DL Open Thread: Friday, May 24, 2024
Colleges To Pay Athletes. As if they weren’t already:
In a joint statement Thursday night, the NCAA and its conferences announced that they had agreed to the settlement terms. And no matter how high the damages are, the most far-reaching component is a new revenue-sharing model, which would pay athletes a cut of money their schools generate from broadcast rights deals, ticket sales and sponsorships, among other streams.
Anyone who believed in the ‘last notions of amateurism’ was being delusional.
Supreme Court Legalizes Racial Gerrymandering. A bad bad decision with far-reaching consequences. Yep, 6-3:
Rather than worrying states will use the close relationship of partisan lean and racial makeup to get away with racial gerrymanders, Alito (who wrote the majority opinion) instead frets that challengers — usually voting rights groups and voters themselves — will successfully knock down partisan gerrymanders in federal court under that cover.
In her dissent, Kagan hammered Alito for appointing himself as an additional attorney to help South Carolina’s case.
“Such micro-management of a plaintiff ’s case is elsewhere unheard of in constitutional litigation,” she wrote.
That micromanagement carried into his assessment of the facts, she wrote, leading him to greenlight those that favored the state’s argument and to dismiss those that didn’t.
“This Court is not supposed to be so fearful of telling discriminators, including States, to stop discriminating,” she added.
She ended her dissent with a look to the future — where states simply have to raise the “possibility” that they drew their gerrymanders with criteria other than race in mind to get off scot-free.
I know you don’t want to read another article about what this radical Supreme Court has inflicted, but at least read this one:
Two years ago, Americans enjoyed a fundamental right to an abortion. With that right since demolished, last month during oral arguments in a case involving an Idaho abortion ban, several justices contemplated whether states can deprive women not just of elective abortions, but ones necessary to spare their uteruses, kidneys, and even their lives. It was a stunning and rapid reversal of fortune for women in this country—and one that cannot be squared with a healthy democracy.
“There’s an exceptionalism in terms of democracy, women, [and the] law in these reproductive cases,” says Georgetown Law professor Michele Goodwin, who argues the case, along with the 2022 Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, ignores “the constitutional citizenship and personhood of women.”
In the decision he wrote that ended the right to an abortion, Justice Samuel Alito placed the state’s interest in protecting an embryo or fetus over a pregnant person’s bodily autonomy. Now, in Moyle v. United States, Idaho asks the justices to place the same state interest over the federal government’s interest in ensuring that everyone receives emergency medical care. At issue is whether the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), an almost 40-year-old law mandating hospitals that receive Medicare funding provide stabilizing treatment in emergencies, preempts Idaho’s abortion ban, which forbids abortion except to save the life of the mother. Put simply, does a state’s right to ban abortion override the federal government’s interest in ensuring women’s safety?
It carves pregnant people out of medical protections guaranteed to everyone else, while more broadly allowing a state to inflict violence—up to and including death—upon its citizens. It assigns more dignity to states than to their citizens. And yet, if oral arguments are any indication, it seemed a majority of the justices were ready to usher in such a future.
This excerpt barely scratches the surface. Read about presidential immunity, then read about how the Rethug judges intend to ‘handcuff the administrative state’ on environmental matters. In other words, read it.
ARPA Funds To Attract Sports Tourism To Delaware? Seems like a stretch to me:
New Castle County is looking to be more of a competitor for sports-related tourism.
Wednesday, $100,000 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds were ceremonially invested into the Greater Wilmington Convention and Visitors Bureau to reach out to sports tournament planners and the families that participate in such events.
Greater Wilmington Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Jen Boes said their marketing program would include a special video presentation showcasing Delaware’s existing facilities as well as potential: “also the wonderful things people can do when they’re not on the field… dining out, visiting our attractions, going down to the riverfront, things like that – the whole package.”
However worthy this project might be, why should recovery funds be used to do a job generally undertaken by a Chamber of Commerce or something?
State Retirees’ Bills Pass. The applicable sentence:
After the bills’ passage, Gov. John Carney’s office did not have comment on the measures.
Not looking good for my press credential…
What do you want to talk about?
There are no quick fixes. The way to end the MAGA Supreme Court is to vote Democratic for a generation. Even if you have to hold your nose. Every year, not just every four years. If you sit out an election, or vote third party, the right will take the opportunity to add more MAGA justices.
I dunno, Congress could impeach (at least) Alito and Thomas and replace them. Congress could expand the court. Congress could impose term limits (all federal judges are lifetime appointments, but justices could rotate down to the Circuit Courts). When the Court has been captured by such openly partisan and corrupt justices, when Mitch McConnel blatantly stole a seat from an Obama appointee, the waiting game seems a little naive and does not seem a proportional response. Of course to do any of this we need to elect more bravely democratic and progressive legislators and fewer Kristin Sinemas and Joe Manchins.
Gotta look at that $100K to promote sports tourism in a different context. Say you spent it on education, it might cover costs for 5 students for a year. Say you spent it on housing the homeless — maybe 10 people get shelter for a year. Would it be enough to clean a dirty stream, to create a park? In other words, a drop in the bucket. If 100 grand won’t make a dent in solving a real problem, why the hell not throw it away to address an imagined need?
To be fair, Roe was always an end run around the fundamental question that the court has refused to answer, which is: what constitutes personhood? A clear definition of personhood would have answers these questions years ago and is now needed more than ever in an era of genetic engineering/human-machine interface, and AI. As regrettable as the outcome was, roe was built on the same shakey ground as Plessy and we need a Brown to settle the matter
“We need a Brown to settle the matter (of personhood)” might no longer be valid. In the South Carolina redistricting case, Clarence Thomas suggested that the Brown decision was an example of judicial overreach.
If Congress were to pass a law defining personhood, this Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional if the definition did not include fetuses.
The question, to use different terminology, is about two things: 1) at what point in gestation do lawful rights begin and 2) at what, if any, point do the rights of the fetus outweigh the rights of the mother carrying it?
These questions should not be decided by the courts but by the elected representatives of the people, who have avoided that responsibility for decades. Their refusal to settle such questions is what brought the issue to the courts in the first place, but it doesn’t mean we should allow a politicized legal system to settle such fundamental issues.