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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Supreme Court roundup thread? They dropped four opinions today that have some pretty wide ranging implications. Some more than others.

In Chatrie v. United States a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that geofence warrants constitute a "search" under the 4th amendment. This does not necessarily resolve the case in favor of Chatrie, though. The government did have a warrant in this case, although it's not clear whether the warrant was "reasonable." SCOTUS here is mostly pushing back on the holding by the Fourth Circuit panel that a search had not even occurred under the fourth amendment, due to the third party doctrine.

In Watson v. Republican National Committee a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) the court holds that federal laws specifying an election day do not pre-empt state laws that permit counting ballots received after that day, so long as the ballots are sent by that day.

In Trump v. Slaughter a 6-3 court holds that the "for-cause" removal provision for FTC commissioners is unconstitutional, overruling Humphrey's Executor. This was pretty widely anticipated, since the Supreme Court has gradually been expanding the President's power to remove officials since Trump's re-election.

In Trump v. Cook a 5-4 court (Roberts and Kavanaugh joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that the President may not fire members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governor's at-will. The for-cause provision regarding firing members of the Feds BoG is constitutional and sets a "substantial threshold" for what constitutes cause.

Most online discussion I've seen has been focused on the latter two decisions and their apparent inconsistency. Apparently, Congress can only insulate executive branch employees from Presidential termination some of the time and those circumstances do not depend on the wording of the statute or anything else Congress has any control over. Roberts is the author of both opinions and he tries to square the circle by arguing that the United States has a long history of independent central banking but I don't think he's very convincing. The Federal Reserve itself is a mere 1 year older than the FTC (founded in 1913 vs 1914) so Roberts tries to reach back to the First and Second Bank of the United States and nevermind the fact there was an 80 year period where the United States had no central bank between the Second Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve. Some of the syllabus even, in my view, departs from anything that could be called a legal argument to argue that this is good policy:

Although this extraordinary case arises on the Court’s interim docket, the Court has had the benefit of not only amici and oral argument but months of internal consultation and deliberation. The Court declines to sow doubt as to the status of one of the Nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions, and would not so quickly unsettle this “special arrangement sanctioned by history.”

The court has also said tomorrow will be the last opinion day, in which we will presumably get the four remaining opinions (including birthright citizenship) so maybe I'll have to do another one tomorrow.

Congress can only insulate executive branch employees from Presidential termination some of the time and those circumstances do not depend on the wording of the statute or anything else Congress has any control over.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the distinguishing feature here is that the conservatives are okay with eliminating FTC independence because they think financial crimes and sweeping expansion of executive power are cool and they are not okay with eliminating Fed independence because they know Trump is retarded and will crash the economy if he is able to dictate US monetary policy. I'm sure you can torture the question enough to come up with something that approximates coherent legal reasoning if you squint, but I doubt anyone thinks that is going on here.

Suggesting that your outgroup believes stupid or evil things is a central example of waging the culture war. Don’t do this.

One day ban to cool off.

I want to place a bet on birthright. I care basically zero about the legal arguments and I don’t think Robert’s primary instinct is choosing the best legal argument.

Simplistically I don’t believe Robert’s will want to create the next Roe v Wade that lacks a legislative solution and ends up creating a voting block that only votes for repeal of Roe. I will consider voting only for candidates who will appoint judges who will repeal Birthright if Robert’s removes the ability of action on the issue outside of the SC. I think both legal arguments to go either way are intellectually coherent so you can just pick the legal theory you want.

My gut says he upholds most of birthright but finds a way to let congress make the rules in the future. This may be the weakest legal theory to just punt to congress but it feels like it fits with Robert decisions. And this includes deciding the Fed is special today. It’s usually better to punt controversial things to congress instead of locking change into multi-decade SC battles.

Everyone knows amending the constitution is impossible now so amending the Constitution just comes down to change the Court membership. Getting controversial things out of the court hands has value to maintain the Court legitimacy. You don’t want a different court in 20 years reversing tomorrows decision.

Your gut was wrong, and Kavanaugh was the one who was looking to let Congress handle it.

