Noted on some other blog (LGM I think)- the fact that the CDC had to walk back the guidelines is a clear demonstration of the total incompetence of the administration. They're one of the most important policy decisions made this summer about the most important issue facing the country, and the fact that the WH is mad about them and publicly forcing a revision means they didn't even bother to review them before they were released. They just don't give a shit about doing their fucking jobs, even when it's politically beneficial for them to do so. Analogy ban, but it would be like them yelling at the Army on Twitter for deploying troops somewhere- shouldn't you have probably been aware of that beforehand?
I don't think that's necessarily true. I can fully imagine scenarios in which they saw the guidelines but didn't fully grasp their implications and are now doing their normal reaction thing. This is not a group of folks famed for thinking through consequences.
I am tangentially also noting the continuing problem with national media being so heavily Northeast East Coast-biased. There has been relatively little coverage, as usual, that acknowledges that many states and districts start the school year in early August. Parochialism strikes again.
And many districts are moving their school opening earlier by a week or two, to try to increase instruction time, to compensate for lost learning in the spring.
(Because the most important thing is that we resume standardized testing ASAP so that we can get back to the business of privatizing poor districts.)
I think some districts are assuming schools will sit down again before winter.
I guess like the rest of us, schools have been assuming the Trump administration would at least try to control the virus outbreak during the summer, if only because mass death and becoming an international pariah is bad for the polls. However, the Trump administration decided that was too hard since they are probably losing the election anyway, and none of them are personally being affected by the virus because the stock market is up again, so instead they will use mass death for leverage to force their enemies to make hard decisions.
So the plan was to start school early in case new case clusters appeared that would require shutting down later. The idea of starting school anyway as the outbreak gets worse, and there are case clusters everywhere at all times, is a new idea.
Seen any stories yet about waves of US students trying to go to school abroad? Quarantining for 14 days to get privileged status as a certified non-pestilential American would be a small price to pay.
Spoke too soon....
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will not revise its guidelines for reopening schools despite calls from the White House to do so, agency Director Dr. Robert Redfield said Thursday.
Trump loses NY subpoena 7-2, decision by CJR.
It's really remarkable the degree to which Trump is able to run as an anti-government ignoramus while actually in charge of the government.
8 - chief justice roberts has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.
Although it remands for further proceedings and says Trump has other more specific options to address his complaints. So probably will just stay tied up in court forever.
I wonder what things are like in an Oklahoma-based title insurance company right now?
So seriously, what happens now (the other case also was a 7-2 and remanded) if Trump just doesn't cooperate?
It's really remarkable the degree to which Trump is able to run as an anti-government ignoramus while actually in charge of the government.
And even more remarkably, he's doing so more honestly (in this limited respect) than most people who run as anti-government ignoramuses.
The subpoena decisions are a bowlful of mush. They reject the extreme positions of absolute immunity from Trump's lawyers but say maybe there are other ways to block them, go try those for the next four years.
13 Doesn't Deutsche Bank have his tax records? Now they have no excuses not to comply with a subpoena.
Sounds good for the Roberts project of giving conservatives 95% of what they want while maximizing the chance that they will continue whining about the courts more than liberals do.
To the OP this thread and the one in the quoted tweet are really good: https://twitter.com/JeremyKonyndyk/status/1281084068235526145
2: Although generally true, i've heard the opposite. Most of the coverage has said August until the turned to Massachusetts governor Baker.
Merrick Garland would've written it better.
We're not going to see any Trump Organization financials before the election, no. Trump has to realize, though, that if he is reelected, especially if he's cheated, this will all come back with a vengeance. If the records indeed show a whole bunch of felonies, and who thinks they don't, then he has to wonder whether finding health reasons to step down (and get a pardon from Pence) isn't the better course.
Our Manhattan commenters need to get themselves into the grand jury pool asap. Just one little leak, for the common good.
17 I would say that 95% is an overstatement, given that what conservatives want is a formally unaccountable Republican executive. I thought Clinton v. Jones was partisan bullshit at the time, and it hasn't worn well at all.
11: I really want to see him prosecuted even after he's out of office for at least one of the crimes he committed.
Has anybody read the Congressional subpoena decision and understand how substantive it is? Sounds like it may be a straight punt on a technicality?
I'll bet 20 to 1 he's never prosecuted for anything personally. The optics would be so, so bad.
