This is the penultimate day of the Supreme Court’s term ending on June 28; a few more decisions today with the remainder tomorrow Friday, the last day of the term.
Decisions released today will follow below. Unfortunately I need to be away from my desk for a while this morning; I may not post the decisions promptly after 10:00 a.m. ET but I will do so as soon as I can get to my desk.
The court agreed Monday to hear the Biden administration’s challenge to a Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, an increasingly potent political issue that has divided lower courts and emerged as a leading front in the battle over LGBTQ issues.
This is going to be as messy as other decisions like those about gun and reproductive rights.
This one will likely go 5-4 with conservatives in majority, none of whom will give a shit about the children’s sentiments.
Justice Gorsuch wrote the 5-4 decision; Justice Barrett wrote the dissent, siding with the liberals on this case related to the EPA’s “Good Neighbor” rule.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the 6-3 decision; Justice Sotomayor wrote the dissent. The case centered on a hedge fund manager’s fraud and their Seventh Amendment right to a trial.
[NB: check the byline, thanks. Updates appear at the bottom of this post. /~Rayne]
Yet again a week later we’re still counting down to the Supreme Court’s term ending on June 28; SCOTUS delivers a few more decisions today with the remainder spread across tomorrow Thursday, and Friday the last day of the term.
Once more we ask: will SCOTUS finally decide the question of presidential immunity posed in Trump v. United States? Or will we not see a decision until tomorrow or Friday?
Decisions released today follow in an update at the bottom of this post.
~ ~ ~
Time-killing observations:
Trump’s case for presidential immunity was the first sub-topic when I searched Google News for “supreme court.” Apparently corporate news media is concerned about this and willing to invest a little human capital about it.
This, however, is just plain disturbing. Who knew House Speaker Mike Johnson would be a minion for that dirtbag Bannon after Bannon refused to comply with a Congressional subpoena? Doesn’t Johnson expect persons his Congress might subpoena to comply?
Justice Coney Barrett wrote the 6-3 decision; Justice Alito wrote the dissent.
This is the First Amendment case about the Biden administration’s efforts to stem disinformation on social media. The states and individual plaintiffs were found to lack standing and the Fifth Circuit erred in lumping the states and the plaintiffs together. The Fifth Circuit’s decision is reversed.
A little statistical analysis:
“Vaccine” and “vaccines” appear (65) times in total in the decision and dissent.
“Misinformation” appears (91) times.
“Disinformation” appears (3) times and not at all in the dissent.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote the 6-3 decision; Justice Brown Jackson wrote the dissent.
In essence this was a case about public corruption; is an amount of money paid to a public official after goods/services have been rendered a bribe or a gratuity if there’s no quid pro quo?
You’ll be shocked, SHOCKED at which way the GOP-appointed jurists went.
Third decision: That’s it, there isn’t a third one today, and definitely not a presidential immunity decision.
~ ~ ~
Updates with news related to the SCOTUS decisions today will appear at the bottom of this post. This is an open thread.
Kimberly Robinson who is on Bloomberg’s byline, posted this on the dead bird app:
Kimberly Robinson @KimberlyRobinsn
BREAKING: #SCOTUS inadvertently released its opinion in EMTALA abortion case earlier this morning. The Justices are poised to allow emergency abortions in Idaho, suggesting the Court shouldn’t have gotten involved in the early litigation.
So…is this accidental leak a head fake of some sort? A means to relieve pressure? Will it come up in the presidential debate if the decision isn’t formally released until Friday?
The Washington Post has a story now about the briefly posted decision in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States. The decision was accidentally published ahead of schedule and quickly removed from SCOTUS’s website, but not before a copy was obtained.
I’m not going to elaborate on this now because it’s not formally a decision until it is published. When it finally is, it’s going to be a must-read based on the concurrences — the tea leaves to be read ahead of future cases about reproductive health care.
If you’re not white you’re not surprised at expressions of hate in our society. There are frequent demonstrations in the form of microaggressions white folks often miss.
Sometimes they’re more obvious, like racist tagging on buildings or even more obvious like the noose once left in a friend’s front yard tree, or direct confrontation experienced by another friend and their family who trapped in their car by racists yelling at them and beating on their vehicle. Many of these expressions never make the local news and might not even be reported to police for fear of making things worse.
But overt signs of hate, the kind to which even white people notice and take exception, didn’t appear as frequently in the news until Donald Trump took the White House.
Now increasingly everyone can see the wretchedness out in the open, waving its stars and bars, screaming hateful epithets at persons who aren’t cis-het white.
Like the insurrectionists waving Confederate flags outside and in the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Yet nothing about DeSantis’ office’s response discouraged another future demonstration with attacks on passersby.
The hate’s all out there in the open – and it’s escalating.
It’s no longer restraining itself to minorities, either; it may also be a component of hybrid warfare intent on demoralizing a substantive number of Americans while embedding and normalizing itself in our communities.
~ 3 ~
On Saturday evening December 4, 2021, a white nationalist group — the Patriot Front (PF) — gathered in Washington DC and paraded in numbers along the Mall before hopping into U-Haul trucks and driving away.