Yep wrong. But was like 95% of being upheld on prediction markets. Already being at 4 to strike it down I would have thought got Robert’s in play.

Barrett was a mistake.

Barrett was a mistake from day 0, she never should have been in line for the court. Alas, she got there because she's a woman, and because Roe v Wade.

Given her record since joining the Court I'm actually shocked that she was shortlisted.

But Thomas was put on the court to swap Thurgood Marshall for another black man, and he's based as all hell.

Probably they get rid of birthright citizenship but make an exception for anyone who’s gotten it to date. Which isn’t totally inconsistent because the Constitution frowns on the ex-post-facto application of laws.

Roe v Wade was bad because it was legislating from the bench. It is very hard to make the argument that the constitution grants abortion rights without tying your head into a pretzel.

If you want to argue that the 14th does not grant children of migrants citizenship then you would have to argue that what the authors meant by jurisdiction is in fact the duty to pay capital income tax in the US, and that the former slaves had this duty but foreign residents do not, or find some other bizarre interpretation of jurisdiction.

Getting controversial things out of the court hands has value to maintain the Court legitimacy.

Would you feel the same way about the rights granted by 2A as by 14A?

I am a big fan of a legal system where words mean things, and courts try their best to interpret the meaning of the text while also keeping previous precedent (where it did an honest job of interpreting the meaning).

If words do not mean things, you do not need much in the way of a constitution, you can simply have a SCOTUS filled by wise elders who can veto any laws or decrees they deem unwise and replace them with wiser ones.

You don’t want a different court in 20 years reversing tomorrows decision.

That is an argument for not torturing the text of the constitution until it confesses to your meaning and the Kennedy assassination.

I am solidly pro-choice, but I fully understand the pro-life's anger at Roe v Wade. It is not like there had been an abortion amendment and the SCOTUS was just "jupp, that means abortion has to be legal". Instead, the court conjured this thing out of thin air, because they felt that achieving the right ends was more important than using the right means (e.g. sensible textual interpretations). So pro-life embarked on a half-century quest to replace SCOTUS with more sympathetic justices, and actually succeeded.

I do not hold overturning Roe v Wade against the current SCOTUS because it was clearly a terrible precedent. By contrast, United States v Wong Kim Ark follows a textual reading of the 14th. If the SCOTUS overturns this precedent without providing a rock-solid argument why it was in fact wrong, they will prove that they are as much partisan hacks as the court which decided Roe.

In that case, filling the SCOTUS with their candidates will be the prime objective of both parties. Either the Republicans win, in which case 14A is only of historical interest, and 1A might not apply to anything Trump labels "left-wing radical", or the Dems win, and 2A will only be of historical interest, and 1A will not apply to anything which president Newsom designates as "hate speech", which will coincidentally include most campaigning by the GOP.

Both of these outcomes would be terrible. I would much rather see the SCOTUS return to being non-partisan referees. Luckily for me, it seems that the current SCOTUS is not afraid to vote against Trump when they feel he is just plain wrong.

If you want to argue that what the authors meant by jurisdiction is in fact the duty to pay capital income tax in the US, and that the former slaves had this duty but foreign residents do not, or find some other bizarre interpretation of jurisdiction.

Or, you know, the pretty basic argument thar "jurisdiction" means just citizens, and a very particular carve out for ex-slaves and native Americans.

My perspective as an non-American third party is that it's pretty clear why the language "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was used instead of just explicitly writing the 14A to restrict citizenship to children of existing citizens (jus sanguinis). It was to include the weird cases of ex-slaves (and later, native Americans, though that's messy about their jurisiction status and for any future similar unusual circumstances) and was never intended to allow for blanket jus soli citizenship.

Ex-slaves and native Americans, even though they weren't citizens, were clearly subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in a way that an anchor baby of a citizen of another country is not.

Why are you bringing up American Indians? They are clearly not granted citizenship by the 14th Amendment, it had to be granted later by statute.

So whatever "subject to the jurisdiction" means clearly excluded them, even if they could be prosecuted for crimes committed off of the reservation.

Because the American Indian Act of 1924 might have been unconstitutional if not for the 14A.

