“Roberts does have an underlying judicial philosophy that motivates him in many of these big cases; it just happens that this philosophy has rapidly fallen out of favor among many of his fellow conservatives.
I am referring to the philosophy of judicial deference or restraint, which, in a nutshell, is the idea that people should take their complaints to the ballot box, not to the courthouse.”
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“That deferential view is not as popular among conservatives today as it once was. But Roberts can still be seen carrying the Holmes/Bork torch.
During his 2005 Senate confirmation hearings, for instance, Roberts tried to put a positive spin on Kelo v. City of New London, a recently decided case that left many conservatives fuming, angry that the Court had shortchanged property rights in favor of a controversial eminent domain scheme. Roberts offered a different view. The Court’s ruling “leaves the ball in the court of the legislature,” he said, “and I think it’s reflective of what is often the case and people sometimes lose sight of, that this body [Congress] and legislative bodies in the States are protectors of people’s rights as well.””
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“the survival of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Roberts saved the law from destruction. Why did he do it? In their piece for The Washington Post, Vermeule and Mehta cite the Obamacare case as “an early, important example” of Roberts’ “dismaying trend of tactical decisions.” He upheld President Barack Obama’s signature law, in their view, in order to save the Court from scorching liberal criticism.
But Vermeule and Mehta’s take misses what actually happened in Roberts’ Obamacare ruling. Not only did Roberts’ borrow a page from the Holmes/Bork playbook, but he specifically invoked one of Holmes’ most notable statements about the proper role of the courts. “If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them,” Holmes wrote in 1920. “It’s my job.” Here is how Roberts put it in 2012: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
Whether or not you agree with the chief justice’s embrace of judicial deference, it would be a mistake to downplay this important facet of his thinking.”
“The Trump administration will pull virtually all of the US’s roughly 700 troops in Somalia out of the country just five days before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
The withdrawal, announced Friday by the Pentagon, ostensibly marks the latest attempt by President Donald Trump to scale back US presence overseas in what he’s described as costly and ineffective military operations across regions like the Middle East.
Acting defense secretary Christopher Miller announced in November that the US plans to reduce US troops from 4,500 to 2,500 in Afghanistan and from 3,000 to 2,500 in Iraq. But the strategy shift in Somalia appears to be something different.
Rather than a case of troops being brought home, many of the forces will be repositioned to neighboring Kenya, according to a Defense Department official, although it’s unclear so far what percentage of the Somali-based troops will be restationed there.
“As a result of this decision, some forces may be reassigned outside of East Africa,” the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday. “However, the remaining forces will be repositioned from Somalia into neighboring countries in order to allow cross-border operations by both US and partner forces.””
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“The US forces stationed in Somalia were largely tasked with counterterrorism missions, with a particular focus on fighting the presence of al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group. And US troops have also worked on training Somali forces to conduct raids and capture al-Shabaab leaders.
According to the Pentagon, the mission against al-Shabaab won’t end — instead, the troops once stationed in the country will “maintain pressure against violent extremist organizations operating in Somalia” from bases in Kenya and elsewhere.
The Pentagon also said the military will “retain the capability to conduct targeted counterterrorism operations in Somalia, and collect early warnings and indicators regarding threats to the homeland.”
How successful the US has been in Somalia at this mission isn’t exactly clear. And the US’s methods for accomplishing its work against al-Shabaab have been met with sharp criticism from watchdogs, who argue counterterrorism operations in East Africa have been conducted without a proper level of accountability.
One of the US’s primary tools against al-Shabaab has been drone strikes, which it has been conducting in Somalia since 2007. The frequency of those strikes have increased significantly during the Trump administration, with 47 strikes carried out in 2018 and 63 in 2019, according to the New York Times. All told, the Trump administration has carried out at least 192 drone strikes in Somalia, an analysis by New America found.
Under Trump’s tenure, the oversight guidelines for strikes in Somalia, some of which are meant to minimize civilian casualties, have also been loosened.”
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““Despite many years of sustained Somali, U.S., and international counterterrorism pressure, the terrorist threat in East Africa is not degraded: al-Shabaab retains freedom of movement in many parts of southern Somalia and has demonstrated an ability and intent to attack outside of the country, including targeting U.S. interests,” the report states.
And that ability has been on display of late. Recently, a CIA contractor was killed in action in Somalia, and al-Shabaab staged a January attack on a US facility in Kenya that resulted in the death of a US solider, two contractors, and the destruction of expensive military equipment — including a US surveillance craft.
