Erwin Chemerinsky’s Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights is an important and upsetting read. Chemerinsky, a constitutional lawyer and professor, walks us through decades of shockingly bad sometimes overtly racist rulings made by the Supreme Court that have served to help create our current police state.
Supreme Court
Democrats Should Pack the Supreme Court
The verdict for this episode is: I now support packing the Supreme Court.
In this episode, I discuss the historical support for court packing, and I propose a constitutional amendment.
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We Will See Trump’s Taxes
The idea that we will see Trump’s taxes is a prediction. The rest of this post will explain why I believe we will see Trump’s taxes relatively soon.
Reviewing The Education of Brett Kavanaugh
Robin Progrebin and Kate Kelly’s The Education of Brett Kavanaugh wants to be an investigative account of the confirmation process that landed Brett Kavanaugh (Kavanaugh) on the Supreme Court. If you followed the process, especially the parts of it involving Dr. Christine Blacey Ford’s (Ford) allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while they were in high school, the book won’t provide a lot of new insight. The books, epilogue, though, leaves readers with the book’s most important point.
Reviewing The new Jim Crow
Michele Alexander’s The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness is one of the most important books I have read in a long time. Alexander demonstrates in revolting clarity how America has used the facially-neutral war on drugs as the current way of controlling and punishing black people, especially black men.
News Updates for July 8,2019
This version of news updates has stories on adding a citizenship question to the census, pay for the women’s soccer team, the legality of the Affordable Care Act, and Iran enriching uranium.
Things to Know About Recent Abortion Bills
This post covers things you may want to know about the recent assault on a woman’s right to control her body.
This post has two sections, things you may want to know about the different state laws and things you may want to know about the legal issues.
National Emergencies Explained
Now that Trump has declared a national emergency at the border with Mexico, I thought we should discuss national emergencies. I will briefly describe the National Emergencies Act and its key provisions.
Consequences for Politicising our Lives
I need to make one thing clear: no one’s health insurance is in immediate jeopardy. Still, the Affordable Care Act is now facing its biggest threat. The possibility that 20 million insured Americans will lose their coverage is now real. There is a chance those with preexisting conditions will no longer have the opportunity to purchase coverage. Children under the age of 26 currently getting insurance from their parents’s policy could soon be uninsured.
America needs National Voting Standards
I’m writing this about an hour after we learned three Florida races are headed for recounts and the same may happen in the contest for Georgia’s governor. All of this is happening against the backdrop of a midterm that saw the highest voter turnout of any midterm election since 1970–in spite of the GOPS voter suppression efforts.
The last five days have reminded us of the massive problems with our election system and the ways politicians game that system for their advantage. Below are several ideas that would dramatically improve the fairness of our elections. If enacted, they would go a long way to guarantee that every American can vote and trust their vote will be counted. That means if we don’t demand these changes, politicians will never consider them.