If you want to argue that the 14th does not grant children of migrants citizenship then you would have to argue that what the authors meant by jurisdiction is in fact the duty to pay capital income tax in the US, and that the former slaves had this duty but foreign residents do not, or find some other bizarre interpretation of jurisdiction.

What say you to a legal argument I believe carries at least some consideration in that Wong Kim Ark was correctly decided for children of what could be analogized to green card holders (and permanent residents) from back then, but that does not grant citizenship for the children of people here temporarily (vacationing, limited visas, etc) or illegal immigrants. The legal backing would be that Native Americans born on US soil were not granted citizenship in the 14th as it required the passage of a later bill to make that happen - so clearly at the time the 14th was ratified not just anyone who gave birth to a child on US soil was given citizenship.

Would you feel the same way about the rights granted by 2A as by 14A?

Even I'm amenable to the idea that there are categories of weapons that ought not be available to random assholes. McNukes are a fun joke, but not something taken seriously by people outside the range of Sovereign Citizens.

Similarly, I don't think the founders, or the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment, envisioned a world where a peer rival could trivially fly millions of pregnant women out to a tourist resort to give birth, and thereby build up a massive voting block of birthright citizens with entirely foreign loyalty.

What?

I think you might be the first person to envision that today. Personally, I’d rule that airlifting millions (?!) in a ploy to seize voting rights involves removing U.S. jurisdiction over whatever area. Defeating the world’s premier air power would certainly do that.

But it’s not exactly salient. How many of the existing illegals used a plane at all? Surely the founders were aware of the possibility of land crossings.

I mean, visa overstays are estimated to make up "an estimated 42% of the approximately 11 million unauthorized population living in the United States" per the Congressional Research Service and I assume most of them came by plane initially.

I guess it’s possible. Is that cheaper than a passenger boat?

Either way, overstaying a visa would definitely be comprehensible to a Founding Father. I don’t think it’s good evidence that the Constitution has a critical security exploit.

No, that already happened. China has something in the ballpark of a million of it's people who have American citizenship via birthright tourism - and the trend appears to be accelerating.

That seems pretty damn salient.

Oh. Anchor babies. I guess I was envisioning something more…coordinated. Mea culpa.

I do take issue with the Post’s excuses for data. Look at those numbers: a nonprofit says 36,000 women in 2012. Chinese officials say 50,000, year unspecified. This Australian professor thinks 100,000, so that’s good enough, I guess.

Meanwhile the actual number of births in the Marianas is around 1,100 a year. If every single one was a birth tourist, you’d still need another 30 Saipans to get in the ballpark. I don’t trust these numbers at all.

But I’d also say they’re beside the point. Saipan’s exploits stem from its organization as a U.S. territory in the 70s. Congress still has the power to amend that relationship. The bigger potential problem is birth tourism in the states proper, which could be resolved by visa policy.

I don’t see this as a real threat.

Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.

2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.

You have admitted yourself theirs plausible cover to rule either way. Slaves paid global taxes to US. Migrants do not etc.

I think the Robert’s court is pragmatic so I think they find a way to give a flexible ruling.

Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.

I think you would need to search hard and long to find someone here who will argue that Roe was the correct decision as far as the procedure was concerned. I certainly was happy that abortion was legal, but the fact on how that was determined seemed rather horrible to me, and indeed created a lot of additional problems, such as the politization of the SCOTUS.

I am a procedure fanboy. As far as the direct outcome is concerned, there is not a lot of difference between cops assassinating a drug dealer and him getting arrested, convicted of murder, exhausting his appeals and finally getting executed. Yet the indirect consequences will be very different because once you grant cops the ability to do summary executions, they are unlikely to stick to just killing drug dealers. It is better to suffer the occasional dealer to go free for lack of evidence than to live in some fascist dictatorship.

Roe was basically the judicial equivalent of just shooting drug dealers.

2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.

That depends a lot on your understanding of 2A and what it is for.

As far as keeping the means to fight battles in the hands of the population, the diverge happened no later than WW1. Not all of it is the judiciaries fault either, parts of it is just that the cost of the equipment which tended to win battles skyrocketed: the median American could probably afford to keep a state of the art rifle in 1800 or 1900, but he could certainly not maintain a tank in 1930! Another part certainly was judicial, in that 2A was simply not applied to Tommy guns.

