With his Never Ending Tour temporarily grounded and his compelling new album “Rough and Rowdy Ways” in stores, Bob Dylan is resurrecting his “Theme Time Radio Hour” on SiriusXM.On Monday, he will broadcast a new episode in the series in which he delivered 100 shows from 2006-09. Each featured a theme – baseball, weather, presidents, etc. – with songs and commentary about the particular topic.The new episode is about whiskey, inspired by the bard’s own brand, Heaven’s Door, which he introduced in 2018.Instead of the usual hourlong program, Dylan delivers a double shot – two hours – of songs, po...
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Friday signed environmental justice legislation that allows the state to deny permits for projects that would have an environmental impact on already “overburdened” communities, defined as those predominated by minority or low-income people.The law, which supporters say is one of the toughest in the nation, would apply to proposals for new or expanded power plants, recycling facilities, incinerators, sludge operations, sewage treatment plants, landfills, or any other major source of potential pollution.The state Department of Environmental Protection would review...
Embattled Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to move forward with a vote on whomever President Donald Trump nominates to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the United States Supreme Court.
"This U.S. Senate should vote on President Trump's next nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court," McSally said.
McSally lost her 2018 bid for the United States Senate, but was appointed a senator anyway by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. Polls show her trailing Democratic challenger and former astronaut Mark Kelly.
Appearing with CNN host Anderson Cooper, former White House adviser David Gergen rained hell on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) after he announced he would rush through a vote on a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just hours after it was announced she had passed away.
Gergen, who served in the White House under both Republican and Democratic presidents seemed beside himself with anger when he talked about McConnell who notoriously blocked Merrick Garland from the court after being nominated by former President Barack Obama.
"Mitch McConnell has just thrown down the gauntlet, we're going to have a titanic fight over this," Gergen exclaimed. "Yes, as Jeffrey [Toobin] has said, it will mobilize a lot of people on the right, the hunger still to overturn Roe vs Wade to get social issues on the 6-3 court, they will think Donald Trump has delivered on his promises."
"This will unleash a fury among Democrats, for all the obvious reasons," he continued. "It's so brazenly contemptuous of fair play -- it's hypocritical. You're going to see that the Republicans will pay a price at the polls this November. Another one of the things, I think it makes it more likely that Joe Biden will win the election, it makes it more likely that the Democrats will take over the Senate."
Fox News contributor Brit Hume reacted to the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by cautioning Republican leaders against replacing the liberal icon before the November election.
Hume made the remarks on Fox News after noting that both President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have previously vowed to hypothetically have a nominee approved before the election.
"Lindsey Graham back in 2018... said that even if were were just into the primary season, he would not want to see a nominee advance in the election year," Hume explained. "I think the circumstances may have changed since [McConnell] outlined that."
"Our American institutions and political system are undergoing a stress test as difficult and intense as I have every seen," he continued. "And I think the leaders have to consider what the effect would be a brutal and divisive confirmation battle into the into the middle of this."
According to Hume, "the threshold question is whether to even make a nomination."
"Trump's instinct undoubtedly will be to go forward," he observed. "But whether Mitch McConnell will feel that way as the majority leader of the Senate is unclear."
"I really think that the threshold question is whether to put the country through this," Hume said.
But for embattled Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the death was apparently an opportunity to raise campaign cash, according to the local political website Iowa Starting Line.
Ernst is being challenged in November by Democrat Theresa Greenfield. The Des Moines Register newspaper is set to release new poll results on the race on Saturday.
In an interview shortly before it was announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away from complications from pancreatic cancer, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told a reporter that she would not vote for a Supreme Court replacement with less than 50 days before the election.
According to Alaska Public Media, the Republican senator stated, "I would not vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee. We are 50 some days away from an election,” with the report noting that "Murkowski said her reasoning is based on the same reasoning that held up the confirmation of former President Barack Obama’s final nominee to the Supreme Court."
About Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) decision to block Judge Merrick Garland, Murkowski said, "That was too close to an election, and that the people needed to decide. That the closer you get to an election, that argument becomes even more important.”
When he nominated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, President Bill Clinton compared her legal work on behalf of women to the epochal work of Thurgood Marshall on behalf of African-Americans.
