Starlight

And the few black women that do exist are CONSTANTLY either sexualized and fetishized (Shevra from Resident Evil), or the fandom eviserates them and their writers do them SERIOUS injustice (Isabela and Vivienne from Dragon Age)

I’m happy that there IS diversity, but we can do better than one black man. We need more black women that aren’t tropes.

We need more positive examples of black women.

It may seem obvious that governments should think through their policies before implementing them; if they don’t, they risk encountering the dreaded law of unintended consequences. That’s exactly what’s happening in the United States’ defense-industrial policy.

While U.S. defense stocks are slumping, European defense stocks are rising quickly because the markets have concluded that those governments will be spending lots more on defense. And every government around the world knows what happened to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week in the Oval Office.

The conclusion that many leaders will draw from the altercation that U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance had with Zelensky is that U.S. security guarantees—a key reason why countries tend to buy U.S. weapons—are not going to be a convincing argument anymore. So far, Trump’s efforts to “make America great again” have been miserable for that all-important U.S. power pillar: the defense industry.

The Supreme Court cast its long-telegraphed death blow to independent agencies Monday, confirming that the president can fire at-will civil servants that were meant to be insulated from political backlash. In a second opinion, though, the Court gave the Federal Reserve a special carveout from this new reality. 

The odd baby-splitting in the combination of Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook — both authored by Chief Justice John Roberts — reveals the right-wing Court’s priorities: It may be sanguine about the demolition of agencies mostly used to regulate big business and protect worker rights, but is far less willing to let President Trump take over the Fed and unleash global economic chaos. 

In all, the decisions represent a major triumph for the unitary executive theory pushed by the legal right for decades, as the president will now have nearly the entire executive branch under his command. The Court had been steadily marching in this direction for years, hacking away at independent agency protections in different forms. Now a major 1935 precedent protecting agency leaders, Humphrey’s Executor, has fallen.

“Today, the Court discards that democratic regime in favor of one that distorts the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her Slaughter dissent. “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.” 

In Slaughter, the case that overturned Humphrey’s Executor and cleared the way for the president to fire members of non-Fed independent agencies, Roberts is joined in the majority by Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, with Justice Clarence Thomas joining all but one section. Gorsuch also wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.

What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.

That history certainly anticipates the Court’s current corruption. But I would argue they are qualitatively different. The idea that contract rights largely, if not entirely, trumped state regulation was not a novel doctrine. And the Court at least generally did not oppose the partisan interests of one party over the other, which is certainly the case today. What we have today as part of the openly partisan nature of the Court is that really every major exercise of power by Democrats comes up for review, in many cases where there is not even an existing Federalist Society/conservative legal movement doctrine in play. I would argue that this begins with the Obamacare decision in 2012. It followed a model which has now become entirely familiar. It generally begins with mouthing off and brainstorming on social media — comments that then gets picked up by a few generally obscure law professors who fashion it into an argument. This argument is initially treated as absurd before rapidly gaining traction on the right and then rapidly getting taken up by the Court.

At the time, the “surprise” decision to uphold the Obamacare individual mandate, largely the decision of John Roberts, was seen as a near miss or evidence of Roberts’ institutionalism. In retrospect, it is perhaps better seen as a latter-day version of Marbury v Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall cleverly rendered a decision that was of immediate benefit to his partisan opposition in order to entrench the general and empowering principle of judicial review. In the Obamacare case, Roberts allowed the individual mandate to remain (while striking down, on the basis of essentially nothing, Medicaid expansion) in order to lull constitutionalists into accept and even celebrating the purported institutionalism of a Court that would now sit in review of every law passed by Democrats. It is a classic case where the benefit of hindsight provides much greater clarity into what actually happened.

In today’s decisions, it’s certainly good that the Court didn’t reject states’ ability to accept mail ballots dated by Election Day. But the idea that it was even reviewed is absurd. There’s no possible constitutional deficiency in these laws. There’s not even any basis for it in the fraudulent menagerie of Federalist Society jurisprudence. It is purely the product of the short-term partisan interests of the Republican Party and far more so the whims of Donald Trump. All of these states’ laws require absolute evidence that a vote is cast by Election Day. The constitution doesn’t speak to the speed of counting (nor does existing federal law) and the long tail of counting has lasted past election day literally for centuries. Congress might pass a law banning accepting post-dated votes after Election Day. (Even in that case, I think there’d need to be at least some rational basis question for why such a law would exist given that the primary responsibility for election administration rests with states, subject to regulation by congressional statute). In any case, that’s a question on which reasonable people can differ. There is simply no basis on which this can be considered unconstitutional or in violation of existing statutes. At least with the anti-constitutional destruction of independent agencies, which is a war on the legislative branch, the conservative legal movement has obsessed and hungered for for decades. So you can at least grant them that it merely aligns with Trump’s demands rather than being the child of them.

The crowd remained on its feet, but some of the audience on the third floor began filing out as Spanberger spoke. This didn’t seem to bother the campaign staffers working the event. Those votes were already guaranteed, and her pitch is about competence and pragmatism, not guaranteed heart-stirring. “A win for Ms Spanberger,” The Economist concluded that evening, “would suggest that, with a disrupter like Mr Trump in the White House, plenty of people are craving someone a bit boring.” Spanberger told me she would be happy for fellow-Democrats to take notes on her approach. “The message that we can send is that voters have power. That’s one thing. But, importantly, that candidates win when they are focussed on the issues that the people that they want to serve are facing.” I asked if this wasn’t too obvious to be useful advice. She thought for a second about her depleted, self-cannibalizing party. “Yeah, I think it isn’t,” she said. “Not to go into a pundit role,” she said, “but in places where people say, ‘Oh, what’s the message of the Democratic Party?’ Well, just start with listening to people.”

But such problems can seem abstract to much of the U.S. population: Why should anyone care about the alleged injustices meted out to a few pesky foreigners?

The hotel owners who are now contending with declining bookings; the airlines forced to cancel flights; and the cooks, receptionists, and service staff who have lost their jobs due to the decline in international tourism undoubtedly have their own opinions on that score. The sad tale of sagging tourism offers merely one more reminder that the U.S. economy does not exist in isolation from the rest of the world—and that the effort to put up barriers often causes more problems than it solves.

Earlier this month, the Academy of Management, an international association of business school professors, announced that it was canceling its 2027 planned conference in Seattle and moving its future meetings overseas for the foreseeable future. One of its members told the Financial Times that Canadian and European members of the organization were worried about “immigration issues.”

Perhaps even more revealing was the decidedly uncompromising response of a U.S. State Department spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, whom the Financial Times asked for comment. “We are upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through the visa process,” Pigott said, “making clear that entry to the United States is a privilege—not a right—and that the safety of the American people comes first.” The absurdity of his own statement—the implication that the administration is working hard to protect us from nefarious business instructors—seemed utterly lost on Pigott. Let us hope that the World Cup festivities will endure despite the efforts of diligent public servants like him.