Daily Archives: July 7, 2017

Liberal and conservative legal experts looking ahead to the next Supreme Court term are preoccupied with much different priorities, but both question whether the high court will decide the fight over President Trump's travel ban.

The issue of whether the travel ban litigation could become moot before the high court hears oral arguments is unresolved, but liberals also appear to be wondering who will be sitting on the high court next term. For liberals, rumors of Justice Anthony Kennedy's potential retirement and role on the high court still dominate their thinking about the future of the Supreme Court.

Erwin Chemerinsky, new dean of Berkeley Law at the University of California, said Thursday that the Supreme Court "is still the Anthony Kennedy court." Speaking at the National Constitution Center's review of the high court's most recent term, Chemerinsky noted that Kennedy "voted in the majority on 97 percent of all of the decisions," more often than any other justice.

"So for the lawyers who're here and watching, if you have a case before the Supreme Court, my advice to you is make your briefs a shameless attempt to pander to Justice Kennedy," Chemerinsky said. "If the clerk of the court will allow it, put Anthony Kennedy's picture on the front of your brief."

While Chemerinsky said he thinks Gorsuch may prove to be more conservative than the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat Gorsuch filled in April, "if Justice Kennedy leaves the court, then we will have the most conservative court there's been since the mid-1930s."

Frederick Lawrence, Yale Law School professor who sat alongside Chemerinsky at the event, said the year has been characterized by "constitutional anxiety" for "constitutional lawyers, constitutional scholars and for citizens who care about the Constitution."

"I certainly will watch with my constitutional anxiety this October in the [travel ban] argument because I think ... there is so much vagueness in play in the joints here that when one finds oneself sort of hoping for mootness as the way out, it tells you the corners we're getting ourselves into," Lawrence said.

At the Heritage Foundation's review of the last term on Thursday, legal experts were similarly questioning whether the high court would resolve the travel ban dispute.

Will Consovoy, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a lawyer who argues before the Supreme Court, said "mootness is a real concern" in the travel ban case. He added that he thought the high court, more so than the lower courts that have reviewed the case, would look to say "can we create a durable rule here that's not going to devour the law, so to speak."

Trump's travel ban blocks nationals from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days and refugees from all countries for 120 days.

Joseph Palmore, a former law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and co-chairman of the Appellate and Supreme Court Practice Group at Morrison Foerster, told the Heritage Foundation audience that the issue of mootness is clearly a top issue for the high court.

Asked whether the Supreme Court could hear the case even if it appears to be moot from the vantage point of those outside the justices' chambers, Palmore said that's a question that likely would lurk.

"The court might view it though as what's before us is this actual executive order and if it's moot then those issues could be fought another day, but I think ... there might be a competing urge to the extent that some justices are concerned with what they might see as the overbreadth of some of the court of appeals decisions," Palmore said. "Do they leave those in place because the Supreme Court case becomes moot or do those get vacated? There's a lot of complicated rules, what happens when a case becomes moot."

Palmore said he also is closely watching to see how Trump's campaign statements can be attributed as motivation to enact the travel ban if at all and whether the lower courts appropriately applied nationwide injunctions.

Palmore said the last pressing question is whether the dispute could return to the Supreme Court in the "next few weeks or even days" because of the disagreement over the scope of the injunction. The Supreme Court, in deciding to take the case, said that nationals from the six countries could visit the U.S. if they have "bona fide" relationships in the country.

The fight in the federal courts over the extent of the travel ban permitted by the Supreme Court began earlier this week.

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Liberal, conservative experts question if Supreme Court will hear Trump travel ban case - Washington Examiner

On my first day at Michigan State University in 1992, a fellow student called me a "liberal" and I was shocked: as a Canadian who was often to the left of the social-democratic New Democratic Party, I identified "liberal" with the Liberal Party, a centre-right political party that had once imposed martial law in Canada.

As I lived in the USA off and on in the ensuing decades, I grew increasingly frustrated with the truncated US political spectrum, whose mainstream ran from far-right to center-right, with "liberal" being as far left as anyone dared to go. It's this bizarre situation that created an equivalence between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, though Corbyn is far, far to the left of Sanders.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nikil Saval describes a gradual shift in American politics, driven by a resurgent, insurgent, anti-establishment Democratic base who are demanding party leaders who stop kowtowing to big pharma, the finance industry, racist "war on poverty" types, surveillance agencies, and prison labor.

These left-wing activists reject and deplore the term "liberal," seeing it as "weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class."

Over the last few years, though and especially 2016 there has been a surge of the opposite phenomenon: Now the political left is expressing its hatred of liberals, too. For the committed leftist, the liberal is a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class. The liberal is pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers a person who is, as the folk singer Phil Ochs once said, 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. The anonymous Twitter account liberalism.txt is a relentless stream of images and retweets that supposedly illustrate this liberal vacuousness: say, the chief executive of Patagonias being hailed as a leader of corporate resistance to Trump, or Chelsea Clintons accusing Steve Bannon of fat shaming Sean Spicer.

