The Supreme Court is terrified of the truth

But so is Dick Durbin. (At least there’s good housing news)

Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.

We are back home in New York after a quick weekend away, and though Zipcar continues to be the most expensive scam going this side of dental insurance and daycare (why do the teachers get so poorly if enrollment costs so much?!), it was nice to get away for a minute. Hope you had a nice weekend and were able to stay cool as the world melted down around you.

As I mentioned in last night’s newsletter, there are a number of additional important stories that I want to share and discuss; because I’m both committed to delivering for subscribers and forever battling actual OCD, this evening is dedicated to the news.

Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Matthew, Roy, Jeri, Vera, Jan, and Susan!

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The only way that the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Supreme Court could be more embarrassing is if it emerges that opinion section editor James Taranto isn’t receiving secret cash payments for public relations services rendered to Samuel Alito.

In June, ProPublica reported that Alito did not disclose a lavish, $1000-a-night luxury fishing trip gifted to him by billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer in 2008, a revelation that sent the court’s resident right-wing soft boy into a fit of indignation. Even before the nonprofit outlet hit publish on the story, Taranto and the WSJ provided Alito a platform to publish a retort. Alito’s piece wound up being dense, pig-headed, and idiotic, so the WSJ did him one better: Taranto and attorney David B. Rivkin, Jr. spent four hours interviewing the justice and then turned it into a puff piece so fawning and subservient that it may well be a kink.

(Rivkin, it should be mentioned, has a case before the Supreme Court this fall, where he’ll try to convince the justices to further rig the tax system on behalf of billionaires.)

The two sycophants perform back-breaking mental and rhetorical gymnastics to square Alito’s supposed judicial philosophy with a record shaped purely by far-right ideology. Alito himself strains desperately to distinguish himself as something more than a partisan hack, even resorting to taking swipes at his fellow conservatives for their slightly different views on the law.

After more praise for his selective textualism and interest in precedents, the conversation turns to the real reason that they’re slobbering over the 73-year-old’s robes: Alito still indignant at the mere suggestion that he should be held accountable for brazenly violating even the most lenient disclosure requirements, much less the law, and can’t help but rage against new ethics legislation that stands zero chance of passing the Senate.

Justice Alito says he voluntarily follows disclosure statutes that apply to lower-court judges and executive-branch officials; so do the other justices. But he notes that “Congress did not create the Supreme Court”—the Constitution did. “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m willing to say it,” he says. “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

The political branches have other weapons they could deploy against the court. The Constitution doesn’t specify the number of justices, so Congress could pack the court by enacting legislation to expand its size. Last week a pair of leftist law professors issued an “open letter” urging President Biden to “restrain MAGA justices” by applying their rulings as narrowly as possible. The day the court decided Biden v. Nebraska, striking down Mr. Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan, the president announced that he was undertaking legally questionable alternatives.

Justice Alito wonders if outright defiance may be in the offing for the first time since the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954): “If we’re viewed as illegitimate, then disregard of our decisions becomes more acceptable and more popular. So you can have a revival of the massive resistance that occurred in the South after Brown.”

It requires an inhuman amount of cynicism and delusion to suggest that subjecting the far-right Supreme Court to basic constitutional checks and balances could lead to societal collapse and total resegregation. (It’s actually darkly ironic that Alito chose that example, given how the court is working to erode every civil right it can by using the same anti-federalist argument favored by Jim Crow states during the Civil Rights era.)

The puff piece by the Federalist Society errand boys is absurdly long, and instead of bolstering their case for Alito as a great legal scholar with unimpeachable moral credentials, the length serves to further underscore what this PR blitz should make obvious: Samuel Alito is absolutely terrified.

No matter how sensitive to criticism he may be after nearly two decades of being coddled by DC’s zillion dollar conservative legal apparatus and provided endless deference by an institutionalist Beltway media, Alito would not be mounting this unprecedented PR offensive if he felt secure in his job.

It’s clear from the interview and his attempts to justify barbaric decisions that Alito is paying attention to Americans’ growing anger at the court. Deep down, despite his self-importance and hatred of being questioned, he knows that authoring the reversal of Roe v. Wade, voting to toss out student debt relief, and ending affirmative action were purely ideological decisions that have turned him into a public enemy. And more than anything else, he’s extremely paranoid about what other details about his ethical shortcomings might emerge.

A forceful Senate Judiciary Committee could use its subpoena power to dig deep into the vast corruption on the Supreme Court and turn the institution on its head, readying the public further for major reforms and convincing reticent lawmakers to prioritize it in campaigns. In the mean time, the pressure and revelations of an investigation could perhaps drastically change the far-right supermajority’s calculations.

And that’s exactly why such an investigation isn’t happening.

Alito really shouldn’t worry so much, because so long as Dick Durbin remains in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee, no conservative justice is in any danger of being inconvenienced, much less losing their position or prestige.

