Lilly Pad

“More than fifty research and development facilities across thirty-one states. Gone. Consolidated into a single location in Fort Collins, Colorado. And ‘consolidated’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, because what it actually means is that decades of place-based, long-term ecological research—the kind that literally cannot exist anywhere else because it depends on specific forests, specific watersheds, specific ecosystems studied over generations—will be snuffed out.

If your senator is a Republican, the question is simple: you voted for a law that requires USDA to get committee approval before reorganizing or relocating any office. USDA didn’t get that approval. Their own lawyers declared your law unconstitutional. What are you going to do about it?

If your senator is a Democrat, the question is just as simple: the legal basis for stopping this already exists. Where are the subpoenas? Where are the hearings? Why is USDA’s general counsel allowed to declare a duly enacted law unconstitutional by internal memo and face no consequences?

Make them answer. Make their staff write it down. Call back next week and ask what happened.

(source)

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), also said that, despite pressure, the UK should forgo much of its potential North Sea expansion.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian, Birol said a key effect of the US-Israel war on Iran was that countries would lose trust in fossil fuels and demand for them would reduce.

“Their perception of risk and reliability will change. Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future,” he said. “And this will cut into the main markets for oil.”

Birol said there was no going back from the crisis: “The vase is broken, the damage is done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.”

In the U.K. and Canada and New Zealand democracy remains quite healthy. In the U.S.? Not so much. Examining these arrangements makes me wonder: might our Constitution be part of the problem?

The administrations of both Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump offer ample evidence that the articles of impeachment in the U.S. Constitution were and remain too weak to perform correctly. We the People can not remove a sitting President irrespective of how unfit that President may be.

Noah Berlatsky at Everything Is Horrible:

The Trump regime has caused a terrible amount of damage to our democracy, our institutions of government, and out populace. A Democratic administration will face a huge number of urgent, desperate priorities as soon as it takes office—from holding Trump administration officials accountable, to dismantling ICE, to freeing those in concentration camps, to rebuilding public health infrastructure, to fixing health insurance markets, to breaking apart media oligopolies—and on and on and on. There are an almost infinite range of crucial challenges and they all need to be addressed as soon as possible. Nonetheless, I think there is a clear priority. The very first thing that a Democratic President, Congress and Senate need to do is to eliminate the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court. The reasoning here is straightforward. The court is currently ruled by a brutal Christofascist majority; it sees itself as an all-powerful legislature. And as an all-powerful, Christofascist legislature, the court is determined to prevent any and all efforts to restore democracy and end Christian authoritarian. If you do not expand the court, virtually nothing is possible. If you do, everything is.

The Court will block Democratic priorities

The evidence that the Court can and will fight relentlessly against Democratic priorities is at this point overwhelming. The increasingly rabid and overwhelming Conservative majority kneecapped any government effort at gun control in 2008; it gutted campaign finance laws in 2010; it rushed to prevent the implementation of climate regulations in 2016; it declared an end to Constitutional abortion rights in 2022; it denied the president the ability to grant student loan relief in 2023. These decisions were all highly partisan. Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett all dissembled and evaded when asked about abortion rights in their Congressional hearings, because they wanted to get on the court and destroy women’s reproductive rights and they worried that their real opinions, honestly stated, would hamper them in that goal. Even more disturbing is the sloppy nonchalance with which the conservative judges twist law and even fact, to allow them to advance their agenda. Gorsuch, for example, claimed that the case Kennedy v Bremerton involved a coach who wanted to lead “a short, personal prayer.” In fact, the coach in question led regular, boisterous prayers on the football field, urging student athletes to join in. On the basis of his own lies, Gorsuch threw out decades of precedent banning school prayer as a violation of church and state. Much of a hopeful Democratic agenda is predicated on the idea that Congress and the President can legislate its way around or over court decisions, either by overcoming the filibuster or overturning it. Democrats, once in power, hope to pass a national abortion rights law; they want to pass climate legislation; they want to increase taxes on the wealthy.

Given the court’s rabid partisanship and manifest bad faith, however, there is every reason to believe that, if Democrats were to pass their signature preferred policies, the court would simply find some pretext to strike them down. The court might dismiss that national abortion rights law on the ground that it violates the rights of fetuses. It could claim that an anti-gerrymandering law violated state control over elections or takes too much notice of race in apportionment. It could even throw out an increased minimum wage or higher taxes on the wealthy on some pretext, or on none.

The court has shown over and over that it is not restrained by facts or logic. It sees its role as the rightful enforcer of conservative policy, and it loves to thwart Democratic presidents and Democratic legislators. Democrats have a choice; they can enact policies they were elected to pass, or they can watch those policies die in the Christofascist court.

[...]

Don’t wait

The need to expand the court is obvious. But politicians worry about the electoral downsides. Many Americans do not think of themselves as partisans, and they find partisan radicalism distasteful. The ins and out of Supreme Court make-up are too complicated for most voters to follow, and they will not necessarily see how or why those ins and outs are important or how they will affect them. Better to do popular things that benefit people (middle class tax cuts!), win elections, and wait the court out, right? This was Biden’s plan. And it dead-ended in our current fascist nightmare and the ongoing (quite successful) assault on the Constitution. So maybe we should try something different.

As the horrific first couple months of Trump’s administration demonstrated, even presidents who win by very narrow margins are granted great latitude in their first months for partisan projects, no matter how utterly corrupt, evil, and ill-advised. Compared to Trump’s rabid destruction of the entire federal government, expanding the court is small bore agenda. A Democratic president with a reasonable Congressional majority who demands, as the very first thing, an elimination of the filibuster and Supreme Court expansion, will have—in the wake of the disastrous Trump presidency—a decent chance of pushing it through. Then, once the Court is no longer a Christofascist barrier, you can do all sorts of things. Enfranchise DC and help rebalance the Senate, at least around the edges. Tax the wealthy; raise the minimum wage; pass gun control; ensure abortion rights; pass voting rights reform. Put through all those good things that have been blocked for years, and decades, by the grotesque white supremacist imbalance of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Create a voting structure in which the Republicans can see clearly the benefits of deradicalizing.

This is a great proposal: SCOTUS must be expanded to at least 13 seats the next time the Democrats get back the Presidency (and the Senate and the House as well). This goes along with making DC and Puerto Rico states.