26 I think if he wins reelection, the pressure will be unremitting. If he loses, why not resign and get pardoned? It's not like he has any interest in the actual job.
25 I skimmed that one, having started with Vance. (Actually, I started with McGirt, which might matter in some ways.) Reading vance though I quickly got sidetracked by memories (HIMTHB?) of being way stoned on qat and explaining at ridiculous length the Burr trial and associated rulings some well amused Yemeni hosts.
I've always wondered what qat was like but never been around it. At my age and blood pressure, probably best to never try it now.
Just be sure to make a spectacle of yourself.
If he wins, he's going full dictator. Whatever the official ruling of a court decision after that, it's unlikely to matter.
Re: schools, maybe I'm in the minority and/or a bad parent, I know other parents with more kids or other responsibilities than me are somehow managing, and I'd totally agree the administration is doing it for the wrong reasons and has done almost literally everything wrong to prepare for it... all that being said, I admit I'm disappointed my local schools probably aren't reopening.
I'm also torn in that way. It is a full-blown crisis if the schools don't open in full, even if the Trump administration is pushing hard for full opening for awful reasons.
Ideally, you take 100% reopening as your goal (back in April when you start planning), and then direct a massive amount of federal money towards implementing that safely. Anything short of 100% reopening endangers poor families significantly, who are already more likely to be significantly exposed to COVID, so the schools don't bump them from 0 risk to sizable risk, the way it does for more secure families.
(When I say 100% reopening, I mean that daily attendance is available for all students, not mandated.)
Trump has to realize, though, that if he is reelected, especially if he's cheated, this will all come back with a vengeance. ... I think if he wins reelection, the pressure will be unremitting
I know that you actually have far, far more experience of and understanding of the federal courts than I do, but this seems misguided almost on a level with Susan Col/lins saying she thought Trump would be chastened by having been impeached.
In the state of the world where Trump wins reelection, the Republicans also (at least) hold the Senate. So no check on him from there, or on his appointments. Who, exactly, is going to put pressure on him? Who, exactly is going to bring this vengeance on him? If the answer is, "the honorable career prosecutors of the DoJ" -- how many of them will be left?
31: Right, at this point there's no good option for local schools or individual families and remaining mostly or entirely online really might be the least bad option. But I'm pretty sure it's not the best option for me and my family specifically is all.
Ideally we would have had actual lockdowns, testing, and contact tracing much earlier and more thoroughly, and it would be safe to reopen in most of the country by the time the school year starts. Several other countries seem to be ready to reopen now. "'No Way to Prevent This', Says Only Nation In This Position."
Trump has to realize, though, that if he is reelected, especially if he's cheated, this will all come back with a vengeance.
Assumes he thinks in terms of more than one day at a time, not in evidence.
I think he's going to try to kill as many people as possible between the election and the inauguration is he loses. If he wins, he's got a mandate for being a complete piece of shit. Either way, we're going to have a bad winter.
I think he's going to try to kill as many people as possible between the election and the inauguration is he loses.
Like, violently, or by suppressing COVID response? Because I'm not sure how he could go HAMer on the latter.
Suppress Covid response and generally weakening government. He hasn't gone all in.
30, 32 Yeah, I think the odds are that he'll want to go full dictator. But, on the other hand, I remember remarking back when he cleared Lafayette Square that this was going to be the Trump Steaks version of martial law. It won't be Barr and DOJ, it'll be institutions he can't control, like states and the House, that keep the pressure on. I think Trump really wanted the vindication that winning these cases would bring, because that would have ended any independent centers of power.
I'm sure I mentioned back in 2018 waking through the museum in Nuernburg who scary it was to see the legislative progression laid right out: getting rid of the independent judiciary, getting rid of independent state governments, getting personal loyalty oaths everywhere, including the army. If Trump had self-discipline and an ideology, we'd have already gotten farther down that road. The 2018 elections were a real block to that agenda, if he'd had it.
McConnell has done a lot of damage to the judiciary. I think even with Trump narrowly winning we have a decent chance at the Senate, so even that slows down a lot. There are still a lot of judges from the Before Time, so even a win and holding the Senate may take a while. (Do Trump and Barr curse Karen LeCraft Henderson every day? Trump may not be smart enough, and might think her vote on the Flynn case is reason enough not to. Barr knows, though, that if she'd taken senior status early in the year, they'd already have one more ideologue on the DC Circuit. She'd still be in the assignment pool, so while the ratio among active judges would be the same (4R/7D) among senior judges it would be 6R/1D -- helping the odds for any particular panel assignment.)
