POLITICO is reporting that Roe v Wade will be struck down. From their report earlier this evening:
The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.
The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
This is really fucking it.
Protests are being organized across the country for later today (Tues, that is). I will update this post with information about the protests as well as providing suggestions as to good groups to donate money to.
Please post any reliable information you have about any of this in the comments.
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@Catalpa:
Almost exactly correct.
The exception here is interracial marriage, which was decided on equal protection grounds.
However… it’s not like there’s no reason to fear even here. Alito literally said that being pregnant wasn’t a “sex-based classification” for legal purposes and that past precedent actually foreclosed the possibility of treating it as such. (This bit about the power of past precedent is actually not true.)
Why did Alito say that? So that he could ignore equal protection analysis and move forward solely on the basis of substantive due process analysis (privacy rights analysis as established is a subset of substantive due process analysis).
I have a post up on my blog about why equal protection, due process, and privileges and immunities analyses should and must be simultaneous and complementary, rather than – as Alito would have it – mutually exclusive. This separate analytical framework is always dangerous, but particularly so in the hands of originalists who follow the Glucksberg line of cases in prioritizing historical rights protections predating the constitutional provision in question (in this case the 14th Amendment, and thus the date 1868).
In any case, interracial marriage doesn’t depend on privacy (which you erroneously said), but Alito’s general approach to decision making is a threat to Loving v. Virginia, even if in the current moment that threat is more distant and less direct than the threats to Lawrence and Griswold (queer sex and heterosexual contraception, respectively) etc.
For more on historical rights as a prerequisite for contemporary rights and the problems and risks associated with separating Due Process from Equal Protection, see
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2022/05/03/originalist-assholes/
@Alan:
The Canadian parliament almost certainly could pass legislation with the direct effect of overruling the very basis for Supreme Court of Canada’s authority. However Parliament would have to renew that legislation every 5 years or it would automatically sunset.
There hasn’t yet been a test of whether such legislation setting aside an SCC ruling can be renewed after a lapse during which the SCC ruling went into effect, but the fun part there is that if the SCC ruled such legislation unconstitutional because of the gap in which the ruling went into effect, Parliament could pass legislation negating THAT ruling, essentially negating the ability of the SCC to intervene against such legislation setting aside SCC rulings.
===But in the USA?
Yes and no.
It’s much more complicated here. SCOTUS relies on Marbury and there is no basis in the constitution for Congress to pass an ordinary statute in conflict with any SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution. In fact, that’s as nearly expressly barred by the plain text of the US Constitution as it could possibly be.
But what’s really weird is that Congress has huge discretion to legislate what does and what does not qualify as a “live case or controversy”. The constitution says that US courts cannot hear cases (much less decide them) that do not involve a “live case or controversy” and further expressly states that Congress has power over the jurisdiction of the courts (essentially over what things someone can bring a lawsuit over, and when something qualifies as a live case or controversy).
So if congress doesn’t like the SCOTUS ruling allowing unlimited indirect campaign contributions (this is the Citizens United case), they could conceivably pass a law that limits courts ability to hear cases regarding such matters, and THEN pass a law that infringes on the protections that SCOTUS gave to indirect campaign contributions.
The precedent wouldn’t be overturned, but the court would be barred from hearing the cases where the precedent could be applied.
Congress hasn’t tried this much in a LONG time. Every so often they do some tinkering with this, over recent decades this has been primarily in the area of environmental law (e.g. who has standing to sue when a forest is chopped down?), but flat-out banning of a particular subject-matter (rather than a particular type of plaintiff) hasn’t been done to my knowledge since the 1800s.
States actually try this shit all the time — they frequently passed laws saying that, for instance, Black people couldn’t serve on juries and then another saying that the first law couldn’t be challenged in court. However the states have no power over the federal court system, so if it touched on a federal question (as does the ability to serve on juries), plaintiffs just skipped off to federal court and filed there. (At least in theory, this is easier said than done if you’re a Black man in 1870s West Virginia.)
But now we get to the real trick: The 14th Amendment specifically states that congress shall have the power to pass legislation with respect to the enforcement of its provisions.
