v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

The Cold Civil War

From Michele Goldberg at the NYT:

These days, it’s barely remarkable when Republicans issue what sound like threats against those who’d dare curtail their private arsenals. “I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president — try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place,” Randy Fine, a state representative in Florida, tweeted on Wednesday.

It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.

Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.

Fine’s words echoed Donald Trump’s during the 2016 election, when he said that “Second Amendment people” might be able to stop a President Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court justices. What was once a barely concealed insinuation of violence has morphed, especially since Jan. 6, into an even more forthright menace. As ProPublica has reported, dozens of members of the Oath Keepers militia were arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, but that hasn’t stopped the organization from “evolving into a force within the Republican Party.”

In Shasta County, a conservative part of rural Northern California, a militia-aligned faction has secured a majority on the board of supervisors, in what members of the movement see as a blueprint that can be deployed nationally. Throughout the country, reported The New York Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with Democrats on public safety is madness.

The Slave Power

From The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie  :

You’ve probably guessed by now that this is not an idle history lesson. I am thinking about “the slave power” because I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.

Two weeks ago, a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. Three days ago, a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Although there has been, in the wake of both atrocities, the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the past year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.

The filibuster, however, is only one part of the larger problem of the capture of America’s political institutions by an unrepresentative minority whose outright refusal to compromise is pushing the entire system to a breaking point.

Large majorities of Americans favor universal background checks, bans on “assault-style” weapons, bans on high-capacity magazines and “red flag” laws that would prevent people who might harm themselves or others from purchasing guns.

But the American political system was not designed to directly represent national majorities. To the extent that it does, it’s via the House of Representatives. The Senate, of course, represents the states. And in the Senate (much to the chagrin of many of the framers), population doesn’t matter — each state gets equal say. Fifty-one lawmakers representing a minority of voters can block 49 lawmakers representing a majority of them (and that’s before, again, we get to the filibuster).

Add the polarization of voters by geography — a rural and exurban Republican Party against an urban and suburban Democratic Party — and the picture goes from bad to perverse. Not only can Republicans, who tend to represent the most sparsely populated states, win a majority of the Senate with far less than a majority of votes nationally, but by using the filibuster, a small number of Republican senators representing an even smaller faction of voters can kill legislation supported by most voters and most members of Congress.

The Senate might have been counter-majoritarian by design, but there is a difference between a system that tempers majorities and one that stymies them from any action at all. We have the latter, and like Congress under the failed Articles of Confederation, it makes a mockery of what James Madison called the “republican principle,” which is supposed to enable a majority of the people to defeat the “sinister views” of a minority faction by “regular vote.”

Rather than suppress the “mischiefs of faction,” our system empowers them. Few Americans want the most permissive gun laws on offer. But those who do have captured the Republican Party and used its institutional advantages to both stop gun control and elevate an expansive and idiosyncratic view of gun rights to the level of constitutional law.

The result is a country so saturated in guns that there’s no real hope of going back to the status quo ante. If anything, American gun laws are poised to get even more permissive. If the Supreme Court rules as expected in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it will strike down a law that requires a license for carrying a concealed firearm.

Popebama doing Shedding Waste

From Pasadena

I was in Pasadena this last week for work and got a chance to photograph parts of Pasadena and The Langham Hotel:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Pasadena

Minority Rule

From Vox, how the Supreme Court plays mind games:

There have only been three justices in American history who were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and who were confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half the country. All three of them sit on the Supreme Court right now, and all three were appointed by Donald Trump.

Indeed, if not for anti-democratic institutions such as the Senate and the Electoral College, it’s likely that Democrats would control a majority of the seats on the Supreme Court, and a decision overruling Roe would not be on the table.

So it is ironic — for that reason, and others — that Alito’s draft opinion overruling Roe leans heavily on appeals to democracy. Quoting from an opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Alito writes that “the permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”

If Alito truly wants to put the question of whether pregnant individuals have a right to terminate that pregnancy up to a free and fair democratic process, polling indicates that liberals could probably win that fight on a national level.