Bottom line, there's just no excuse not to go all in for Biden.
I have a friend who is very eloquent on FB, and is describing how her 4 year autistic child has regressed without being in school, and it is just heartbreaking. Like, he's in the critical window of neuroplasticity, and it's just being squandered.
, I remember remarking back when he cleared Lafayette Square that this was going to be the Trump Steaks version of martial law.
This made me laugh.
Oh, I forgot Walker, confirmed on June 18 to replace Griffith (who is taking senior status, although 10 years younger than Henderson, presumably at the urging of Barr et al) -- so the active ratio will still be 4/7 but senior judges will be, beginning on September 1, 7/1. Henderson taking senior would have made it 8/1 -- and thus the overall ratio 12/8. Odds of getting 2 Rs on a panel look pretty good (although not all senior judges take full case loads.)
Can the Muscogee Nation just send everyone who owns land in Tulsa a letter demanding rent or they move to Texas?
Are there non-Native towns on land where tribes have sovereignty? Curious how it works there.
Also, I'm increasingly pessimistic that we will go through at least one more cycle of Republicans in the wilderness and dressing themselves up as principled deficit/liberty hawks before Dem and media leaders start realistically treating Republicans as a whole as despicable and unamenable.
Maybe that should be recast as, I'm increasingly optimistic that this cycle is going to end in the next ten years?
Are there non-Native towns on land where tribes have sovereignty? Curious how it works there.
Part of the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin is also part of the Oneida Indian Reservation. I'm curious about how it works there too.
Next thing I looked up was the CSKT Flathead Indian Reservation that CharleyCarp is always talking about, the includes the town of Polson, MT, population 4,041, 78% white and 16% Native American.
There's no way the economy doesn't need some stimulus/unemployment spending between November and January. Trump can probably block it.
38.last: There's no excuse not to go all in for the Democratic nominee. Biden should drop out.
In fact the entire Flathead Indian Reservation is only 1/3 Native. And that's not even including the one thousand Buddhas.
Trump will defend the statues if they portray Buddha as a white slave owner.
46 It does seem like there has to be a point at which government borrowing has a real world impact, doesn't it?
Can Trump urge (and, in October, sign) legislation that gives every American who made less than 50k in 2019 a check, signed by him, for 5k?
I'm not saying that 1200/2400 isn't a welcome shot in the arm for a great many households. But if you want to win a lot of votes with it, it seems to me that 5k is a way better amount. And don't fail out the big corps in the same bill.
Can't he even fake empathy?
As I've said before, I am just never going to understand why Trump didn't realize that Bannon was right, and that his road to majority power was what got him the Republican nomination: white supremacy plus active disdain for the elite Republican agenda.
As I've said before, I am just never going to understand why Trump didn't realize that Bannon was right, and that his road to majority power was what got him the Republican nomination: white supremacy plus active disdain for the elite Republican agenda.
ISTM in some cases he disregards all advice, but those are the things he cares most viscerally about, specifically brutalizing immigrants and to a lesser extent withdrawing from international agreements. Everywhere else, he's weak-minded and agrees with the last thing he's told. Instituting Herrenvolk welfare not only requires a lot more follow-through (working with Congress) but also active staff support.
I think he just doesn't like poor people.
51 I'm not an adherent, but go there a few times a year. It's really worth a stop, and their summer and fall festivals are great.
McGirt doesn't change land ownership. I don't think it affects the status of Polson. CSKT has a Pub L 280 agreement with the state-- don't quote me on this, but I think it might be the only tribe here with one -- so you'd factor that in. I know there is a pending dispute between CSKT and the county over a road to a trailer court in Big Arm -- but don't know how it turned out.
There's a pending bill to turn the National Bison Range, currently owned and managed by the US FWS, over to CSKT. IIRC, the bill basically implies that the land was stolen, so maybe there's something in McGirt for that.
(I have a water rights client -- white guy -- within CSKT, and he has Walton rights I suppose, but whether we end up litigating that will depend on whether Congress ratifies the Compact. I didn't see anything in McGirt that make an immediate difference, but I'll have to study it further.)