Particularly in light of the January attack, US military officials in East Africa reportedly began to push for greater flexibility to launch airstrikes from Kenya, and Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta also reportedly asked Trump for greater aid with countering al-Shabaab earlier this year. The troop redeployment would appear to accomplish both these aims.
And indeed, while US training of Somali security forces is expected to end, airstrikes against militants in Somalia will be continuing, since the air bases housing the US drones that carry out strikes in Somalia are currently based outside the country.”
“Thirty-one days into the new Congress and weeks after the Georgia Senate runoffs gave them 50 seats, Democrats now officially control the functioning of the Senate.
It took weeks of negotiation between party leaders to decide how Democrats and Republicans would share power and resources in the evenly divided Senate, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell stonewalled the process, trying to extract promises from Democrats about retaining the filibuster. That obstruction left Republicans chairing committees, despite the seating of a 50-50 Senate, in which Democrats, through Vice President Kamala Harris, hold the tie-breaking vote. But on Wednesday, the Senate finally passed an organizing resolution largely sharing power. The resolution was adopted by unanimous consent.”
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“The belated passage of the organizing resolution eliminates the trouble Democrats ran into trying to confirm President Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees without technically being seated as the majority. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, incoming Chair Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) had to request that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) schedule a hearing for Biden’s attorney general nominee, because Graham still held the gavel. Graham rejected the request, underscoring the stakes of the hold-up over the organizing resolution.”
“the EU signed off on a law that will give the bloc the power to ban travel and freeze assets of individuals and entities involved or associated with violating human rights, including genocide, slavery, extrajudicial arrests and killings, gender-based violence, human trafficking, and other abuses that are “widespread, systematic or are otherwise of serious concern.”
The EU’s adoption of this law is a big deal, both symbolically and practically. One of the European Union’s foundational principles is a commitment to human rights, democracy, and rule of law. But it has sometimes fallen short. This new tool will put some heft behind those commitments.
All 27 EU member states agreed — including some of the democratic-backsliding countries in the bloc like Hungary, which previously held up attempts to pass this kind of EU-wide law.
Practically, this gives the EU a lot more flexibility in whom and what it can target for rights violations. Previously, the EU was mostly limited to applying sanctions in country-specific situations, like a conflict, as in Syria, or for certain issues like terrorism or cyberattacks.
Since this law applies to all EU member states, it cuts violators off from a lot of travel — including nice vacation destinations on, say, the French Riviera — and from accessing and locating assets.”
“President Donald Trump..announced a US-brokered deal between Morocco and Israel to normalize relations — the fourth such agreement between Israel and an Arab state since August.
To get the pact done, Trump overturned decades of US policy by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a large piece of sparsely populated territory in northwest Africa. Morocco claimed it in 1957, moved to annex all of it in 1979, and has been fighting for control of it against the territory’s Indigenous Sahrawi people ever since.
A 16-year insurgency ended in 1991 with a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, and the UN pledged to help organize an independence referendum in Western Sahara down the line. That referendum has still not happened, and the chance it ever will is even less likely now that the US has become the first Western nation to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over the territory.”
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“Israel gets another Arab nation to openly engage with it, slowly ending its regional isolation (though Morocco and Israel have engaged in secret talks for decades). And Morocco, after many years of asking for it, has its long-desired territorial claim recognized by the United States.”
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“The administration also announced it will be sending economic aid to both Morocco and Western Sahara as part of the agreement, and flights will go back and forth from Morocco to Israel.”
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“While the Morocco-Western Sahara conflict is an issue of its own, Thursday’s deal really should be viewed as part of the administration’s larger diplomatic effort to get Arab nations to establish formal, public ties with Israel.
Indeed, the announcement follows Trump administration-brokered deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates in August, Bahrain in September, and Sudan in October. Before those pacts, the last peace agreement Israel struck with an Arab country was with Jordan in 1994 (it had signed one with Egypt in 1979).
Even if Biden wanted to reverse those decisions — and for now there’s no evidence that he does — Trump’s announcements would make it harder for him to do so. Which means Trump will likely solidify his legacy as the president who broke the logjam on Israeli recognition, but it remains to be seen if it leads to any real, tangible gains in the Middle East.”