On the other hand, while the judiciary has been fine with not adding new weapon systems to the 2A pool, and has certainly okayed background checks and waiting periods, there was also little attempt to reneg on earlier precedent. Double-action handguns had been in the 2A pool since they were first invented, and there they stayed.

Today the US is one of very few jurisdictions where a citizen can own a rifle or semi-automatic handgun without giving her government any justification why she wants a gun. (Sure, carrying the gun in public is a bit trickier and might require a license in blue states, but contrast this with Germany: to even own a 9mm, I would need to show legitimate need (such as being a hunter or long-practicing sport shooter), and to get a license to carry in everyday life I would basically have to become a cop.)

I am solidly pro-choice, but I fully understand the pro-life's anger at Roe v Wade.

Even Justice Ginsburg once said that she thought that Roe was awkward law that probably set back the pro-choice movement a lot.

She said they should have found another argument to enshrine an abortion right and it was the wrong case. So there was still a desire to find a plausible argument that made abortion a right.

Sure, but even within that mindset Roe isn’t great. I think she also touched on the backlash it caused and said it might have been better to let it progress through democratic means, but I could be misremembering.

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.

And it's just a punt onto the merits: I fully expect the 5th 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.

Technically the District Court found that the warrant was invalid under the fourth amendment but ruled the evidence was admissable anyway due to the good faith exception. I have not read the Fourth Circuit opinion but it's possible they just affirm the District Court's holding. So, the cops get away with it this time but maybe not in the future.

Yeah, fair. And some circuits have rejected geofence warrants as general warrants, so it's not implausible.

Fourth Circuit opinion

Thanks, corrected.

And it's just a punt onto the merits: I fully expect the 5th 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.

Why wouldn't it be a reasonable search, given that the police in Chatrie had a warrant?

The only thing the Supreme Court seems to be saying here is that you can't completely punt the issue by declaring it a non-search (because reasons) rather than a reasonable one.

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.

McNeely holds that a blood draw is perfectly valid as a subject of a warrant.

Obviously there's evidence you can get from a blood draw for certain crimes that are extremely important and also potentially exculpatory, and I don't see the reason why a blood draw would be in itself unreasonable.

Agreed.

If you do not allow the drawing of blood for evidence, then any DUI laws become basically unenforceable. At best, they would become a shit-throwing fest with cops arguing that according to their eyewitness testimony, you were clearly inebriated. I will rather take my chances with the BAC results of a forensic technician any day of the week, thank you very much.

If instead you want to get a warrant to draw blood of a pedestrian sitting in a park because you want to convict them of being on some illegal narcotics, then I am much less sympathetic because the scope of the alleged crime does not fit the invasiveness of the search, and would argue that any such warrant is unreasonable. (I do not think this is a common MO for cops though, typically they want to catch you with the substance in a bag instead of in your blood.)

Eh, it wouldn’t be as big a deal as you think. Cops and courts had been catching and charging drunk drivers for 80 years before the breathalyzer or other chemical testing even existed. The first one was in 1897.

It's not quite as bad as you make it out -- SCOTUS has placed limits on warrants, at least as to generality and specificity. Groh v. Ramirez & Riley v. California come to mind. They only mostly disagree with you :-)

Also, while McNeely holds that a blood draw is valid, Winston v Lee holds that a surgery to remove a bullet isn't. So there's some cognizable limit there too.

Why wouldn't it be a reasonable search, given that the police in Chatrie had a warrant?

"and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The question is whether "everything in that area" is particular enough.

Watson is pretty terrible; it allows bad actors to keep adding backdated votes after election day until they get the result they want. Vastly increases the ease of such fraud.

That's not a good argument that a specific statute (from 1934, no less, before my dad was born) covers it.

Yes, the decision is probably legally correct. But if something isn't done to prevent rampant fraud, our elections are all going to be decided by whoever is best at fraud.