SO… If Congress makes a finding and supports it with evidence and/or solid reasoning (it didn’t used to have to support it with evidence or reasoning, but SCOTUS started demanding that when it reviewed the Americans with Disabilities Act), it can pass what appears to be an ordinary statute, and which has some of the features of an ordinary statute (subject to presidential veto, can be repealed by another ordinary act of congress, etc.), but which is actually supposed to be determinative of the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Which means that any SCOTUS case interpreting the 14th (Marbury does not, of course) might just be subject to statutory reversal in a way that cases interpreting other provisions of the constitution are not.
So in sum:
No, you probably can’t reverse Marbury.
Although you probably can get around Marbury by stating that certain cases are now cases the court is not allowed to hear.
There is stronger precedent for forbidding cases based on characteristics of the plaintiff than based on characteristics of the subject matter.
The 14th Amendment and any cases interpreting it are a whole different ball of wax, and while Congress has been reluctant to use the power given to it to overturn SCOTUS cases, it is only tradition that prevents them from overruling SCOTUS right and left here. And, in fact, they’ve done it once recently with the RFRA overturning Eployment Division (Oregon) v. Smith. So… never say never!
Oh, thanks for the clarification!
@Snowberry
You’re right that this is only a draft decision and that until it is published any justice could change their mind and thus the outcome.
I don’t have a lot of hope of Gorsuch saving Roe & Casey, but you’re spot on in saying that it’s not over til it’s over, and it ain’t currently over.
I haven’t read all the comments because I just don’t have the energy. But I’m terrified of this. I hope enough judges change their minds. Otherwise I’ll probably have to look into sterilization.
Cheers Crip Dyke! I knew you’d have some really good points. You’ve given me a lot to mull there (but hopefully you can see that I was thinking).
It’s a bit like the laws of robotics. You can’t erase them; but you can nullify them by, for example, redefining human.
The Govt here is plotting to limit our supreme court’s powers. Basically, like as you mention, declaring some things beyond the purview of judicial review. Historically the courts have always been antagonist towards ouster clauses. But if there’s one thing we are clear on in our rather nebulous constitution it’s the supremacy of parliament. Parliament can overrule any law. It could abolish the court system if it wanted to.
Our Supreme Court is built on rather sketchy grounds. It’s neither an inherent jurisdiction court, nor a creature of statue (like our magistrates and county courts). When they reformed the court system here it was decided that there would be one final court of appeal. Imaginatively called ‘the court of appeal’. The courts of appeal (criminal and civil divisions) together with the High Court (and all its various divisions) were collectively “The Supreme Court”.
The Lords though wanted a say. So they set themselves up as de facto final court of appeal. Technically though the HoL wasn’t a court. It was ‘the judicial committee of the house of lords’. So they don’t really give judgements. The hearings were conducted in a grotty room at the end of a corridor. But the decisions we’re given in the chamber of the house of lords. So really they were bills of attainder. (like how you used to have to get a private act of parliament based to get divorced).
The funny thing is, the HoL was explicitly excluded from being part of the Supreme Court. That as fine until they changed the name to The Supreme Court. But then you had the situation that the Supreme Court wasn’t part of the Supreme Court.
After a year people realised how daft that was so they remained the original Supreme Court, the Superior Court.
But this is relevant to the topic in hand in terms of separation of powers and the power of judicial review.
It seems ironic that in the US the problem is SCOTUS has too much power over government; but over here the fear is the opposite; that the courts will lose the ability to scrutinise and interpret government actions.
Yes!
If there’s one thing for which I was infamous during law school, it’s when I argued that we needed a “principled sedition” in Canada, because Canada claimed that it was a country with “Parliamentary Supremacy” but simultaneously claimed that there were constitutional guarantees.
I told my audience that there’s no such thing as a constitutional guarantee under parliamentary sovereignty, and that they were going to have to decide whether to obey the constitution as written, in which case they would have to stop saying their bloody, stupid bullshit about their country having parliamentary sovereignty, or they were going to have to stop saying that there were such things as constitutional guarantees, since an ordinary act of Parliament could erase such “guarantees” at any moment.