The group is a spin-off from Vanguard America which took part in the hate rally in Charlottesville VA in 2017.
PF has had numerous pop-up events; the Anti-Defamation League has documented their activity across the country from propaganda to rallies. The December 4 event was in the same vein.
There were many calls to avoid giving this fascist organization any air time, and more calls to ridicule them as unserious.
… This weekend in Washington, a ridiculous white supremacist boys club called Patriot Front dressed up in matching outfits to make themselves look like menacing middle managers of an electronics store. They got their white nationalist flags and their little shields and their khakis and their shin guards and they marched from the Lincoln Memorial down the national mall in what was supposed to be a white supremacist show of force in the nation`s capital. …
But the December 4 event should have given us pause, especially 11 months after the January 6 Capitol Building insurrection.
— PF didn’t have a permit for their demonstration;
— They amassed a large number of participants in a short time with little-to-no advance notice to the public;
— They used at least one smoke bomb during their demonstration;
— Their rally took place in the same area the insurrectionists gathered and traveled from the January 6 speeches at the Ellipse to the Capitol Building;
— Police presence was a fraction of the number of PF rally attendees, with many on bikes;
— It was difficult to tell whether police were protecting or monitoring PF attendees.
Not only were folks left of center insisting PF’s rally not be treated as a valid expression of dissent, but they encouraged laughing at their normcore appearance which included not only khaki pants and ball caps but white neck gaiter masks.
Where have we seen so many white men wearing white fabric masks over their faces not to prevent infection but to hide identity while displaying a unified identity?
The December 4 event and other earlier PF events like this one may have looked performative, like costume players merely dressing as contemporary fascists, but the entire effort made a point and may have been proof-of-concept for some other future effort.
In other words, what’s to stop another group which is armed from beginning an assault on Washington DC in exactly the same way?
Enclosed box trucks show up, their contents not visible to anyone on the street including law enforcement; the occupants jump out wearing similar outfits and shields but this time concealing firearms and other weapons; they march to their intended destination and deploy a smoke bomb at first to mask another explosive device or to mask their weapons.
On December 4 they made it clear they could do this.
I’d have been less worried about these normcore shock troops but persons with more expertise have likewise expressed concern.
lots of huff and puff about Proud Boys, 3% & Oathkeepers…I’m more worried about Patriot Front https://t.co/ZZjPA0ftNw
All of the above I wrote months ago, beginning a draft in December after the PF event in D.C., revising the draft after yet another PF rally on January 8, 2022 when PF participated in the March for Life anti-abortion rally in Chicago IL.
Clearly I should have published what I had at the time, ahead of yesterday’s arrest of 31 PF members in Coeur d’Alene ID for conspiracy to riot at a scheduled Pride parade.
“It appears these people did not come here to engage in peaceful events.” Authorities arrested 31 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front near an Idaho pride event after they were found packed into the back of a U-Haul truck with riot gear. https://t.co/XXbiCN3rbj
Though Coeur d’Alene police were in contact with federal law enforcement, it was CADPD which handled the arrest and charging of the PF members.
Only one person of the 31 arrested was from Idaho; the rest were from across the U.S. — Washington, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Illinois, Wyoming, Virginia, and Arkansas — though the bulk were from West and Midwest states.
Like the December 4, 2021 PF rally in DC, CADPD found PF brought riot gear, one smoke grenade, shin guards and shields.
No firearms have been mentioned in any reports, but this event could have been bad had PF arrived and violence triggered if locals were carrying weapons.
There have been no federal charges, yet; it’s not clear if any federal laws were broken. Traveling across state lines might be a factor.
It’d be easy to brush this off as just another stunt by cosplayers on a sunny summer Saturday afternoon, except the number of events like this and the corresponding propaganda by PF have exploded.
(source: ADL report: White Supremacist Propaganda Spikes in 2020)
More than 80% of that uptick was PF’s work. Where are they going with this besides demoralizing much of the country?
~ 1 ~
There’s been some confusion in left-of-center social media about Patriot Front and the Proud Boys, some mistaking one for the other. They are different groups with overlapping if not identical ideologies.
Patriot Front
Proud Boys
Launched: 2017 (spun off from Vanguard)
Launched: 2016
Ideology:
Patriot Front is a white supremacist group whose members maintain that their ancestors conquered America and bequeathed it to them, and no one else.
Patriot Front justifies its ideology of hate and intolerance under the guise of preserving the ethnic and cultural origins of its members’ European ancestors.
The Proud Boys are a right-wing extremist group with a violent agenda. They are primarily misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration. Some members espouse white supremacist and antisemitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups.
Their xenophobia, antisemitism, and misogyny are their primary shared attributes along with racism to varying degrees.
We’ve now seen what the Proud Boys have been willing to do which Patriot Front have not yet engaged in — participation in events which can become violent. Yesterday’s Pride parade in Coeur d’Alene could have become a crossover event had Team PF not been arrested ahead of their destination.