Terminally disinterested in wielding the power entrusted to him, Durbin has barely shown a pulse throughout this scandal, which now reaches back to April.

Durbin’s last four months have consisted of showing up on cable news to whine that John Roberts refuses to self-police the court, getting thoroughly insulted by increasingly emboldened lawyers for corrupt billionaires, and making lame excuses for not using subpoenas to investigate the court himself. Even Durbin’s supposed get-tough legislation is designed in part to compel the Supreme Court to write its own ethics rules.

The bill, the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, passed through the Judiciary Committee on an 11-10 party line vote on June 20th, earning Durbin a day or two of decent headlines. But it was an entirely Pyrrhic victory, because the bill has no chance of overcoming a GOP filibuster in the Senate much less even getting a vote in the House. It was pure optics from a controlled opposition, and now that Durbin is out with Covid, it’s unclear when it’ll even come up before the full Senate any time soon.

I’m sure it’s not a particularly fun time for Durbin right now, but everyday he’s away from the Senate is another day that he doesn’t have to answer questions about why he refuses to investigate the justices who are very publicly shaking with fear at the prospect of such an inquiry. Alito can do us all a favor and give it a rest.

Education:

Arizona: The nation’s first universal school privatization scam is working exactly as intended. The cost to taxpayers is skyrocketing through the roof, diverting money from public schools and sending it straight into the coffers of opportunistic private schools that are suddenly popping up around the state at a predictably rapid clip.

Many of them are teaching flawed religion-infused curriculum, and none of them are regulated or accountable to any standards whatsoever. And that’s how people like Erika Donalds, a Moms for Liberty nut and wife of Florida Rep. Bryon Daniels, are able to build a growing empire of Hillsdale College-inspired virtual schools with money that should be going to public schools that have been criminally underfunded for years.

Medicaid:

Bad news: Around 4 million Americans have been kicked off of Medicaid since states were permitted to begin redeterminations again in April. As we’ve continued to report, the vast majority of the unenrolled lost their benefits due to issues with their paperwork.

Good news: Some states have pursued stripping low-income people of their healthcare with such zeal that the federal government ordered six of them to knock it off, take a pause, and figure out how to make the unwinding process less barbaric. Yeah, this is a real temporary silver lining, but it’s something that activists have been requesting for months now.

Michigan: Some more good news, as beneficiaries in the Wolverine State who are up for redetermination and haven’t sent in their paperwork will once again be given more time to get it done.

The unwinding is a barbaric program that provides a perfect example of our demented priorities and blasé attitude toward suffering, but at least this is some modicum of empathy within the context of a system built to dehumanize.

California: Starting next year, California residents will no longer be subject to asset tests when applying for Medicaid.

While the ACA’s expansion turned annual income into the most discussed factor in Medicaid qualification, the harsh reality is that according to federal guidelines, applicants must also have almost nothing to their name in order to receive government health benefits. It’s a back door means test that keeps some struggling people from obtaining care until they lose their homes or drain their savings.

In 2021, as millions of Americans remained out of work and thus without health insurance, the Califnoria legislature voted to raise the maximum asset level from a mere $2000 to $130,000. Earlier this month, the feds approved the state’s request to eliminate the test entirely, a change that will go into effect next year. California is the first state to do this, though nine others and DC had already eliminated the test for parents in family coverage, to great results.

Voting Rights:

Ohio: If Republicans have one talent, it’s shrieking bigoted nonsense. If they have a second talent, it’s doing the bidding of big business and billionaires. And if they have a third talent, it’s being able to attack democracy from multiple angles at once.

In Ohio, all eyes are on the GOP’s desperate attempt to make future ballot initiatives impossible to pass, but that’s not the party’s only effort to thwart the popular will. State Sen. Theresa Gavarone proposed a bill last week that would strip funding from municipalities that enact ranked choice voting, which hasn’t even been brought to Ohio yet.

Garavone knows that with the GOP’s strong takeover of the state Supreme Court and gerrymandering back in style, ranked choice is the only threat to the electoral prospects of utterly unhinged reactionaries such as herself.

Housing

Illinois: An estimated 120,000 people in Illinois experienced homelessness for some or all of 2020, and on any given night, there around 4500 people living without shelter. New legislation signed Friday by Gov. JB Pritzker aims to take both numbers down to functional zero by 2025.

HB 2831 codifies an executive order issued by the governor in 2021 and will facilitate a massive coordinated effort by 17 state departments and agencies. The Illinois Interagency Task Force on Homelessness and the Community Advisory Council on Homelessness — the name is almost a parody of big government, and I love it for that — will have plenty of money to wage this war, as this year’s state budget includes $360 million for the initiative.

California: With the state’s housing prices continuing to soar and shortages unabated, Californians are going to get another chance to repeal the ancient preemption on local rent control in 2024.

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