The amount of fraud from voters vs. the amount of fraud form the party in office doctoring rolls/removing polling places/judging ballots as invalid vs. people casing false ballots is so fucking huge, I just assume that anyone who cares about one but not the other is either so uninformed I should just ignore them or activally malicious.

You expect people to be informed of something there is literally not enough evidence to judge? The claim that the number of false ballots cast (no, not by ineligible individuals, but by organized groups) is small is disputed. And we know these operations can be hidden from official scrutiny (even if they're so well known they're basically a meme) for a very long time; Chicago was.

Agreed. The Court can’t save us from failing to pass the SAA

I don't feel like this is viable, you basically need to enlist an entire post office as your accomplice when you get them to put a false date in their post-marking machine and run a bunch of ballots through it for you, and post offices have security cameras.

California doesn't even require a post-mark, just a hand-written date on the ballot envelope.

Are you fucking kidding me

Everything I learn about the California elections process seems to be explicitly designed to allow as much fraudulent voting as possible

Everything I learn about the California elections process seems to be explicitly designed to allow as much fraudulent voting as possible

correct

From Election Code section 3020

(2) If the ballot has no postmark, a postmark with no date, or an illegible postmark, and no other information is available from the United States Postal Service or the bona fide private mail delivery company to indicate the date on which the ballot was mailed, the vote by mail ballot identification envelope is date stamped by the elections official upon receipt of the vote by mail ballot from the United States Postal Service or a bona fide private mail delivery company, and is signed and dated pursuant to Section 3011 on or before election day.

So if you can get the ballot to the counters as-if it was delivered by the post office or "a bona fide private mail delivery company", you don't need a postmark.

bona fide private mail delivery company

Isn't this illegal under federal law? USPS has a granted monopoly on letter delivery.

That monopoly has enough loopholes to drive FedEx through. The post office suspended the monopoly on "extremely urgent letters" in 1979, and I believe current statutes freeze that suspension.

So basically, I can carry one of these things into a polling place filled to the top with ballots any time within 7 days after the election and they'll be eligible to be counted.

Well, to the counting office, but yeah.

How hard would it really be to fake a postmark?

Well the basic problem I see is illustrated by the Mitchell and Webb moon landing conspiracy sketch:

"So, first off, we're going to need to build a massive rocket."
"Why would we need to do that? We're not actually going to the moon."
"Yes, but when they ask how we got them there, we're going to need to be able to say, we sent them there on that massive rocket you saw."

I would be extremely surprised if the USPS doesn't track the amount of volume through each post office. It would be insane if they didn't. So when somebody asks "where did all of these ballots come from," your conspiracy is going to need to be able to say "they were mailed from this post office, look at the postmarks," and this would become a pretty embarrassing thing to say if you can go to that post office and it turns out they didn't process nearly enough volume to account for all the ballots that supposedly passed through that post office. So that post office needs to actually process approximately enough mail-in ballots to actually account for everything that showed up at the counting location.

Trivially easy to defeat: the post office volume tally is not available because the data was lost / it was malfunctioning that day / not enough funding

Indeed, what I mostly took away from the 2020 election is that US judges will not consider failure of integrity measures to be proof of fraud and will refuse to do anything about unverifiable votes, so as long as incompetence is a possibility all integrity measures are pointless.

And that's just one logistical issue. The secret ballot doesn't mean there's no tracking of ballots sent out and returned at all. The record of who you voted for is unknown, but if you voted is public. So in order to generate a bunch of additional fake votes you have to figure out a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on or else you end up with a massive clump of votes received>voters who actually voted. But if you have a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on, then you have to coordinate them to cover up that they didn't actually vote when people check, in which case is it not easier to just have them vote if they're in on the conspiracy? So ok maybe you make up a bunch of fake people who can't expose they didn't really vote because they aren't real, but then the double check finds they aren't real so nothing has been fixed!

The easiest weak point I can think of would be in the counting process, just saying "yep this one for A is actually for B" but then you have to find a way to hide it from the other monitors and dispose of the real ballots without anyone noticing, because of course if you just mark it down wrong the double checks can find that too you have to replace real ballots with fake ones.