Whichever way they chose, I argued, they were abandoning a position that my law professors would constantly espouse (they were always saying both of those things, and yet they’re clearly contradictory).
I told them that sedition was inevitable – against constitution or against parliament – and that in my opinion the preferable stance was against parliamentary sovereignty and for constitutionalism.
That took my law professors back, having a bloody immigrant without even permanent status at that point telling them that their own sedition was inevitable, and subtly putting them down since it was obvious that “parliamentary sovereignty” was nearly fetishized for some of them.
I am a union organizer. In my experience, which admittedly is only a couple of decades, so it could be a recent change in tactics, there is absolutely no contradiction in this at all. People who want to dismantle unions do two things. They wait for the old union members to die off and then they get the new employees, who never had union jobs, and say, “Why do you want to pay fees to a dirty union? They take your money and do nothing! Fat cat union bosses living off your hard work! If you see a union prowler around, report them to us immediately!” And the union drive never gets off the ground. Or they just set them up as gig economy workers (or the old-fashioned gig economy worker, the independent contractor) who compete with each other and feel like they can’t trust each other to unionize. It’s not people who had union jobs dropping the union jobs, it’s people who never had a union not fighting to get a union. Corporations are smart. Never let people know what they’re missing, tell them it’s shitty and they don’t want it in the first place. The GOP assists greatly with this.
And even still, good strides unionizing workers. Look at the Amazon warehouses. Such a thing would never happen 20 years ago–look at how it used to be with torts coming out for workers off the clock for multiple hours every night at WalMart. UAW added 3k members and got the California legislature to force the UCs to recognize more student workers as workers, and those were all people never previously in a union. Even leadership, Hoffa’s out of the Teamsters and his hand-picked successor failed, so now strikes and effective union action is more likely to be taken there. Things are looking up for unions, you just have to fight the long fight. Patience is key, but the union fight is not for everyone because it is a generational fight.
It was, again, more about the weight of maintaining the status quo getting more people to fight, but yes, my addendum did imply that it would be better if Democrats were voted in. You can hardly believe that a large number of Republicans being galvanized to vote in candidates, or even the win by default of apathy is the better option.
When Roosevelt wanted to pass New Deal stuff during the Great Depression and the Supreme Court was packed with conservative judges. Ok packed is a bad word here given the context, “had a more than bare majority.” Roosevelt had passed stuff like the SEC, the NRLB, Social Security, Titles I-V, etc. Now the Supreme Court was striking down law after law, so Roosevelt introduced legislation to actually pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges, one for every old conservative judge. Unlike Biden, he had an extreme supermajority in both houses and those policies were very popular (unemployment during the Great Recession? Conferring standing on unions and protecting unionized workers? Of course it was!). The court packing bill was not popular but was expected to pass because of the extreme supermajority.
So the court got slapped down by public opinion. One of the conservative judges 180’d (of course all men at that time) and started voting in the New Deal stuff. The court-packing bill then failed because the court was seen to respond to public opinion.
There are other less consequential examples that can be found in papers such as How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court in the American Journal of Political Science (unfortunately paywalled on all sites I found except probably the Russian paper megasite, which I don’t want to link for reasons).
You know I think this might be the fundamental source of your continued misreading of me as “because I suggested no direct action specifically, I must mean only go vote and be happy.” I cannot fathom bothering to engage with a politician on only what you are calling the messaging level. Even a politician very sympathetic to the cause, known to always take union positions and argue for them, you must approach from a perspective of “and you should do it because it will help you in X way” not “and you should do it because it’s the right thing to do, obviously.” I would never engage with messaging only; a message has default consequences one way or the other in union bargaining. It is the same in any political engagement with me.
Perhaps we may begin to understand each other here: I am not thunderously naive (which is what I am reading from your posts), I am merely an optimist, which I believe you somewhat must be in order to maintain sanity in long grueling fights. Otherwise, the urge is to give in and not vote, or not join the union, or do nothing in some way. Doing nothing is always the easiest.