This shift in terminology can be confusing, both politically and generationally as when baby boomers describe fervent supporters of Bernie Sanders as very liberal, unaware that young Sandersistas might find this vomit-inducing. It can also create common ground. Last year, the young (and left-leaning) writer Emmett Rensin published a widely read piece on Vox deriding liberals for their smug style; soon enough, one longtime adept of the right, National Reviews Ramesh Ponnuru, was expressing his partial approval, writing in Bloomberg View that what contemporary liberalism lacked most was humility. Here was a perspective common to both sides of the old spectrum: that liberals suffered from a serene, self-ratifying belief in their own reasonableness, and that it would spell their inevitable defeat.

Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be Liberal Anymore? [Nikil Saval/New York Times]

(Image: Photo illustration by Derek Brahney)

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Trump is an infamously domineering handshaker, who uses the gesture to impose and humiliate. Sometimes, a wily Trudeau or muscular Macron will get the better of him, but theyre still playing his game. Agata Kornhauser-Duda isnt, drifting right past his outstretched lil smokies to greet Melania Trump instead, only turning to the orange morgellons monster []

In the wake of CNN threatening to out a critic if he does not limit his speech in the future, former federal prosecutor and First Amendment champion Ken White has published an eminently sensible post about the incoherence of the present moments views on free speech, and on the way that partisanship causes us to []

Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins shot video of himself talking about the need for invincible U.S. powerwhile wandering the gas chamber at Auschwitz. In his five-minute ramble, Higgins explains the horrors that took place at the camp, where some 1.1m people, mostly Jews, where murdered by the Nazis during World War II. And that this []

Excel, Microsofts venerable spreadsheet program has some seriously powerful capabilities. But unless you know where to look in the maze of menus and toolbars, you probably leave the pivot tables and conditional formatting to your offices Excel guru. If you want to level up your skills and steal the title from the resident guru, take []

Entertaining bold changes in your career can feel like an abandonment of what youve worked for thus far, but this fallacious mindset can cost you a lot more in the long run than the time spent at your current gig. Change is constant, and building new skills outside of your typical wheelhouse will do much []

Immersive 3D sound is usually only possible with an array of surround-sound speakers, or by using headphones with Binaural audio content. And since most readily-available media is mastered for generic stereo, your Dolby 5.1 setup wont automagically add an extra dimension to your listening experience. But you can still simulate a rich audio environment with []

Excerpt from:

America is starting to realize that "liberal/conservative" labels exclude the left - Boing Boing

All year long, struggles within Congress and the White House on health care, taxes, trade and infrastructure have highlighted deep fissures in the Trump-era GOP.

For the moment, they've obscured divisions within a Democratic opposition savoring the luxury of just attacking.

But those divisions will surface soon enough, as the 2018 mid-term election campaign accelerates and the 2020 presidential contest gets underway. And when they do, a recent examination of both parties suggests, they will produce some surprising Democratic beneficiaries.

The examination, by a team of analysts across the political spectrum for the Voter Study Group, shows how the surge of President Donald Trump's blue-collar backers has buffeted the GOP. They diverge from the party's traditional conservatism on taxes, spending and trade.

Democrats have their own fault lines, as the party's protracted 2016 primary battle made clear.

But the report concluded that the party's rank-and-file chose between establishment figure Hillary Clinton and self-styled revolutionary Bernie Sanders on the basis of style more than substance.

Though Sanders' supporters were more hostile to international trade agreements, they held similar views to Clinton's allies on core economic concerns such as income inequality and the importance of an activist government.

"Their voters were not all that different on most issues," wrote Lee Drutman, a fellow at the New America think tank who was part of the Voter Study Group team. "To the extent that the Democratic Party is divided, these divisions are more about faith in the political system and general disaffection than they are about issue positions."

Thus attitude may represent the key variable within Democratic politics over the next three years. Already, some Democrats have staked out divergent positions on how vehemently to resist the agenda of Trump and the GOP Congress.

After Democrat Jon Ossoff struck a temperate tone in his losing race for a Georgia House seat, some intraparty critics complained that he should have excoriated the president more. The recent fight for Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial nomination in which Sanders-backed former House Democrat Tom Perriello lost to Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam revolved around who had greater ability to produce change.

The Virginia outcome suggests that firebrands in the mold of Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren may have less momentum within the party than they assumed in the wake of Trump's triumph. Like the Republican president, each has drawn energy with angry complaints that the political system is rigged to the detriment of average Americans.