Election fraud can work out in countries that are already lying about all their other logistics and where no one really bothers to meaningfully contest the results anyway (since they all know it's rigged), but it's going to be way harder when numbers don't start to match and people are willing to challenge it in the US.

you have to figure out a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on

Homeless people. You register them to vote at the homeless shelter, getting them to sign the registration form with an X, then the party loyalists staffing the homeless shelter just fill out the ballots when they arrive at the shelter. The homeless shelter is rewarded with government funding when their party has power. There is essentially zero possibility that there is anybody working at any homeless shelter who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat party loyalist, there's essentially zero chance of this operation getting ratted out. It actually feels extremely reasonable to me that this would be the explicit mechanism by which the Democrats keep their electoral majority secure in California. This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.

X to doubt. Homeless shelters are mostly run by religious Christians, not lefty NGO's.

probably less true in California than most places, and while I don't know Brenda Lee Armstrong's religious beliefs we can be quite confident she was doing fishy things with homeless voting.

Why not just have the homeless vote in the first place? Presumably most homeless would also mostly vote for the Democrats, and this way you do not go to jail if your little scheme is discovered.

Purportedly, this was how they swung things in LA. Paying homeless people $5 to vote for the other socialist after the formal date, and then kept going until they had just enough to keep Pratt out of the runoff. There are videos of interviews with supposed homeless people. Believe, dive down a research rabbit hole, or press X to doubt as you choose.

Given that these are literal homeless people, there would probably be an unacceptable rate of voting for republicans because of some combination of 'I just want to fill it out for my $10'/literally not understanding how to vote straight D/'Screw you for telling me what to do'/etc.

I don't believe the theory, mind(notably, homeless shelters are mostly a Christian project in the US, and not particularly likely to do shady stuff on behalf of democrats). But the idea that the homeless would vote monolithically D anyways is not an argument.

And yet it fails the very next part

then you have to coordinate them to cover up that they didn't actually vote when people check,

A whole bunch of people saying they were signed up at the homeless shelters and that they didn't vote yet somehow votes were submitted in their name would be noticeable. And if these homeless people were willing to lie and say they actually did vote, then it would be easy to just get them to vote to begin with.

This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.

There's already an easy and known explanation for it, spending doesn't matter. Housing supply and demand matters and California is extremely NIMBY. It's why West Virginia has some of the worst drug rates but low homelessness. Homes are cheaper (because they have a much larger supply:demand ratio) so even most of the addicts can afford a place.

A whole bunch of people saying they were signed up at the homeless shelters and that they didn't vote yet somehow votes were submitted in their name would be noticeable.

Dunno about a whole bunch, but I recently saw a reporter interviewing homeless people in LA saying that they were paid to fill out ballots for/against some ballot initiative -- so what if it's both happening and noticeable, but nobody does anything about it because the people doing the fraud keep getting elected?

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How politically active do you really think the modal homeless person is? The point is to get your hands on a bunch of ballots for a bunch of people who were never actually planning on voting, and likely aren't even aware of what you are doing when you shove a voter registration in their face and tell them to draw an X on it.

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high-res photo of a bunch of stamps on mail

3d-model the stamp's shape

3d-print the stamp in a rubbery material with a resin printer, so no layer lines.

gently weather/age the stamp.

...would be one obvious and probably undetectable method. You could use this to match an existing stamp's "unique" flaws/weathering, or use it to create a plausible stamp that doesn't match known stamps, whichever is more useful.

I go into more detail in another comment but this falls apart if it turns out the post office that you are pretending to have mailed this from turns out not to have handled nearly enough mail that day to account for all the ballots that were supposedly mailed through it.

Absolutely trivial, it's just an ink stamp.

Absolutely trivial, it's just an ink stamp.

I imagine it would not be too hard to find a cooperative postal worker who likes the idea of fighting Nazis.

How do you do this with a single postal worker without them getting caught by their fellow employees or the security cameras in their post office? This is why I say you would need to enlist an entire post office in this scheme.

A quick Google says postal employees can use hand stamps to manually post mark so I imagine they could simply take one of those and return it after a couple of days. And as we saw with Fulton County, it can take years and years to even be allowed to investigate suspicious ballots.