@Anonymous
I’ve just seen your first post, sorry, it got lost when I was reading before. I guess we will have to agree to disagree on some issues. I see no reason I should give up my “faith that politicians will do anything” and move straight to violence when in fact my union has successfully lobbied the government to force the UCs to recognize student workers in the face of a standard disinformation campaign.
Now if you mean, will politicians do anything unmotivated, of course not. But there is a huge amount of space between “nothing” and “I must die for this.” Calling for women to shed yet more blood and die is little strong when there are other steps to take.
I’m angry/horrified, and I don’t even understand this completely yet.
So if the judges pass this ruling, then the national protection for abortion in the U.S. is just *over*? Which wouldn’t mean it’s an absolute blanket ban, but that state legislatures can then vote on whether to outlaw it in their individual states?
And can they really just decide something that important behind closed doors?? Couldn’t someone put it up for a vote – if not arrange a national referendum, then at least a vote in Congress? (It’s probably a different U.S. government branch, isn’t it – I’m thinking of the Canadian parliament, not that I’m an expert on that either).
@Crip Dyke – Speaking of which, what you’re saying about the contradiction between parliamentary and constitutional supremacy makes a lot of sense. Right now I just feel fed up with hierarchical systems in general.
…Cue my childhood complaint of “Why can’t everybody just vote on the important stuff? Wouldn’t *that* be democracy?” (I was 7 when they had the 1995 Quebec independence referendum and it gave me ideas.) Of course, you’d have to first define “important stuff.”
sigh…
@Big Titty Demon
I too would prefer it not come to that, but one must always prepare for the worst. I was contemplating phrasing it as being willing to kill, but needless to say that has problems of its own.
Your union is doing good work, by the way- far too often, the few unions in the US that aren’t toothless fall straight into the pitfall of class collaboration and selling out the workers they’re supposed to represent for the sake of power. The way they go on, you’d think their job is to suck up to bosses, not fight against them!
@epitome
This exactly.
Well, there could be a vote in Congress on this, but representation by population is only for the House of Representatives (think your MPs in Parliament). In the senate representation is by STATE, which means rural states with low population get just as much representation as the most populous states. So the senate is — by design — anti-democratic. It always favors the rural, the conservative, the status quo.
The house is where the majority of the population can speak, BUT… it’s not strictly by population, but rather “by population, by state”. So they round off population to units of several hundred thousand and distribute the correct number to each state by that state’s population.
Here’s where it gets tricky. The state is empowered to choose its own representatives, not the people. Which means the states determine how the districts are divvied up. And Republicans, being anti-democratic asshats, have gerrymandered those districts to create just a couple districts with 90% Democratic voters, and then a large number of districts with 55% to 60% Republican voters.
A 55/45 initial imbalance is hard to overcome, and a 60/40 imbalance is virtually impossible to overcome. So those districts are going to be nearly as reliably Republican as the 90/10 districts are Democratic, but by shoving so many Democrats into just a couple districts, they can create many, many more Republican-leaning districts than Democratic-leaning ones.
After that, if the vote is 50/50, the Republicans get somewhere between 60 and 85% of the seats in the state legislature and 60 to 75% of the seats in Congress. Even when the Dems win big in terms of total votes, they lose in terms of who controls congress and the state legislatures. (Because a 55/45 total split of the final vote **statewide** isn’t enough to overcome an initial 57/43 lean in a particular district.)
Maybe a couple 55/45 Republican advantage districts go unexpectedly to the Dems, but once you hit 57/43 or higher the advantage is just too large, making even solid statewide voting victories for Dems into elections where the state legislature is controlled (albeit narrowly) by Republicans.
