Upstate along the route of the old Erie Canal has some pretty towns with a central square ringed by old Federal style houses. At least according to my memories of the area when my brother went to college around there a long time ago. Plus the Adirondacks are really nice, esp around Tupper Lake area which is less commercial than say Lake Placid. And the town of Lake George is nice if you like honky tonk and are somewhere between 15 and 30 and looking for SD&R&R -- the upstate version of Old Orchard Beach in Maine (i.e., the place that people with money and "taste" who have summer homes in the region avoid)
I'm visiting very bossy people and my job is to be bossed around. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1: My sister went to summer camp on Lake George for several summers. I had no idea that it was a place that people with "taste" avoided.
On the subject of the Supreme Court - rejecting student loan forgiveness and affirmative action but upholding discrimination against LGBTQ.
I have a question for people with more knowledge of legal history: What previous Court does the current Court most resemble? Taney? White?
In the sense that they're just making up legal principles to justify the outcomes they want on ideological grounds. Obviously the substantive results are very different.
I'm not super-knowledgeable about legal history but I think the Court has been a conservative force for the vast majority of its lifespan. Of course Taney went too far, in the end, but the rest mostly kept it boring enough to keep wielding power. (And in the late 20th century, the Court went back to being pro-corporate-power long before it started turning back the social-progress clock.)
1,4: we are actually staying at Lake George.
That's where the one guy took nude photos of Georgia O'Keefe.
I thought the LA Times had a good background article on what was left of affirmative action programs prior to yesterday's court rulings, given the many previous rulings and, in some states, legislation that already limits it.
I'm in upstate NY too! Unfogged meetup time! (Realistically we're probably nowhere near each other.)
Biden is going ahead with student loan relief anyway: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/30/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-supreme-court-decision-on-student-loan-debt-relief/
Oh wait, I hadn't seen where you are, we're kinda nearby (or will be tomorrow).
Are you going to the Best 4th in the North?
RWM grew up in Ticonderoga. We'll be in North Creek and then Burlington, but we're thinking about going to the parade in Ticonderoga.
I've searched the internet, but to no avail: that scene in Last of the Mohicans where Danial Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe are making out by firelight. That's a Lake George scene.
Unsurprising from the US Sup Ct. I hope no one does business with that dishonest asshole web designer. The major questions policy was designed for the student loan case, and it's not crazy actually crazy. Maybe Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ought to have come out the other way.
On the other hand, if we'd elected Hillary Clinton the case would've gone 5-4 the other way.
Don't blame me. I voted for Hillary. Or blame me, because I didn't campaign for Hillary.
The not working on Sunday case seems good. Keep the end in weekend.
19.1: this? https://youtu.be/jj3XHQiLtOQ
Or is there another scene where they make out by firelight?
16th: never heard of it! but I know our time here will be tightly scripted, so maybe? I really do develop some learned helplessness and don't bother to find out ahead of time what we're doing.
Don't let them peer-pressure you into drinking Genny Cream Ale.
22 There's a statute that says you can't imprison Americans without specific authorization. Congress authorizes the use of military force against Al Qaeda. Hamdi, an American citizen, is captured in Afghanistan, and held in prison at a US navy base. Is this legal? Well, yes, says the SupCt, because, you know, indefinite detention is a part of war, and saying that they could use military force means that too. That's authorization enough.
Is this a major question? No, the category didn't exist yet.
(This is from memory, so a better explanation of my comment than any sort of reasoned analysis. The only thing I ever quote from Hamdi is the 'unraveling' part, which is really really obvious, but no one in government wants to admit it.)
23 Yes, but just at the beginning. There's a lot that happens between making out on the palisades and canoeing on the lake.
Of course, Last of the Mohicans is also a prisoner of war story.
8 I was remembering the town itself, not the lake - which is very pretty as you write. We used to get off the thruway at Lake G to head ~25-30 miles further north and west, typically evening before a weekend or holiday, and the town would be absolutely full of young people. It looked jumping but we'd left the city and driven 4 hours for something different.
Oh yeah, 25 is spot on. A guy I sorta once knew wrote a book (published?) about attending a baseball game at every major league ballpark one season. Needs to do a sequel on trying terrible traditional local brews across the country, especially in non-urban areas. Describe the local scene, bars, and get a general flavor of the area as well as the brew.
I was guessing cream ale doesn't travel that far east, but I don't actually know because I don't travel that far east often.
I have a Bluesky invite code for anyone here who wants one
Fermented dairy products go further east than you can even imagine.
There's not any dairy product in cream ale.
One of our local cream ales is called That's What She Said.
People like it.
would take a bluesky code if anyone has one spare!
You would think that the simultaneous implosion of Reddit and Twitter would force me find more profitable ways of using my time, but instead I'm just doomscrolling Instagram more. I normally don't use Instagram except to keep up with pop-up restaurant locations and repertory cinema calendars, so after I exhaust the three or four posts from accounts I actually follow, I'm left with whatever the algorithm thinks I want to see. This turns out to be mostly cake decorating videos (yes!) and text-only slides about self-care (no).