I don't think it affects Tulsa either -- it's about what court tries major crimes committed by Natives. The Great Falls Division of our federal court has several reservations, and so sees a lot more of the sorts of ordinary criminal prosecutions that you'd usually see in state court. It has a substantial impact on scheduling for civil cases. I really don't know enough about the legislation that diminished the reservations here to know whether there's an implication for eg the Crow Nation or not.* We can be sure, though, that the caseload in the Eastern District of Oklahoma is now going to change substantially.
I'm wondering how this will impact that buffalo commons argument my environmentalist friend is preparing. If someone want to pay my hourly rate, I'd be happy to write a brief on that . . .
* In 2008, I worked on a case that involved regulatory jurisdiction over coal mined in an area that the Crow Nation had given up in 1904 but kept the subsurface rights. The case was settled in the 80s, giving the state the authority to regulate, but in the waning days of the Obama Administration there was an effort to reopen the settlement and assert federal jurisdiction. Lead counsel for the state back in the 80s was a partner at my old firm, but he'd been appointed to the DC Circuit back in 1990, so a colleague and I took up the cause. We won, even though there were decisions after the settlement had been reached that pointed very strongly to federal jurisdiction.
So, 2000. The years, they blend.
Some post hearing banter with the DOJ lawyer about how the governor of Montana, my client, was rumored to be under consideration to be nominated as Secretary of Interior, and thus become his client. I thought this meant I'd get an opponent who sympathized. No, says the government lawyer, how people see things depends on where they sit. "Just like Thomas a Becket."
If there wasn't a legal profession, where would nerds like that guy, or anyone who declaims about Aaron Burr while addled by qat, find a place in society?
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Would anyone mind holding my hand (over email) through some super basic statistics questions? Like which version of ANOVA I should use, or if I should use a t-test or something else instead.
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Isn't it in Jean Anouilh's foreword or something super accessible like that that the "a" in Becket's name is an interpolation from centuries later?
I have actually made that analogy, also about a specific person, in my workplace,so I guess nonprofits is the other answer.
This is very interesting, CC.
Growing up in Pennsylvania I thought of Indian reservations as a purely theoretical concept like rain forests, then was stunned to be driving through one one day in Upstate New York. If Upstate New York is typical, the reservations on the east coast are pretty much surgically separated from anything resembling a town of over a thousand people or anything that might generate property taxes, so no worries about someone unexpectedly finding themselves on Native land.
People who want to buy untaxed cigarettes matter too.
If they'd had representatives from the Indigenous nations at that convention in Philadelphia, the sort of rough back and forth that went on with bg/small states, slavery, electoral college, and the rest would also have done something about the status of those nations. Instead, we've been ad hoccing it for more than 2 centuries. With wildly different approaches over time.
64 The treaty by which my valley passed from the Salish to the US government reserved to the Salish the right to fish in their accustomed places. My subdivision borders a creek, and the land between my back yard and the creek is owned in common by the subdivision, and is managed as open space closed to non-residents. The area right behind my house -- my yard and the open space -- is the kind of flat bench that would have been perfect for an encampment: close enough for easy access to the water, high enough so that there's no risk of flooding. It;s not huge -- the level bench is a couple acres at most, even counting what's in people's yards. There were Native gravesites scattered around the hillsides up and down the valley.
Does the treaty imply a right to insist on minimal instream river flows in rivers that do not cross the reservation? CSKT says yes, and got the state to agree in the compact that is pending ratification in Congress. Does the treaty imply an easement to cross private land to get to such places -- an easement that would have pre-existed the ownership of that land? Has that easement been lost by prescription?
We know from that Supreme Court case about the Crow man hunting in Wyoming decided last year that such treaty rights continue on federal land.
re: 66
I'm working on a project to put a lot of those treaties and the associated land cessi ons online at the moment. It's running late (problems at the US end, not at our end). I'd expect it to go live in August, though. Target audience isn't legal professionals, though. It's ordinary people and especially native people who might want access to those documents (or at least the historic 19th c. ones).
64: Interestingly, the reason New York is unusual among northeastern states in continuing to have substantial Indian reservations is that the Second Seminole War was such a pain in the ass for the Van Buren administration that they decided not to push their luck by trying to kick the Iroquois out of New York too. A few Iroquois did go to Oklahoma voluntarily, and many more had already relocated to Ontario, but the rest stayed put and are still there.
