By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
Almost two
months ago, Chief Justice John Roberts declared the
leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson
Women’s Health Organization “a singular and egregious breach” of trust
and an “affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here,”
announcing that he had “directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an
investigation into the source of the leak.”
You notice that the leaker has not yet
been identified. The Supreme Court has only a few hundred employees, and the
list of clerks and employees who had access to the draft cannot be that long.
It has been about a month since Supreme Court officials asked clerks to sign
affidavits and turn over their cellphone data. Members of the public started to
dig into past social connections between the Politico reporter
who broke the leaked draft and particular clerks. From early on, some
suspicious minds speculated that one of the justices abdicated his or her
duties to colleagues and the institution and committed this breach. The longer
the investigation goes on without any conclusion, the more people will suspect
that identifying the leaker would compound the damage already done to the
Court’s reputation.
Progressives Fume at the Biden
Administration’s Dobbs Response
One of the oddities of the past two months
is that the public received that leaked draft copy and knew the odds were good
that the majority would vote to overturn Roe, and yet when the
decision did come down, it still felt like a bombshell.
Intriguingly, some
congressional Democrats see a president and White House that didn’t seem
prepared for this scenario either:
“He made a
strong statement the day of. I would have liked to see some more specific
actions rolled out,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who leads the
Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We all knew this was coming.”
Jayapal
spent part of Monday in meetings with Biden officials and encouraged them on
the sidelines to do more, urging a look at further agency-level moves to
protect abortion access — the sort of action that White House aides say is coming
soon, albeit without specifics so far.
If the Biden administration is listening
to the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, it might decide the first and easiest thing it could do would be
to “open abortion clinics on federal lands in red states right now.” AOC
characterizes this as “the babiest of the babiest of the baby steps.”
But every type of federal land presents
its own financial and logistical challenges to this scheme.
For starters, the Hyde amendment
bars the use of federal funding to pay for abortions; the only exceptions are cases involving rape or incest, or when the
mother’s life is in danger. Any attempt to build abortion clinics on federal
land would be in violation of that provision and spur an instant court
challenge contending that the Biden administration is breaking federal law.
Second, Congress has not authorized or
appropriated any funding to set up new abortion clinics on federal land;
diverting funding from some other source without congressional approval would
spur another round of lawsuits — to say nothing of, for instance, the U.S.
Forest Service complaining that their firefighting budget is being diverted to
build abortion clinics.
Third, Pentagon officials will not want
lines of civilians traipsing into military bases (which occupy federal land) to
get abortions. It is hard to see Americans embracing the idea of setting up
abortion clinics within national parks or on Bureau of Land Management
properties; even if they did, as Greenwire observes, these stretches of wilderness are not near population centers and
aren’t designed to handle the kind of traffic that clinics might generate.
One of the odder bits of speculation is
whether Native American reservations in red states could set up abortion
clinics, beyond the legal authority of the state governments. It does not appear
that anyone advocating this idea bothered to check with Native American tribes
to see if they want their reservations turned into sites where non-Natives go
to get abortions. As it happens, so far, Native
tribes are not enthusiastic about the idea.
The Good GOP Polling in, Er, Rhode Island?
What kind of a midterm wave are we looking
at?
The Suffolk
University/Boston Globe survey of Rhode Island’s second
congressional district has
Allan Fung, the candidate currently favored to win the Republican primary,
ahead of Seth Magaziner, the candidate currently favored to win the Democratic
primary, 45 percent to 39 percent. Fung is ahead of all the other Democratic
opponents as well. President Biden’s approval rating in the state stands at 38
percent, his disapproval rating at 52 percent. Almost 69 percent of respondents
say Biden should not run for another term.
Rhode Island’s second district is
currently represented by Democrat Jim Langevin, who is not running for
reelection. Langevin won 58 percent of the vote in his most recent bid for
reelection in 2020.
The last time a Republican represented
Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives was in 1992, when Ronald
Machtley was reelected in the first district.
A Blow against Noncitizen Voting
At the beginning of the year, New York
City’s mayor and city council enacted a measure that would have
allowed more than 800,000 noncitizens in the city to vote in municipal
elections. Under the law, most noncitizen legal permanent residents of the city
would have been able to vote in elections for mayor, comptroller, public
advocate, borough president, council member, and other city-government
positions.
This change was enacted right around the
time President Biden gave his infamously incendiary
address on voting rights, in which he asked,
“Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over
injustice?” And answered: “I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not
flinch. I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies —
foreign and, yes, domestic.”
But President Biden never said much about
whether he believed noncitizens should be voting in local U.S. elections.
On Monday, as National Review’s Diana Glebova reports, the New York Supreme Court struck down that New York City law. Staten
Island justice Ralph J. Porzio wrote: “The New York State Constitution
expressly states that citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are
entitled to register and vote in elections. . . . Though voting is a right so
many citizens take for granted, the City of New York cannot ‘obviate’ the
restrictions imposed by the Constitution.”
Hey, Remember Covid-19?
In the U.S., Covid-19 is an afterthought,
overtaken by all kinds of other problems, such as inflation, gas prices, and
even monkeypox. (See below.) Meanwhile, there’s a
report that over in China, once again the Communists are proposing five-year
plans:
A story
first posted in the Beijing Daily, the official publication of the
capital’s ruling party, quoted former mayor and current party chief Cai Qi as
saying the city will uphold the controversial “zero-COVID” policy “for the next
five years.”
The quote
from Cai, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Jinping, provoked a quick and
furious social media backlash. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, the
hashtag “for the next five years” was banned in response to the uproar.
So China will be shutting down cities
every time somebody sneezes until 2027?
You don’t see as many “What the U.S.
can learn from China’s response to COVID infections” articles as you used to see. For two years, major U.S. publications
liked telling the story of China’s smoothly implemented, efficient, and ruthlessly
effective policies to shut down the virus, while the stumbling, bumbling, unruly, and chaotic Americans
accumulated the highest death toll and infection rate in the world. The New
York Times’ narrative of “how China beat the virus and roared back” on the
strength of “power, patriotism, and 1.4 billion people” looks silly now. That
was always a misleading, stage-managed narrative promoted by an authoritarian
regime, hoping their own subpar vaccines and draconian lockdowns could keep a
virus as contagious as the common cold at bay.
Anyone with eyes can see that the official Chinese figures on Covid-19 infections and deaths are nonsense. The Chinese
government would have you believe that, out of China’s total population of 1.4
billion, it has recorded only about 225,000 total infections since the start of
the pandemic — fewer than in Montenegro, with a total population of 621,000! —
and only 5,226 deaths — fewer than in Latvia, with a total population of 1.9
million. China would have you believe that between April 2020 and April 2022,
the country suffered a grand total of five deaths from Covid-19. The Economist, looking at
China’s annual death rates compared to the historical average, estimated that China’s true death toll from Covid-19 could be as
high as 2 million.
The Chinese government lies a lot. For
what it’s worth, our government is no longer investigating the origins of
Covid-19, at least publicly. Most of our governmental, scientific, media, and
cultural elites have simply accepted a global pandemic that killed at least 6
million people, and likely many more, as just bad luck, requiring no further
investigation into the country of origin.
ADDENDUM: I mentioned monkeypox above. In
the New York Times, Dr. Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell
Medical School, writes that “the United States has, yet again, been caught
flat-footed when confronted with another virus.”
He worries that “many problems with the Covid-19 response by the United States
are being repeated: limited access to testing, contact tracing, vaccination and
isolation support, and scant data
from public health officials about how and where people are being infected.”
That’s impossible! In January 2021, I was
assured the adults are
back in charge!
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