Since those state legislatures control the drawing of new districts (which happens once every 10 years) the initial gerrymander guaranteeing control leads to more and more radical people getting elected to the state legislature, and by the time a decade is passed and the state is drawing districts again, they want to gerrymander EVEN HARDER. Modern gerrymanders in the US began in the 1980s, but really picked up steam during the 2001 redistricting. Since there weren’t a lot of states who had gerrymandered previously, the increase in 2001 was significant but not overwhelming. That led to bigger majorities and more radical legislatures in 2011 for that year’s redistricting (which was also affected by the racist panic that followed the election of our first Black president). The 2011 gerrymanders were truly awful, and in every state except Maryland it was Republicans who abandoned democracy. (Democrats gerrymandered Maryland and I’m not defending that as ethical, just saying that it’s 1 state, not a national trend, while Republicans did it in 14 or more states IIRC – which I might not- depending on how you count)
The natural misrepresentation in the Senate, combined with gerrymandered misrepresentation in a number of states, including populous ones like Florida, Texas, and Ohio, means that neither the House nor the Senate reflects the will of the people anymore. There’s currently a Democratic majority in each, but it barely happened, and it took everyone being freaked out by 4 years of Trump and a COVID pandemic to get people dissatisfied enough with the people in power (who were all Republican) to vote for a change, even if that meant voting for Democrats.
All of this means that there is no real hope that either the House or the Senate represents the large majority of US citizens who want abortion to remain safe and legal.
it’s shitty, but there we are. We won’t see a shift back until Republicans daughters die from illegal abortions when RU-486 is safe as fuck and can be mailed to your door. It will probably require a good 10 or 12 Savita Halappanavars before there is enough pro-choice sentiment in the conservative states to overcome the gerrymanders and install lawmakers that will respect women’s lives. I don’t see it happening for a good 20 years for most states who will be in the initial wave of outlawing abortion.
I also think it would take at least that long to pass and ratify an amendment to the federal constitution. We would need 38 states to ratify it, which means 12 states can still be backwards as fuck but there are a lot more than 12 backwards-ass, women-hating states. How long will it take to convince half of them that we need to change the constitution to protect women’s rights?
A long time.
Yep, we’re in the shit.
Florida and MIssouri have both had ballet referendums that the Republican state legislatures have “overruled,” and the state supreme courts have sided with the legislatures. The problem is that the state supreme courts are even more partisan than the federal courts, so even when a ballet referendum allows the people to directly ammend the state constitutions, the courts can just cancel what people voted for.
@Big Titty Demon
I’m genuinely glad that your unionization efforts have borne fruit, and thank for you the information regarding the history with the supreme court, it’s good to know about what kinds of tactics made an impact in the past.
And yes, unionization efforts are thankfully making strides today, but this is only clawing back ground that was lost decades ago. I sincerely hope that is not the kind of timeline required to regain reproductive rights.
If your argument is that only people who are immediately and concretely benefiting from having a right are the ones who can be expected to fight strongly against its removal, and that obviously people who don’t have a personal history or stake in the right can’t be expected to fight the same, then I can’t help but wonder how many of the 59% of the population you’re counting on are people who are capable of being pregnant, are currently sexually active, and would want an abortion themselves.
I think my reading of you stems mainly from you replying to someone expressing frustration with the extreme lack of any action on the part of the Democrats with “oh but the majority of the population supports abortion so women’s rights will get added to the Constitution sooner or later”.
Perhaps I should have granted the benefit of the doubt and assumed that “because the 59% will engage in a massive wave of action to force politicians to add that to the Constitution, despite this issue being admittedly unlikely to galvanize a large voter turnout” was unsaid but implied.
But I am quite upset and rather irritated at having any criticism of the Democrats met with “hey you can’t say that, we can’t hold the politicians accountable or else the even worse politicians might win, and then you might lose rights quickly, instead of marginally more slowly!”, so I was not feeling terribly generous.
I will note that my original post was not intended to say “you, specifically, are thunderously naive”, but more a general sentiment expressing my frustration with people responding to this with “the solution is to vote blue!!!” So perhaps it is not merely me doing the misreading.
Obviously I do not, as I’ve previously written in my posts. I just take umbrage with every response to “hey, just sitting here in this pool of sewage really sucks” being “oh, so you’d rather that we swim into the deep end of the pool????” instead of the sentiment being interpreted as a desire to get out of the shit water.
@Snowberry
As I see it: “tradition” is just peer pressure from dead people.