Most other northeastern states had long since pushed out their few remaining Indians by one means or another by that point. There were a few scattered reservations in New England, where the Indians were highly assimilated and not considered as much of a threat, and some of those are still around too.
The Iroquois (and the southern tribes) were also pretty assimilated by the early nineteenth century, of course, but they were numerous enough to use their understanding of white society to hold on to large amounts of land.
Maybe the most well known Indians on the east coast, aside from the Seminoles and those only known for owning a casino, are the Lumbee Indians in North Carolina, who make up almost half of the population of Robeson County. I looked up a list of reservations on the East Coast and they are mostly in NY, Maine and Florida, and there are some other tiny ones (two in Virginia with double-digit populations), but nothing for the Lumbee Indians. Why is that?
A lot of tribes lost federal and/or state recognition at some point, and with it their reservations. I think the Lumbees fall into that category but I don't know any of the details.
I've never had occasion to learn anything meaningful about the Lumbee people, but what's not to like about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hayes_Pond
There's a really terrific new(ish) book about the Lumbees. I don't remember how to embed links, so here's the url: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469646374/the-lumbee-indians/.
It's two years out of date. I'll wait for the next edition.
This reminds me that I get very confused about the local state of the Mashpee Wampanoags. It's definitely a mess.
I started putting a land m acknowledgment in my syllabi:
The University of [MidAtlantic State] was built upon the Lenapehoking, the traditional lands of the Lenni Lenape before they were forcibly removed to their present-day territory in what we now call Oklahoma and Canada
31: I'm also torn in that way. It is a full-blown crisis if the schools don't open in full, even if the Trump administration is pushing hard for full opening for awful reasons.
This is one of the problems of the Trump/Republican era. There are a lot of complex issues in running a country in normal times much less a crisis like this. What to do about schools (and at what level of granularity, and on and on) is truly a vexed issue requiring a metric shit-ton of balancing of harms (and even in the best case there would inevitably be a lot of hiccups and a need for rapid adjustments). Hard to work through in any scenario, but with these kings of shit absolutely fucking impossible. Even when they are sort fo right* they are totally fucking wrong. And it paralyzes every fucking thing, and in some cases probably does lead to some kneejerk rejection by opponents to avoid granting a political win. (And of course the Trump-less Republicans had a lot of practice before 2016 but it has gone to 11 since then)
*Take for instance the China "travel ban." Probably a good thing to have done; but it was done in an utterly jigoistic fashion** with no real planning and poor execution that undoubtedly torpedoed its effectiveness greatly. But still probably a right step, and one that I would probably not advocated for as early as it happened. So yeah, they kinda, sorta made the trains run on time in this one instance.
**And yes, it was in fact jingoistic as fuck, and has been exploited as such.
80: Since I've emerged from blog commenting semi-retirement to rant let me continue.
My best example of the crazy, evil going to 11 just today: The adviser, Paul Alexander, criticized the agency's methods and said its warning to pregnant women "reads in a way to frighten women . . . as if the President and his administration can't fix this and it is getting worse." I barely have words the loathing I feel for Paul Alexander and I really don't even know who the fuck he is.
68 et seq.:Teo. I've been meaning to recommens a couople of Alaskan weather/climnatologists who I follow on Twitter and who are great. Mix of general climate/weather, Alaska weather/climate, and Alska stuff (usually out-of-doors stuff). Not sure if you do the twitter machine (or if they post in other venues. Anyway, they are: Brian Brettschneider @Climatologist49Rick Thoman @AlaskaWx.
I can imagine you not being on witter, but even if you loathe it in general, maybe consider doing for a few folks likes this and/or your local NWS station (which tend to post a lot of great stuff*) The Capital weather Gang in DC is also very good (DC focused obviously but they pass on interesting tidbits from all over). This advice for everybody.
*You know, like whether a hurricane might hit Alabama or not.
Eh, they're probably ready for one.
My memory goes back even to the times before the plague.
82: Thanks! I have so far held off on joining Twitter, but so much of the online discourse that used to be on blogs etc. has moved there that I do in practice end up reading it a lot, so I probably should just sign up.
This is a good summary of the actual (fairly limited) implications of the Court's decision in the Oklahoma case.