However hostile the party's feelings about Trump, their challenge may get even steeper the closer the nation draws to the 2020 presidential contest. David Axelrod, the chief strategist in Barack Obama's breakthrough 2008 victory, notes a recurrent pattern: Voters seek qualities in their next president that compensate for what they consider defects in the last one.

Thus in 2000, they embraced George W. Bush's vow to restore "honor and dignity" to a White House tarnished by Bill Clinton's scandal. In 2008, they turned to Obama's deliberation over Bush's "gut-player" style. In 2016, an electoral majority opted for the bombast of a wealthy outsider vowing to "make America great again."

"In 2020, there will be a market for an antidote to him," Axelrod said. That points toward a quieter, more thoughtful approach that places a higher premium on governing experience.

"There will be a receptivity to someone who offers big ideas about how to insure a fair shot and economic security for the broadest number of Americans in a rapidly changing economy, rather than promising a return to an irretrievable past," Axelrod said. "There will be a market for a more healing and unifying figure who can speak to our common values and concerns as Americans rather than mining resentment and sowing antagonism."

If he's right, harsh denunciations of the wealthiest 1 percent won't prove the most effective Democratic answer to Trump's denunciations of illegal immigrants. That dynamic would give an advantage to potential White House candidates with a more consensus-oriented message, such as Joe Biden or Cory Booker, rather than Sanders or Warren.

See the original post here:

Liberal firebrands may not be best hope for Democrats in Trump era - CNBC

Archbishop Quinn used his platform to criticize American military intervention in Central America and to condemn nuclear war as inherently immoral; at one point, he called on Roman Catholics serving in the armed forces to defy any order to detonate a nuclear weapon.

He argued for greater openness in debating such doctrinal questions as contraception, the ordination of women and whether to allow divorced Catholics to receive the sacraments. In 1985, he appointed Sister Mary Bridget Flaherty as his chancellor, or manager of day-to-day operations. It was the highest position ever attained by a woman in a major diocese.

In moving to address the AIDS crisis, Archbishop Quinn donated a former convent to be used as a hospice and, through the social-services organization Catholic Charities, created a housing program to help AIDS patients remain in their apartments.

Archbishop Quinn held firm to church doctrine on abortion, opposing Roe v. Wade and campaigning for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Our witness to the sanctity of human life cannot diminish and our effort cannot cease, he wrote in the Jesuit magazine America in 2009, referring to the grave moral evil inherent in abortion.

John Raphael Quinn was born on March 28, 1929, in Riverside, Calif., to Ralph Quinn and the former Elizabeth Carroll. He set his sights on the priesthood while serving as an altar boy there in St. Francis de Sales parish.

He enrolled in the Immaculate Heart Seminary in El Cajon, Calif., and completed his training at the Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained as a priest for the diocese of San Diego in 1953, his third year of study, and received his licentiate in sacred theology the following year before taking up duties as an associate pastor in St. Georges Parish in Ontario, Calif.

After serving as vice rector and rector of the Immaculate Heart Seminary in San Diego, with two years as president of St. Francis College Seminary in El Cajon in between, he became auxiliary bishop of San Diego.

While attending a synod in Rome in 1980, Archbishop Quinn ruffled feathers by informing the assembled bishops that the church would have to address resistance to its doctrines forbidding contraception. He cited studies showing that 76 percent of Catholic women in the United States used contraceptive devices and that 71 percent of American priests did not regard the practice as a serious sin.

To quell the ensuing furor, he issued a statement explaining that he supported church doctrine. The intent of my speech was to suggest possible ways of making the churchs teaching on contraception better understood and more widely accepted, he said.

Some Vatican watchers, reading between the lines, saw his remarks as a move to push the church in a more liberal direction. That did not happen, and his outspokenness on the subject, and on the church hierarchy later on, might explain his failure to be named a cardinal.

All he did was ask that the church acknowledge the views of the laity on birth control, but that was the turning point, Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1995. He wasnt challenging church teachings. He was just acknowledging reality.

His last two years as archbishop were clouded by financial problems and allegations of sexual abuse and embezzlement leveled against two priests in the archdiocese. In response to damage wrought by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and expensive new building requirements, Archbishop Quinn closed more than a dozen churches, cut the staff of the archdiocese by 20 percent and sold the old archbishops residence.

After retiring at the end of 1995, he delivered a widely publicized address at Campion Hall, Oxford, in response to Pope John Paul IIs 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That they may be one), which invited suggestions on papal overhaul and ways to promote dialogue with other Christian denominations.

In his address, the archbishop argued for a spirit of criticism and open discussion. He targeted the papal curia, or governing body, which he described as a politburo that stifled free discussion and imposed its will, making bishops managers who only work under instructions rather than true witnesses of faith who teach in communion with the pope in the name of Christ.

He elaborated on his ideas in a book, The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity, published in 1999. He was also the author of Ever Ancient, Ever New: Structures of Communion in the Church (2013).