“The Supreme Court’s 8-0 decision in Tanzin v. Tanvir on Thursday is almost certainly correct as a matter of law. Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion was unanimous (Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the Court too late to hear this case, did not participate), and it relies on a fairly straightforward reading of a federal religious liberty law.
Tanzin holds that federal officials may be personally liable if they violate an individual’s religious rights — a ruling that could benefit many religious liberty plaintiffs with genuinely heartbreaking claims against government officials, including the plaintiffs in this case. But it also potentially hands a new weapon to conservative culture warriors who seek broad exemptions from federal law.”
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“The plaintiffs are Muslims who claim that FBI agencies placed them on the no-fly list in retaliation for the plaintiffs’ refusal to act as informants against other members of their Muslim communities. One of these plaintiffs, Muhammad Tanvir, alleged that he was unable to see his ailing mother in Pakistan, and that he had to quit his job as a long-haul trucker because he could no longer fly home after a one-way delivery.
The Court’s decision in Tanzin means that these Muslim plaintiffs will be allowed to seek money damages from the FBI agents who allegedly violated their religious rights — although it is possible that the agents will escape liability because of a doctrine known as “qualified immunity.””
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“In recent years, the Court’s conservative majority has also appeared very eager to expand the rights of religious conservatives to sue government officials, and some of the Court’s recent decisions suggest that such officials violate the law if they commit fairly minor slights against certain people of faith.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), for example, the Court scolded a state civil rights commissioner who made the objectively true statement that “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history.”
So one implication of Tanzin is that religious conservatives may now be able to seek money damages from federal officials for violations that, until recently, the courts would have viewed as entirely benign.
The policy implications of Tanzin, in other words, are likely to spark ambivalence among liberals and conservatives alike. Outside of the religious liberty context, conservative judges have generally been hostile to efforts to make law enforcement officers personally liable for their illegal actions. Liberals, meanwhile, will undoubtedly have sympathy for the Tanzin plaintiffs. But the Court’s decision is also likely to empower religious conservatives who seek exemptions from anti-discrimination laws and other policies favored by liberals.”
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“The good news is that FBI agents and other law enforcement officers are likely to think twice before committing violations similar to the ones alleged by the Tanzin plaintiffs. But government officials may become more cautious about enforcing civil rights and other laws against religious objectors — because those officials could potentially pay a personal price if they do so.”
“these two international crises highlight a major challenge Biden will face over the next four years, just as other presidents before him did: how to support democratic movements in places where the US doesn’t have actually much leverage, and where doing so could end up hurting the very movements the US wants to support.
In Myanmar, the US has few options to push the ruling generals to reverse course, especially since it provides almost no financial assistance to the government. As for Russia, any American effort to bolster democracy in and around it is viewed as a threat to be stamped out and delegitimized. Last October, shortly after the Kremlin poisoned and nearly killed Navalny, Putin’s regime claimed the dissident worked with the CIA.
American leaders with high hopes of ushering in a more democratic future inevitably run into the harsh reality of their limitations and the opposing forces working against them. “Every administration for the last 30 years has struggled with this,” said Erin Snider, an expert on US democracy promotion at Texas A&M University.
Myanmar and Russia, then, show the Biden administration is already in the thick of this dilemma.”
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“Biden is also looking into the possibility of placing economic sanctions on Myanmar in the coming weeks. But while that would potentially give the US additional leverage over the military generals ruling the country, it could backfire.
That’s because some experts have warned that doing so could end up increasing authoritarian China’s already immense economic influence in Myanmar while pushing out democratic countries like South Korea and Japan, which have worked to develop economic and military ties to the country and break China’s “stranglehold” there.
And though China has had a complicated relationship with Myanmar’s military regime, it’s unlikely closer ties between the two countries will bode well for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement — or for the Biden administration’s efforts to counter China’s growing influence in the region.”
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“it’s not clear the US actually has many ways of successfully pushing Russia to change. The Kremlin rejects any efforts at democratization in Russia and its surroundings, while pro-democracy groups like Navalny’s get stamped out the second they become overly threatening. The best way to punish Russia would be to get European nations to curb ties with Moscow, but that’s always proven hard for any US administration to do.
No one expects Biden, or any US administration, to depose autocrats and usher in full-blown democracies over his four or even eight years. At most, the US can move the needle a little bit so that, over time, a country liberalizes so organic democracy movements can grow. But even incremental progress requires trade-offs, ones that require the president and his team to assess how much they value a foreign nation’s democratic leanings against everything else.”