The comparison was entirely appropriate: As Marshall oversaw the legal strategy that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed segregated schools, Ginsburg coordinated a similar effort against sex discrimination.
Decades before she joined the court, Ginsburg’s work as an attorney in the 1970s fundamentally changed the Supreme Court’s approach to women’s rights, and the modern skepticism about sex-based policies stems in no small way from her lawyering. Ginsburg’s work helped to change the way we all think about women – and men, for that matter.
I’m a legal scholar who studies social reform movements and I served as a law clerk to Ginsburg when she was an appeals court judge. In my opinion – as remarkable as Marshall’s work on behalf of African-Americans was – in some ways Ginsburg faced more daunting prospects when she started.
Thurgood Marshall, in 1955, when he was the chief counsel for the NAACP.
AP/Marty Lederhandler
Starting at zero
When Marshall began challenging segregation in the 1930s, the Supreme Court had rejected some forms of racial discrimination even though it had upheld segregation.
When Ginsburg started her work in the 1960s, the Supreme Court had never invalidated any type of sex-based rule. Worse, it had rejected every challenge to laws that treated women worse than men.
For instance, in 1873, the court allowed Illinois authorities to ban Myra Bradwell from becoming a lawyer because she was a woman. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, widely viewed as a progressive, wrote that women were too fragile to be lawyers: “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.”
And in 1908, the court upheld an Oregon law that limited the number of hours that women – but not men – could work. The opinion relied heavily on a famous brief submitted by Louis Brandeis to support the notion that women needed protection to avoid harming their reproductive function.
As late as 1961, the court upheld a Florida law that for all practical purposes kept women from serving on juries because they were “the center of the home and family life” and therefore need not incur the burden of jury service.
Challenging paternalistic notions
Ginsburg followed Marshall’s approach to promote women’s rights – despite some important differences between segregation and gender discrimination.
Segregation rested on the racist notion that blacks were less than fully human and deserved to be treated like animals. Gender discrimination reflected paternalistic notions of female frailty. Those notions placed women on a pedestal – but also denied them opportunities.
Either way, though, blacks and women got the short end of the stick.
Ginsburg started with a seemingly inconsequential case. Reed v. Reed challenged an Idaho law requiring probate courts to appoint men to administer estates, even if there were a qualified woman who could perform that task.
Sally and Cecil Reed, the long-divorced parents of a teenage son who committed suicide while in his father’s custody, both applied to administer the boy’s tiny estate.
The probate judge appointed the father as required by state law. Sally Reed appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
Ginsburg did not argue the case, but wrote the brief that persuaded a unanimous court in 1971 to invalidate the state’s preference for males. As the court’s decision stated, that preference was “the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.”
Two years later, Ginsburg won in her first appearance before the Supreme Court. She appeared on behalf of Air Force Lt. Sharron Frontiero. Frontiero was required by federal law to prove that her husband, Joseph, was dependent on her for at least half his economic support in order to qualify for housing, medical and dental benefits.
If Joseph Frontiero had been the soldier, the couple would have automatically qualified for those benefits. Ginsburg argued that sex-based classifications such as the one Sharron Frontiero challenged should be treated the same as the now-discredited race-based policies.
By an 8–1 vote, the court in Frontiero v. Richardson agreed that this sex-based rule was unconstitutional. But the justices could not agree on the legal test to use for evaluating the constitutionality of sex-based policies.
New York Times article about the Wiesenfeld case, which refers to Ginsburg as ‘a woman lawyer.’
New York Times
Strategy: Represent men
In 1974, Ginsburg suffered her only loss in the Supreme Court, in a case that she entered at the last minute.
Mel Kahn, a Florida widower, asked for the property tax exemption that state law allowed only to widows. The Florida courts ruled against him.
Ginsburg, working with the national ACLU, stepped in after the local affiliate brought the case to the Supreme Court. But a closely divided court upheld the exemption as compensation for women who had suffered economic discrimination over the years.
Despite the unfavorable result, the Kahn case showed an important aspect of Ginsburg’s approach: her willingness to work on behalf of men challenging gender discrimination. She reasoned that rigid attitudes about sex roles could harm everyone and that the all-male Supreme Court might more easily get the point in cases involving male plaintiffs.