I never sucumbed to the peer pressure of those in high school who wanted me to join their self aggrandizing clique or engage in smoking cigarettes with them (for being an unhealthy habit and being around the ash of cigarette smokers made my physically ill); so people trying to appeal to the rubric of “tradition”; are already on loosing ground with me.
If I didn’t cave to the peer pressure of the living: the peer pressure of the dead, buried and turned to dust: have zero chance.
Though I did choose of my own volition to be vaccinated, and considered it a responsibility and duty as a citizen; because I not only don’t want to get sick or worse, I didn’t want other people getting sick or worse because of being a negligent, septic jerk.
That aside; the news regarding this whole Roe V Wade situation is heart breaking…
Umm… why is everyone saying 59%? The number of people who want limited restrictions is 43%, and no restrictions 26%, for a total of 69%. So it’s a bit worse than you’ve been implying. If you count people who are fine with significant restrictions (typically rape, incest, to save the parent’s life only), that’s another 19%, leaving only 12% who are against in all cases no matter what.
After looking into it a bit deeper, it appears there may be a bit of confusion here because there’s a sort of middle-of-the-road 10% which apparently gets counted as “limited restrictions” by some polls and “significant restrictions” by others? So, maybe split the difference and say 64%?
Regardless, back in the mid-20th century, 35%-40% popularity was enough to establish and/or protect rights; but this number has been creeping upwards over time, and I estimated that it was up to 65% by the time Trump was elected. If this stands, then even that may not be enough.
@Crip Dyke – Thank you for taking the time to explain. I’m sorry and angry that all this is happening, and by “all this” I mean:
@brb – Yeah, unfortunately it doesn’t always count.
But thinking back on what I said, I’m not sure a simple “majority rules” is always fairer either. Suppose there’s a situation with a comfortable majority who don’t care about making others suffer?
E.g. my father thinks more than half of Quebecers support the blatantly discriminatory Loi 21. He’s a bit of a pessimist, and he’s offered no proof, but it’s possible. It’s possible some people believe it’s about the separation of church and state, instead of about screwing over (mostly) visible minorities, Muslim women in particular. And the local press is focused on the same old French vs. English crap, about which je ne care pas either way. But now is not the time to rant about local stuff. It’s 2 AM and I should sleep.
Hope everyone is doing relatively OK.
Now there’s a Qanon theory that the leak of the supreme court decision occurred in order to distract people from the release of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “2000 Mules”, which alleges that Biden stole the election. Because of course.
@Anonymous
I don’t want to derail too far off RvW even though it’s an open thread, but I will say that the latter is one very strong reason I’m happy Hoffa is out of the teamsters. I expect action now. But regarding toothlessness… unions reps are sometimes in a very rough position.
Next time there’s an open thread, if you’re still interested, I have a great example of a union appearing toothless because an entire chapter unanimously refused to strike after a strike authorization (a win for the corporation! they were satisfied with their conditions after all!) when in fact it was a failure in leadership to understand a local situation and had absolutely nothing to do with the corporation. If you want to do union organizing, it is just as important to have local leaders that know the union membership as it is to have regional and state leaders that know how to talk to the government/corporate leadership, but I think these are not emphasized enough/there’s too much churn.
@Snowberry
I am using this poll, which is 1 year out of date. However I don’t expect there was a radical change between then and now. I could be wrong though. The methodology and data are accessible. Which poll are you using?
@Catalpa
Lol I can definitely join you in this hope! Who knows! Perhaps this ruling may never come to pass. Ever the optimist. 😀 I wouldn’t bet on it, of course. Start the protests now.
Re: 59%
No, my argument is more like “they will passively help in one direction instead of passively hindering the other.” I said there would be bad years, and of course activists are always the minority: many people cannot fight, and for legitimate reasons. But to discount the weight of public opinion being on your side is a mistake. It is easier to get the numbers you need when you are not fighting against everyone. We may reasonably expect that we won’t have state dogs set on us in our protests. There is backsliding, but there is still some progress, we’re not starting from the very beginning. Take hope where you can.