Sorry, my eyes are getting bad. I though 38 was from peep.
Having been out of the loop for the past few days: how does the legal argument go that Biden can't forgive student loan debt? Is it obviously spurious? what would have been the proper channel for him to take to do so?
I have no idea, but that's a good question.
If I understand right, the conservatives have invented a new doctrine (called the "major questions doctrine") which says that if they think an executive action is big and controversial then you can't do it (regardless of what the law in question actually says). So I'm pretty sure they'd strike down any way he does loan forgiveness, since it's a "major question" and so they're saying you need to pass a new law and not just use old laws (regardless of what those laws say). Also, if I understand right, the "major questions doctrine" doesn't apply to Republican presidents because otherwise it wouldn't have meant Trump's muslim ban was unconstitutional.
wouldn't -> would
So spuriously wielded, but an actual principle that gets used appropriately other times.
It's "laws mean what the literal words mean, unless we the justices of the Supreme Court are shocked by the implications, in which case we disregard the literal meaning of statutes and demand that Congress have specifically said that they really no fooling meant to address this specific circumstance." It's Calvinball -- the SC can disregard any statute if they think it's important enough.
Shameful lawless trash.
Right, but that means it's clearly saying "Biden can't do loan forgiveness without passing a new law, because we don't like loan forgiveness," so it's not that he went about it in the wrong way it's just that they don't like the policy.
That is, since it has nothing to do with the text of the statutes, it can't be that Biden can find a different statute. It's still a "major question" so you can only do it with a new law written to purpose.
I thought the big problem was that the new rule for standing is "butthurt and conservative".
48, 49 -- I think this is true, yes.
47 -- I don't agree with slavish adherence to text, when it's obvious that Congress intended X but did not intend Y. How ever can anyone tell what they were trying to do? I don't think this is beyond knowing, especially when we're looking at text from the 21st century. I don't like 'one-weird-trick' implementation of the law. As applied, though, this major questions thing is bullshit. And I certainly don't have any time or patience for self-styled slavish adherents to text suddenly discovering that maybe intention is more important.
I think this because I think text is a means -- a sometimes imperfect means -- of conveying and actuating intention. The words aren't the point. The point is the policy objective the words are designed to achieve. I thought it was wrong when Scalia would give his little Nelson Muntz from the Simpsons laugh , and say 'haha, the statute doesn't actually say that' and I don't like it the other way either.
48, 49 -- That is, I don't think an executive action forgiving loans en masse would fly, even if a different statutory authority was used. There may well be other ways to go. Suspending all collections until Jan 22, 2025, for example. Not funding or staffing collection efforts. Granting individual requests for loan forgiveness to anyone who writes a hardship letter. I'm sure there are other things the Secretary can do.
Yeah, there are cases where the Supreme Court said the text didn't do what it literally appeared to do, and where in context that was the correct decision - King v. Burwell is the one that comes to mind to me.
There are what are essentially scrivener's errors, like King v. Burwell, where the words of the statute fail to literally do thing that Congress was very clearly trying to do -- those can be as simple as something like a missing "not", where no one objects to a court fixing the obvious reversal of the intended meaning, to situations where it gets a little more complicated. And everyone agrees you draw a line somewhere, depending how very clear what Congress was trying to do was, but the basic principle that you can fix unintentional problems with the wording of a statute is uncontroversial.
The major questions doctrine is totally different -- that gets hauled out where Congress definitely intended to delegate discretion to an agency, and definitely wrote a statute in words that successfully did delegate that discretion. But then the Court invents the idea that if Congress had thought hard enough about the breadth of their delegation of authority, they would have realized that they meant it to be narrower than the words they wrote stated, so the Court will step in and do the narrowing that Congress didn't have the forethought for. Not an error between Congressional intent and the wording of the statute, but an "error" between a statute representing the intent of Congress and what the Court thinks it would have been if Congress had thought through all the implications.
Justice Kagan's criticism of the decision to grant the states standing to sue was really remarkable. MOHELA, the student loan servicer chartered by Missouri might have claimed an injury in that they would lose out on the payment fees for processing the loans, but they didn't want to. (Of note: the PSLF accounts are transitioning to MOHELA from the despised FedLoan):
The most that can be said of the theory the majority selects, proffered solely by Missouri, is that it is less risible than the others It still contravenes a bedrock principle of standing law ---that a plaintiff cannot ride on someone else's injury. Missouri is doing just that in relying on injuries to the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHeLA), a legally and financially independent corporation. And that means the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution. [emphasis mine.]
37,51 dq, that email bounced. I think I have another email for you but I can't find it.
barry! so sweet of you!
heebie has my real email, or we could connect & exchange emails via dm at the place with its wheels falling off & various engine bits self immolating, where i am @reinelaitiere!
Apparently, even with an invite, nobody can sign up for Blusky just now.
I appreciated this summary of court decisions: https://stevevladeck.substack.com/p/34-what-a-difference-five-years-makes