Original post:

John R. Quinn, Archbishop and Liberal Voice in Church, Dies at 88 ... - New York Times

Despite his campaign comments to the contrary, President Donald Trump will apparently meet Friday for the first time with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany.

If Trump fails to stand up to Putin and forcefully raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections, the Kremlin will conclude that he is too weak to stand up to them at all. That makes his statement todaythat no one really knows who was behind the hacking and dumping of Hillary Clinton's emailsmore than discouraging. Far from putting America first, if he continues to cling to this personal fiction, he will be elevating Russian interests above all others.

On the agenda should also be Russia's continued destabilization of Ukraine, Russia's propping up of Bashar al-Assad, and a clear declaration that the U.S. will not turn a blind eye to any potential Russian support of the Taliban or increased trade with North Korea.

There is little evidence, though that Trump plans to confront Putin on any of these serious matters. Instead, he may seek little more than the exchange of pleasantries and the usual claims of a fabulous meeting.

This would be a historic mistake, with damaging implications for our foreign policy for years to come. Because what the Russians have in mind goes well beyond interference in one election, or the restoration of Russian dominance in what it considers to be its sphere of influence into a profound challenge to a rules-based international order that has been of incalculable benefit to freedom-loving people around the world.

Last summer, what began as a Russian effort to gather foreign intelligence on candidates for the presidency of the United States became a very different kind of enterprise when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to weaponize the data stolen by his intelligence services. Putins dumping of private stolen emails in an effort to influence the U.S. election was a breathtaking escalation of Russian interference in our internal affairs. It is vital that we understand both why he chose such a provocative course, and the new threat that the Russian government poses to the very idea of liberal democracy.

There is no question that Putin despised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her support of pro-democracy protesters who gathered by the tens of thousands in Moscow streets years earlier to protest his governments fraud and corruption. Putin was terrified by these mass protests and believed he saw the hidden hand of the Central Intelligence Agency behind them.

Putin understands innately that the only real threat to his regime will come from the streets, not from an election process where opposition leaders are continually jailed or killed, and where the state controls all the major media. Putin was more than aware Clinton would continue her strong support of sanctions over Russias invasion of Ukraine, and those sanctions are a keen threat to the regime specifically because they have slowed the Russian economy and made the prospect of popular opposition to Putin even greater.

Apart from opposing Clinton, there was every reason for the Russian government to prefer Donald Trump, who over the course of the campaign belittled NATO, celebrated Brexit and a further weakening of Europe, expressed a common purpose with Russia in Syria notwithstanding our very different interests on the survival of the Assad regime, and most significantly, made clear his willingness to revisit our economic sanctions on Russia.

But we would make a grave mistake to assume the Russian intervention was solely about hurting Clinton or helping Trump, or even its main object. Above all, Putin wanted to tear down American democracy just as he is assaulting other liberal democracies around the world. We are in a new battle of ideas, pitting not communism against capitalism, but authoritarianism against democracy and representative government. America must not shrink from its essential role as democracys champion.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived in a world in which the number of people living in free societies was ever increasing. The triumph of liberal democracy in Europe seemed certain, and around the world, democratic change was often plodding but seemed inexorable.

Today, even with welcome victories for candidates like Emmanuel Macron, we may be at an inflection point in which we can no longer be assured that the number of people around the world who will enjoy the freedoms of speech, assembly and religion will increase. It may, in fact, contract. Putins autocratic model is on the rise in places like Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere.

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The narrative Putin wishes to tell is that there is no such thing as democracy, not in Russia nor in the United States, and our commitment to human rights is mere hypocrisy. Putins aims are served when Trump baselessly accuses President Obama of illegally wiretapping him or when the President lashes out at a secretive deep state allegedly working against him.

Of all the praise heaped undeservedly on Putins leadership, none would have pleased him more than when Trump was asked during the campaign why he could not criticize Putin's assassinations of reformers and journalists, at home and abroad. Trump responded, Well, you think our country is so innocent?

The Trump Administration has decided that democracy and the promotion of human rights will no longer be a top priority and instead we will put America first. This fundamentally misapprehends the degree to which the success of democracy around the world is a core American interest.

When the President complements Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on a massive campaign of extrajudicial killing, he is not advancing American values or interests only causing the rest of the world to turn away. We fought two world wars to make the world safe for democracy, because we recognized, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., that a threat to democracy anywhere was a threat to democracy everywhere.

America is not a victim, as the President so often paints her, but the most powerful nation on earth and the greatest beneficiary of a liberal world order established at tremendous cost in American blood and treasure. That is a legacy to cherish and to defend.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

See original here:

Schiff: Putin Aims to Take Down Liberal Democracy. To Put America First, Trump Must Stand Up to Him - Daily Beast