Re: rest
You’re right, I could have been less sensitive and not included myself in the general category which I fell, I’ll bear it in mind for the future. I dunno what you want to be the response here: since I’ve not mentioned anything about holding democrats responsible or the lack thereof I’m going to assume it’s not directed at me. Although I’d be interested in what you consider holding Democrats accountable. What are the individual actions a person takes to hold Democrats accountable? I’m sorry you’re stuck in the shit water, I’m stuck there too. Let’s go protest the stink.
@Big Titty Demon
I’m not denying that. The Taft-Hartley Act gutted a lot of their ability to act on behalf of the workers. Perhaps “toothless” isn’t the right word, but they’re certainly far weaker than they were before it. As for Hoffa, he was definitely one of the worst but it’s a general rule that bureaucrats and upper management of all stripes tend to have shared interests no matter who they claim to represent. But I’ll leave it at that for now.
I think I’ll take you up on that offer to hear more about that. I have to wonder what was going on behind the scenes there.
You have more faith than I do in the effectiveness of having a majority of the population willing to passively go “yeah I support human rights I guess”.
It’s better than having the majority against you, certainly, but I kind of see that as the difference between having a car with no engine or having a car that’s been lit on fire and has no engine. It’s definitely better for it to not be on fire, and that’ll make it easier to install an engine, but it’s still not going anywhere without an engine. (The engine in this metaphor represents mass public action.) Emphasizing that the car not being on fire is a driving reason why it will be fixed is, technically, not incorrect, but it seems odd to lead with that aspect of it instead of highlighting the tools, parts, mechanics, etc that can actually get the car moving.
I think that we are arguing semantics at this point, though. Your intent seems to be “don’t lose hope, we have some advantages still (that will allow activists to make an impact with their work)”, while I am more focused on a sentiment of “this is incredibly horrendously bad and mass effort needs to be implemented to fight this right now (and we need to have hope that we can make a difference)”. Assuming that the implied sentiment in the parentheses is missing or not emphasized enough seems to be the problem here, which is a silly thing to be arguing over when the main point is the same. Apologies, my mood is currently not the best.
Admittedly I could have stood to be more precise in my language in my first post. Transitioning immediately from my response to your post to venting about similar more frustrating sentiments that I’ve seen expressed in the wake of this was certainly not ideal.
The accountability bit was intended to be my explanation to why I tend to side-eye comments that disagree with or dismiss the frustrations that people hold toward Democrat inaction, not an accusation of you. Probably could have been clearer about that as well. You assumed correctly though.
In terms of actions that a single individual can do to hold a politician accountable? There aren’t a lot. Phoning or writing to your representative are basically it, at least in terms of legal options. Mobilizing a larger group provides more options, such as protests, strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts, petitions, mass communication efforts, class action lawsuits, etc.
I don’t want to derail this thread from the specific topic of RvW; but perhaps in the next open thread we could discuss activism and campaigning generally?
I do a bit of legal work/advice for activists. One group I’m involved with has just commissioned a big study about what tactics work most effectively. Everything from lobbying politicians to political violence.
Some interesting points arise. For example, some disruptive campaigns irritate the public to the point they initially push back against the cause. But the publicity gets the underlying issue into the media. And then when people see what appears to be neutral reportage, they come back to supporting the issue, and people who weren’t really even aware of it come on board. So whilst the campaign group remains unpopular, the actual cause ends up more popular.
So the implication is, maybe have some ‘burner’ groups that can really get the story to the headlines; but then step in and make the narrative ‘Well of course this is a good cause, they’re just going about it the wrong way’. But the key thing is, you’ve made ‘its a good cause’ the unchallenged assumption and once that’s established you can throw the original group under a bus.
Of course this is a major topic, and different causes may require different tactics. So rather than have a big theoretical discussion here I’ll leave the focus on RvW and how to deal with that. But it might be worth having a general chat in an open thread perhaps?
@Alan
That sounds really interesting, I’d love to know more!
As this is an open thread…
Methane from farm animals, especially cows, is of course a major driver of climate change.
However the industry has finally decided to address this by….fitting cows with gas masks.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/04/29/prince-charles-prize-backs-face-mask-that-cuts-methane-emissions-from-cow-burps