She turned out to be correct, just not in the Kahn case.
Ginsburg represented widower Stephen Wiesenfeld in challenging a Social Security Act provision that provided parental benefits only to widows with minor children.
Wiesenfeld’s wife had died in childbirth, so he was denied benefits even though he faced all of the challenges of single parenthood that a mother would have faced. The Supreme Court gave Wiesenfeld and Ginsburg a win in 1975, unanimously ruling that sex-based distinction unconstitutional.
And two years later, Ginsburg successfully represented Leon Goldfarb in his challenge to another sex-based provision of the Social Security Act: Widows automatically received survivor’s benefits on the death of their husbands. But widowers could receive such benefits only if the men could prove that they were financially dependent on their wives’ earnings.
Ginsburg also wrote an influential brief in Craig v. Boren, the 1976 case that established the current standard for evaluating the constitutionality of sex-based laws.
Like Wiesenfeld and Goldfarb, the challengers in the Craig case were men. Their claim seemed trivial: They objected to an Oklahoma law that allowed women to buy low-alcohol beer at age 18 but required men to be 21 to buy the same product.
But this deceptively simple case illustrated the vices of sex stereotypes: Aggressive men (and boys) drink and drive, women (and girls) are demure passengers. And those stereotypes affected everyone’s behavior, including the enforcement decisions of police officers.
Under the standard delineated by the justices in the Boren case, such a law can be justified only if it is substantially related to an important governmental interest.
Among the few laws that satisfied this test was a California law that punished sex with an underage female but not with an underage male as a way to reduce the risk of teen pregnancy.
These are only some of the Supreme Court cases in which Ginsburg played a prominent part as a lawyer. She handled many lower-court cases as well. She had plenty of help along the way, but everyone recognized her as the key strategist.
In the century before Ginsburg won the Reed case, the Supreme Court never met a gender classification that it didn’t like. Since then, sex-based policies usually have been struck down.
I believe President Clinton was absolutely right in comparing Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s efforts to those of Thurgood Marshall, and in appointing her to the Supreme Court.
Attorney General Bill Barr delivered a remarkably incendiary and inflammatory speech this week, apparently defending his overtly partisan and political management of the Justice Department and triggering a wave of analysis and outrage from many of his usual critics. I'm among his usual critics and have written about his warped view of justice many times before. I have little to add to the excellent arguments about Barr's hypocrisy and overreach that I haven't said before.
Instead, I'd like to point to a few key features of the speech and some recent reporting that I think may be flying under the radar. And at the risk of being proven decisively wrong by future of events, I'd like to engage in some measured speculation about Barr's much-hyped investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
The investigation remains mostly a black box. Its full scope is unknown, though we know it's somewhat duplicative of Inspector General Michael Horowitz's review of the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the Russia investigation. Durham has, quite inappropriately, made public that he does not fully support Horowitz's view that the Crossfire Hurricane was properly predicated, though he hasn't explained why. And Durham has secured a guilty plea from Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer who admitted to altering an email in the course of an application to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page, though there's no sign it was part of any larger criminal wrongdoing. (Indeed, were it not for the attorney general's unique interest in the case, Clinesmith probably would have been simply fired rather than charged for his wrongdoing.)
We also know that right-wing media is deeply invested in the investigation, to extent that is probably difficult to understand for those who haven't followed it.
For example, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro once declared that there was a "a criminal cabal in our FBI and the Department of Justice who think they know better than we do who our president should be." She has said the deep state "worked to spy on and frame a presidential candidate and plant the seed for his overthrow in the ugliest, most corrupt attempted political coup in U.S. History.” She added: “That it occurred at all, is stunning. But that it was manipulated to take down a president and remove him from office almost as soon as we put him there, essentially overthrowing a government, is an outrage that demands the most severe consequence our criminal justice system has to offer.”
She, her viewers, and their compatriots have closely watched for developments from Durham to finally get vengeance for Trump.
Barr has dutifully whetted conservatives' appetite for the results of the probe, and Trump is just as hungry for high-profile convictions as anyone else — though charges against former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden have already been ruled out. Against all tradition and protocol, Barr has repeatedly given public updates on the investigation, for no other obvious reason except that it's what Republicans want to hear.
