative defiance, here. The "Spirit of Aloha" shows up, and VanDyke gets a nice quote. The biggest tell is just "After Bruen, Hawaii and four of the other five States called out by our decision adopted a new method of restricting law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms for self-defense."
- Alito does still duck on the question of the law's purpose, though: "Petitioners and the United States argue that the new default rule was enacted to undermine our decision in Bruen, but whatever the purpose of the new law, the shift from the old common-law rule unquestionably imposed a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right that this Court recognized in Bruen."
- The analysis of historical analogues takes up the most paper, but Alito's "step one" analysis has the most meat to it. A lot of lower courts have ducked the Second Amendment by including interest-balancing or historical analogue tests before a plaintiff can even argue the Second Amendment is implicated, and Alito pretty heavily ties that off if they follow the holding here. Big if, though.
- It's a 6-3 split. Duh. Technically the liberal dissenters are just saying Bruen shouldn't cover this law. Kagan by saying the historical analogues are close enough in a way that would make any law an analogue for anything else in a one-paragraph dissent that's threadbare, while Sotomayor and Jackson draw up an alternate universe where it was just a property law and didn't implicate the Second Amendment at all. But that's a pretty weak fig leaf, and Jackson outright says "I think Bruen was wrongly decided". There were a lot of people trying to pull tea leaves from Hemani, and the tea leaves are just that they didn't want to be voting against potheads, and that's not going to apply to anything else.
- There's a Barrett concurrence that mostly seems written to counter the Sotomayor/Jackson position, which is fair, but also kinda shooting fish in a barrel since Jackson doesn't really seem to be interacting with concepts like "We don't do this in the 1A context". She does also bash Hawaii's attempt to use Black Codes as support, which are joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. There's a II-A section that explicitly draws out what sort of prohibitions she would accept, that notably no one else (even Roberts!) joins... but it's also more constrained than the exceptions Alito and Roberts have signed onto before, so I dunno that it's worth reading too deeply into it.
- At least in the short term, both Wolford and Hemani are likely to mean more for what happens to other cases, not their own holding. There's still the hardware and under-21 cases, they haven't been granted or denied cert yet, and not much time before the summer break. The narrowness of these decisions would make any GVR clearly pretextual, and pretext that's doomed to fail, especially in cases like Duncan that have already been GVR'd once before in Bruen. At best, it buys two years while Roberts yells 'don't make me pull over' to brats who know he won't. ... but that doesn't make it implausible.
Honestly, noncompliance is one of the more consistent and understandable bits: both PrEP and ARVs have unpleasant side effects, disruptions to supply chains or mobility give a lot of excuses, and the stigma is pretty present even in countries where it'd be possible to take the medicines privately. People with chronic illnesses 'forgetting' their meds because they're doing fine now is really common in the West, even for diseases that are hilariously unpleasant. PrEP has the further problem where it's perceived as accusing your sexual partner of infection or infidelity in a space where that's a serious insult.
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