Who's going to investigate and prosecute that in a blue city?

Post offices are operated by the federal government. The federal government would be investigating it because a federal election is a federal issue.

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How do you do this with a single postal worker without them getting caught by their fellow employees or the security cameras in their post office? This is why I say you would need to enlist an entire post office in this scheme.

Yes, I tend to agree with this. But how many people need to be involved? I've seen small post offices with only 2 people on duty.

Okay, let’s apply the new Slaughter test to the Federal Reserve. What executive power does the fed wield?

Various powers to regulate banks. All of which count as “executive” under Slaughter for the same reason that the FTC’s rule making powers do.

Good point. I had forgotten how much regulatory authority the fed has over banks. Seems like these powers could be spit-off and given to Treasury though. I think you could make a principled exception for open-market operations.

Roberts is the author of both opinions and he tries to square the circle by arguing that the United States has a long history of independent central banking but I don't think he's very convincing.

The US sure has a history with central banking, and it's one of resisting the foreign and centralizing influence of the bank. It's just as unconstitutional for congress to make unaccountable bankers as every other kind of unaccountable bureaucrat.

Being able to kill the fucking bank was a pillar of many presidential campaigns.

As always, Thomas has the right of things.

The federal courts also lack the authority to enter the relief that the Court upholds today. This Court has held that a plaintiff cannot obtain relief against anyone, let alone the sovereign, without a right of action, but now it rules that Cook may obtain such relief without identifying one. It has held that federal courts lack equitable authority to interfere with the removal of public officers, but it recognizes an exception to that rule for Cook. And, it has held that Congressand the Judiciary cannot encroach on the President’s exclusive and preclusive powers, which include his power to remove executive officers, but it prevents the President from exercising that power here. Although the Court expresses concern that the President removed a Board member for “the first time in the Federal Reserve’s 111-year history,” ante, at 1, it expresses no such concern that it today upholds an injunction against the President’s removal of an executive officer for the first time in the Constitution’s 237-year history.

He then goes on to eviscerate the idea that central banking is traditional in any way. Just go read Justice Thomas while he's alive.

I remember when Obama reinstated the Federal Reserve for another hundred years, which has always been ridiculous on its face. I don't know why I thought he might resist, but of course he didn't. End the fed, kill the bank, and stop debasing my money.

End the fed, kill the bank, and stop debasing my money.

Are you certain that giving the president direct control of the monetary policy would lead to less debasing of the US dollar?

Roberts is the author of both opinions and he tries to square the circle by arguing that the United States has a long history of independent central banking but I don't think he's very convincing.

Okay, assuming this is just a fig leaf for a political decision, could someone please lay out for me the political reason why someone might rule differently in Slaughter and Cook? Because I am clueless about this.

I think basically Roberts didn't want to scare the hoes. Or rather, the bros. Giving the President that much control over the Fed would upset the financial markets and Roberts never wants to rock the boat that much.

One steel man aside is that there is a substantial history of an independent central bank in the Founding Era whereas for-cause-only removals for administrative agencies are a much more recent thing.

One can argue whether such history embodies a real rule of Constitutional interpretation, ie. that a document should not be interpreted to forbid what its contemporary supporters were doing, but it's not entirely wacky.

One can argue whether such history embodies a real rule of Constitutional interpretation, ie. that a document should not be interpreted to forbid what its contemporary supporters were doing, but it's not entirely wacky.

I would hope not. It took like 5 minutes for the Federalists under the Adams administration to outlaw scandalous criticism of the President, which of course is a proud American tradition.

The Federal Reserve controls the country and the fed is in turn controlled by international financial interests. Therefore FTC gets sacrificed but Fed is untouchable.

Unless I'm missing something isn't the whole point that the one group is the metaphorical arms of the president and the other group is supposed to be objective separate body? I feel like everything falls neatly from there...

The regulatory functions of the Fed (as opposed to the FOMC which sets short-term interest rates) are exactly the type of "executive" power that was at issue in Slaughter. If Congress can't delegate the power to regulate commerce to a removal-protected FTC, they can't delegate the power to regulate bank capital adequacy to a removal-protected Fed.