But could Barr be ready to disappoint his fans? Several recent signs point to that possibility.
Most clearly, the Washington Post reported this week of Barr's speech:
... some people close to the attorney general said Barr’s speech was meant not just as a rejoinder to those on the left who have criticized his moves on cases involving Trump associates, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime friend Roger Stone. Barr was also gingerly trying to temper conservatives’ hopes that, before Election Day, former senior officials once involved in investigating the president will be charged criminally, people familiar with the matter said. [emphasis added]
Lawfare's Susan Hennessey scoffed at this claim, saying she found no evidence for it in Barr's actual remarks: "Read the speech for yourself and see if you can spot where Barr is supposedly tempering expectations. (I can't)."
Indeed, many critics read the speech as a brazen assertion of his own power and refusal to bend to any criticism, rather than a tempering of expectations of his allies.
But arguably, there were signals in his speech to those on the right who may be on the edge of their seats waiting for indictments. For example, Barr said:
In short, it is important for prosecutors at the Department of Justice to understand that their mission above all others is to do justice. And that means following the letter of the law and the spirit of fairness. Sometimes that will mean investing months or years in an investigation and then concluding it is without criminal charges. [emphasis added]
For those who have waited for months and years to see Trump's enemies — including James Comey, John Brennan, Andrew McCabe, and others — proscuted, this may be a signal to get ready for disappointment. A long probe like Durham's sometimes comes up dry.
Barr also said:
This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct — conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment, up to and including being locked away in a cage.
And:
The political winners ritually prosecuting the political losers is not the stuff of a mature democracy.
Many read these claims as a defense of Barr's own actions regarding Robert Mueller's investigation, in particular his attempts to exonerate Trump and Michael Flynn and reduce the sentence of Roger Stone. He has said explicitly that he thinks that Obama administration launched partisan investigations of political enemies. And he likely intended these claims as a defense of himself, at least in part. But imagine that Durham has found little if anything to criminally charge out of the investigation; in this context, Barr's words sound like a pre-emptive warning to Trump's base and a post-hoc rationalization on Barr's part for the broad sweep of his actions. No, he might as well be saying, I'm not going to prosecute those on the losing side of a political fight — because I can't.
There are other signs as well that Durham may not be fulfilling the grand visions of people like Pirro and the president.
Several officials said expectations had been growing in the White House and Congress that Mr. Barr would make public, ahead of the election, some kind of interim report or list of findings from Mr. Durham before he completed the investigation. Mr. Barr had wanted Mr. Durham’s team to move quickly, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Hartford Courant reported that Nora Dannehy, a top aide for Durham, resigned in part because of improper pressure from the DOJ to produce a report, an extremely disturbing development on its own.
But why would Barr want to publicize an "interim report" or "list of findings"? That is not what prosecutors or U.S. attorneys do. Barr released Mueller's report, but that was specifically demanded in the unique circumstance in which a special counsel is called for. And it was uniquely reasonable to releasese findings about the president's potentially criminal conduct because he cannot be prosecuted while in office under current DOJ guidelines. Ordinarily, prosecutors are not supposed to say anything about the cases they've investigated unless they're bringing charges; it's viewed as a basic matter of fairness.
So it seems that Barr would only want a highly unusual and likely inappropriate "report" from Durham if he couldn't get what he really wanted: high-profile prosecutions of criminal wrongdoing. Given Durham and Barr's previous remarks, they may announce that they've concluded that Crossfire Hurricane was improperly launched, conradicting the inspector general. One report has already floated the possibility that some of the paperwork filed to start the probe may have been somewhat unusual, and perhaps there were other administrative errors of varying levels of signficiance. Perhaps Barr and Durham will have findings to share about the Steele Dossier, which has become a particularly potent bugbear on the right. But all that would be a huge disappointment to people hoping to see Comey in handcuffs.
When President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to even hold a hearing on the seat, as the vacancy occurred during an election year.
McConnell's 2016 message was repeated by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Saturday evening.
"The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president," Schumer tweeted.