Murdochs and Money

Eric Alterman writes:

…this three-part, multimedia deep dive from Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, also in the Times back in 2019: here, here, and here (with a cheat sheet here). That one illustrated the global machinations of the Murdoch family. It demonstrated the manner in which its members have poisoned political discourse in countless countries simultaneously, increasing racism, promoting violence, destroying any hopes for saving the planet, and worsening life for the most vulnerable people everywhere, purely because it makes the Murdochs more and more money, when they already have more money than any group of people their size could spend in a dozen lifetimes. These pieces are in some ways more remarkable than the Tucker Carlson series because of the (mostly realized) ambition of their reach. These articles should most definitely be treated as prerequisites for the Carlson pieces, the way English 101 is a prerequisite for English 10

Corporations and Profit

From Mother Jones:

Private equity billionaires are looting the country, leaving everyday Americans to clean up the mess—and fight for the scraps….

For a long time, corporations worked in the plain way that you’d imagine they should work: They created a product or provided a service, and if they did a good job of it, they turned a profit. ­Houdaille, for example, grew to be a valuable company by making first-rate car parts. Simple enough.

But a confluence of factors in the 1970s flipped that model on its head. Suddenly, the value of a business was measured less by how well it served its customers, and far more by the profits it reaped for its investors. University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman helped propel this change with a 1970 manifesto in the New York Times. Corporations, he wrote, need not worry about “providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else.” They were accountable to the wallets of their shareholders: nothing more, nothing less. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profit,” Friedman added….

Soon, businesses came to be viewed less as productive enterprises and more as bundles of assets to be bought, sold, and endlessly manipulated for financial gain. Rather than doing the hard work of investing in new value—innovative products or fresh approaches to societal problems—financiers began focusing on ­extracting existing value, again, and again, and again.

Mask Up Now

From The Lancet:

Individualistic approaches to health, exemplified by the CDC's May 2021 mask guidance, ignore the impacts on health inequities, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic and continue to hinder vaccination access . Many are essential workers with high exposure risks and limited workplace protections, who face vaccination barriers due to a lack of sick leave and existing caretaking responsibilities. These inequities compound vulnerabilities for those at high risk for infection and severe outcomes, including older and disabled or chronically-ill adults and children, and institutionalized populations. Overlooked inequities yield disproportionate COVID-19 disease, disability, and death in oppressed and excluded communities—even where there is overall disease reduction. Yet, such groups have often been omitted from discussions of public health policy, with their lives treated as expendable.

Public health protection is inextricably linked with human rights promotion. The right to health has provided normative clarity in public health policy and legal accountability for public health outcomes, focusing on the need to prevent disease at the population level to ensure the highest attainable standard of health for all. In promoting individual rights to protect public health, the pandemic has shown the need for a response that prioritizes community trust and cooperative engagement. The CDC's decision to prioritize individual autonomy over public health ignores disease vulnerability, not only for at-risk individuals but the community.

Ongoing debates about CDC's mask guidance raise foundational questions about the meaning, purpose, and role of public health. Even as public health often seeks to project itself as “apolitical”, moral values permeate public health practice. Purportedly apolitical public health decisions, manifested in policy decisions that rationalize economic “reopening”, employ a cost-benefit analysis that prioritizes some lives over others and makes loss of life, sickness, and isolation seem acceptable, obscuring the reality that morbidity and mortality could be greatly decreased with appropriate structural mitigation.The current US approach continues to undermine the fundamental notion that all people are equal in dignity and rights. When the CDC Director speaks of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”

, this implicitly assumes that those who become ill are responsible for their own suffering and that their deaths are acceptable—because they could have been vaccinated. These moral deficiencies reflect a larger neglect of collective responsibility, equity, and human rights in US public health policy. CDC guidance must consider the moral foundations of public health, providing a normative framework to support public health policy and practice.

Former Air Force Base in Aguadilla

Ramey Airforce Base-wall art and structures:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Ramey Air Force Base