The FOMC seems more "executive" to me than whatever the US Institute for Peace is doing (which is explicitly not delegated any sovereign power by its founding statute), given that it relies on the power to print legal-tender money. And there is an Appeals Court judgement basically saying "given that we know Humphrey's Executor is dead, USIP counts as 'executive' and its board are removable"

But if all the Fed did was support the FOMC, I think the "The Bank of the United States is a founding-era precedent, so it must be constitutional" would be a reasonable argument

There is a general belief that Fed independence is a crucial linchpin undergirding American wealth and prosperity, regardless of how strong the legal argument is for it.

My preference would be for the Supreme Court to rip the band-aid and let Trump ruin our economy for a bit, and show people why we should get a proper Constitutional amendment protecting Fed independence, but that isn't going to happen.

IMO an amendment guaranteeing Fed Independence would be worse than the disease. The Fed can do Coups. They do have the technology to cause a Depression. You would essentially give the Fed the power to hold the rest of government hostage. That is not good. As it is now if Trump does something bad he can lose the next election.

They did not do it on purpose but they basically caused the Great Depression.

That would somehow require you to believe that the era before 1913 was somehow neither wealthy nor prosperous, or that the wealth and prosperity is no longer obtainable.

Obviously the US was wealthy and prosperous at the end of the 19th century. Incredibly wealthy and prosperous, in fact. What Fed independence is undergirding is exactly the kind of control over government that was repeatedly warned against by Jackson, among many.

The Fed is not a fourth branch of government, and Congress cannot make them so.

The Fed is not a fourth branch of government, and Congress cannot make them so.

No, but Congress and a supermajority of the states can make them so.

I imagine trying to make the Fed's power explicit via amendment would tank a lot of the support for their powers.

The main political explanation people argue is that fucking with the federal reserve hurts the markets and if there's one thing they care about more than expanding the Trump executive, it's their finances.

I don't know if this is the correct explanation, but it's the main one I've seen.

The connection between the first and second national banks and the federal reserve board is incoherent. "Expansion of executive power except if Trump might fuck rates and my retirement account" is unserious. Kavanaugh spells it out clearly enough.

I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U. S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that, in various permutations, we have as been thinking about for many years. As the Court’s opinion explains and the Government agrees, the Federal Reserve occupies a unique role in the U. S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U. S. and world economies.

I find it hilarious that everyone, from mottizens to Supreme Court justices, knows that Trump is going to fuck the US economy if allowed. It put the court in a rather unenviable position where they would tank the economy if they didn’t deliver this self-contradictory verdict.

No. The issue is not that Trump would fuck the US economy by dismissing Federal Reserve members. The issue is the financial community would be freaked by the fact that he COULD, and that would fuck the US economy.

This is like saying Trump wouldnt do somethung crazy like follow through on his campaign promises to implement a bunch of tariffs. Why on earth would I expect that Trump is not serious about lowering interest rates no matter what?

The financial community is a money-weighted consensus vote of decision makers, not some boogyman. It’s not only that he could (he can do a lot of damaging things), but that he's been making Argentina-like rhetoric for about a year now and his other actions very much suggest that he might go down the LATAM path.

but that he's been making Argentina-like rhetoric for about a year now and his other actions very much suggest that he might go down the LATAM path.

I don't think the financial community is afraid of Trump acting like Milei.

Milei talks and acts like a libertarian. Markets are justifiably afraid of Trump, who is a populist and not a libertarian, and talks like Peron, acting like Peron.

Why wouldn't he? The whole reason SCOTUS had to rule on this is because he tried to fire a fed board member on spurious non-charges, not to mention the bullshit investigation into Powell. Rate cuts are the only way he can square the circle between "affordable housing" and "homeowners don't lose a penny in equity".

Rate cuts wouldn't fuck the economy, unless they zeroed them in the next meeting or something. The Fed doesn't have the fine control it thinks it has, and as far as I can tell the only Fed-related trouble we've had is due to overtightening, not over-loosening.

The 1970's inflation was caused by central bank over-loosening.

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