What’s problematic, though, is the slack Proud Boys have been allowed. They’ve been treated like other civic and community organizations when their core ideology is hate. Buhl, Idaho allowed the Proud Boys to participate in a parade last summer:
The Times-News reports that Proud Boys members were among about 100 floats in the Sagebrush Days parade that went through the center of town.
The Buhl Chamber of Commerce runs the parade but wouldn’t comment specifically about the Proud Boys taking part.
“At this time the Buhl Chamber (of) Commerce will not feed into any negative propaganda,” the group said in a statement to the newspaper. “The Buhl 2021 Sagebrush Days parade saw 90 plus entries who celebrated in a courteous and civil manner. The Buhl Chamber takes pride in welcoming all participants, while giving them the opportunity to celebrate our great nation.”
“will not feed into any negative propaganda” meaning what, they weren’t going to allow anyone to bash Buhl’s Chamber of Commerce, or they weren’t going to let anyone bash the Proud Boys?
So long as Buhl allows the Proud Boys to participate in a community event, there’s no daylight between Buhl and the Proud Boys.
Both communities have validated and legitimized a hate group by allowing them equal footing with the rest of their community.
Would they have done so with Patriot Front had they taken the same approach as the Proud Boys rather than showing up in a U-Haul panel van after publishing comments online which could be construed as an expressed intent to riot?
Are these two hate groups testing the waters to see where they can establish a foothold and grow their organizations? Or has there been something more hateful in the offing?
Why yes, there was — where PF was stopped from harassing a Pride event in Idaho, the Proud Boys had already stormed a public library to halt a Drag Queen story hour in San Lorenzo, California, scaring families with children by shouting hate-filled diatribes at attendees.
Alameda County sheriff’s department escorted the Proud Boys out of the venue.
Between the two groups at these two different locations on the same day, they now know they can get away with their harassment if they restrain themselves to smaller numbers and target families with children, or attack larger groups if they use more operations security.
~ 0 ~
When I first set out months ago to write about PF, I had also wanted to discuss harassment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the truck convoys. Both are examples of the spread of overt expressions of hate, the first being racist and the second being socio-economic. Whatever was driving the attacks on HBCUs and the convoys has eased for now. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if foreign influence operations were the primary drivers.
However we have plenty to focus on immediately with the domestic influence operations these two hate groups are engaged in which must be stopped.
PF, by the way, still has an active Twitter account and a Twitter account used as a follow hub.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Hate_AndreHunter-Unsplash_12JUN2022.jpg10011500Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2022-06-12 17:33:222022-06-12 17:33:22Three Things: Something Truck-ed This Way Comes
Idaho has simply run out of ICU beds, ventilators, and personnel to support persons who either code in the hospital or arrive at the hospital in need of resuscitation.
Technically speaking, the guideline isn’t universal across all of Idaho; the IDHW noted in its September 16 statement,
… Although DHW has activated CSC, hospitals will implement as needed and according to their own CSC policies. However, not all hospitals will move to that standard of care. If they are managing under their current circumstances, they can continue to do so. …
But chances are good if the ICU beds are full in any Idaho hospital, patients are being transferred to other hospitals until their beds are full as well.
None of this had to happen.
In fact, this change in triage methodology could have been foreseen.
Last March we saw the first documented and publicly acknowledged “codice nero” conditions in northern Italy and then in Detroit, when hospitals were completely overwhelmed by the first surge of COVID-19 patients. While Italians may not have known about the implementation of code black, Detroit’s local news reported on the change in triage protocols after patients and their families were notified on admission that care would be allocated in order of patients’ likelihood of survival due to the limited resources available, from ICU beds to ventilators to qualified health care staff.
The swamping of hospitals in March 2020 could have been avoided had lock-downs and mask mandates been implemented by the end of February/first week of March, but there likely would have been a surge in hospitalizations simply because government and public alike still had not fully acknowledged the threat COVID-19 posed.
Idaho’s hospitals have been and are among the worst in the nation for crisis care preparedness. As of the third week of August, Idaho was number three behind Georgia and Texas among states that are least prepared for hospital capacity. At that time Idaho’s ICU beds were already 83% occupied.
The state had ample to adjust to a pandemic and prepare for the possibility of a surge in COVID-19 cases. They had plenty of examples of crisis level care across the country to shape their response.
But now, nineteen months after the first wave began, when multiple vaccines are freely available to the public? The ICU beds are beyond full if Idaho must declare the equivalent of a code black.
Unvaccinated Idahoans chose this. They willfully opted to court hospitalization, long-term disability, and death by COVID-19.
The worst part is what the unvaccinated are doing to those who chose otherwise — like those who arrive at the hospital with a gunshot wound or a heart attack or stroke, who may have been vaccinated but are likely to die because they will only receive palliative care instead of interventions to save their lives.
Note there is zero reference to COVID-19 on the entire page and the “Universal DNR Order” refers to all patients in cardiac arrest.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NIH_Coronavirus_COVID-19_Feb2020_1500x1000.jpg10001500Raynehttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngRayne2021-09-19 00:37:432021-09-21 01:52:15TL;DNR = Too Late; Do Not Resuscitate