The question on whether to hold hearings is ultimately up to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham is an interesting situation due to the timing, as there's a good chance Republicans will lose control of the Senate in January.
Graham is also under pressure to spend as much time as possible back home in South Carolina, as he's facing a credible re-election threat from Democrat Jaime Harrison.
US Supreme Court Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday, opening a crucial vacancy on the high court expected to set off a pitched political battle at the peak of the presidential campaign.
Ginsburg, 87, died after a fight with pancreatic cancer, the court announced, saying she passed away "this evening surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, DC."
Affectionately known as the Notorious RBG, Ginsburg was the oldest justice of nine on the Supreme Court.
She anchored its liberal faction, whittled to four by two appointments since 2017 from President Donald Trump.
Coming just 46 days before an election in which Trump lags his Democratic rival Joe Biden in the polls, the vacancy offers the Republican president a chance to solidly lock in a conservative majority at the court for decades to come.
That could lead to a court that would potentially attack abortion rights, strengthen the powers of business, and water down rights provided minorities and the LGBTQ community over the past three decades.
But Democrats are expected to fight tough to force a delay in her replacement until after the election -- an uphill battle given the control Trump's Republicans have in the Senate, which must approve any nominee.
Ginsburg, who was Jewish, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1933.
A legal scholar and law professor, she had a deep history in jurisprudence standing up for women's rights.
She became only the second woman to serve as a Supreme Court Justice when she was appointed to the court in 1993 by president Bill Clinton.
"Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague," Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement.
"Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her -- a tireless and resolute champion of justice."
There was no immediate comment on her death from the White House.
Speaking to a rally in Minnesota and apparently still unaware of the news, Trump reminded the crowd of the likelihood that a new term would allow him to appoint new justices.
"The next one will have anywhere from one to four" justices, he said. "Think of that, that will totally change" the landscape on core legal issues, including abortion, he said.
ABC News later reported, citing well-informed sources, that Trump will move quickly to name a replacement.
In a pitch to conservative voters earlier this month, he unveiled a long list of possible replacements for court vacancies, all of them deeply conservative, that he would tap if reelected.
Asked in August by radio host Hugh Hewitt if he would nominate a justice just before the election, Trump replied: "Absolutely, I'd do it."
"I would move quickly. Why not? I mean they would. The Democrats would if they were in this position."
Democrats were expected to fight hard to prevent a replacement from being named right away.
Ginsburg herself was acutely aware of the stakes of her health on the court balance, and her fans fretted at her increasingly frequent trips to the hospital over the past two years.
According to NPR radio, Ginsburg raised the issue this week with her granddaughter Clara Spera.
"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed," she said, according to Spera.
But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Friday he would move on any nominee from Trump, ignoring the precedent he set in 2016 in freezing Democratic president Barack Obama's nominee to fill a vacancy before the election.
"President Trump's nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate," McConnell said in a statement.
Rep. Devin Nunes was ripped in the pages of The Fresno Bee on Saturday by columnist Marek Warszawski.
"Devin Nunes wants you to think Black people are scary. What other possible takeaway can there be from the Tulare Republican congressman’s latest TV spot airing in the Fresno-Visalia market?" Warszawski wrote.
"Backed by images of violence, homeless camps and looting involving people of color, we get snippets of a speech by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris the day after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, a Black man who was unarmed," Warszawski explained.
He noted the ad takes comments by Harris out of context.
"Harris is clearly talking about peaceful protests. She is condemning violence and looting. Doesn’t matter. Nunes wants the viewer to think the biracial Harris and those dark-skinned mobs stand in solidarity. When in fact Harris is a former district attorney with a history of being tough on crime," he explained.
"That Nunes would engage in such racial fear-mongering in a year when civil rights issues are finally getting the national laundry-airing they deserve represents a new low. Which, for him, is saying something," he wrote.
"Nunes is an eight-term incumbent in a district drawn for an easy Republican victory. Thanks to his national profile, he has campaign money to burn. He doesn’t need to fear-monger and mislead to win in November," Warszawski noted. "Yet he can’t help himself. Which is what happens when a politician abandons his constituents and becomes the main character in his own Tom Clancy novel."
