“The Supreme Court ruled..that if a police officer fails to inform you of your right to remain silent and avoid self-incrimination when you’re suspected of a crime, you can’t sue under federal law as a violation of your civil rights.
To be clear, the Court isn’t overturning Miranda v. Arizona, the 1966 Supreme Court ruling that determined that it’s a violation of a suspect’s Fifth Amendment rights for police to interrogate him or her about a crime without informing them they have the right to remain silent and the right to request an attorney. But what the Court ruled today is that if and when this right is violated, people can’t turn to Section 1983 of the U.S. code and file a civil action lawsuit against the police officer or law enforcement agency and seek redress or damages.”
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“Essentially, Alito’s opinion says that the purpose of Miranda is to serve as a safeguard against compelled self-incrimination by police or prosecutors. It was not intended to establish that it was inherently a Fifth Amendment violation if somebody voluntarily confesses or self-incriminates himself or herself prior to or absent of a Miranda warning.”
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“Alito concludes that because a violation of Miranda is not automatically a violation of the Fifth Amendment, there is no justification to permit a civil rights lawsuit. The opinion reverses a judgment in Tekoh’s favor and remands it back to the lower courts to revisit.
The dissent is written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan observes the obvious in her dissent, that this ruling will make it harder for defendants to pursue legal remedies when their rights are violated”
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“the Supreme Court recognizes that these constitutional rights exist, but by shielding officers from liability for violating these rights, the Court undermines the necessary tools to make sure police take them seriously.”
“Sri Lanka’s economy is in free fall. The country doesn’t have enough money to buy essentials: food, medicine, and especially fuel. Buses can’t run, schools can’t open. The economic crisis was years in the making because of mismanagement, but terror attacks in 2019, and later the Covid-19 pandemic, which shriveled Sri Lanka’s tourist economy, pushed it to the brink.
But the domestic political turmoil unfolding in Sri Lanka also links back to the instability across the globe, including the war in Ukraine and all of its consequences.”
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“I tend to believe in markets, but I will say that markets for basic necessities like food, these are not markets you want to operate according to cold economic logic. The market for food is not a market where you want to wind up at the end of the sale with no available supply. We can’t have that because we need to have buffers in the system precisely because of events like the ones we’ve seen. And so if that’s physical grain reserves, [or] if it’s governments willing to use what they call virtual reserves, which are basically governments, in a coordinated fashion, intervening in markets to short these futures contracts to drive prices back down.
There are things that can be done. It’s just going to take an investment of resources and, I think, broader awareness of the enlightened self-interest that it does not make the United States any safer and more prosperous to exist in the world where many of our trading partners and many of our strategic partners around the world are facing instability because they can’t feed their populations.”
“Kavanaugh stressed, the constitutional problem with New York’s licensing scheme for carrying handguns in public was that “it grants open-ended discretion to licensing officials and authorizes licenses only for those applicants who can show some special need apart from self-defense.” By contrast, “43 States employ objective shall-issue licensing regimes. Those shall-issue regimes may require a license applicant to undergo fingerprinting, a background check, a mental health records check, and training in firearms handling and in laws regarding the use of force, among other possible requirements.” Today’s decision by the Court, Kavanaugh emphasized, did not touch any of that in any of those 43 states. “Shall-issue licensing regimes are constitutionally permissible, subject of course to an as-applied challenge if a shall-issue licensing regime does not operate in that manner in practice.”
Kavanaugh’s second point was drawn straight from the Heller language that I quoted above. “Properly interpreted,” Kavanaugh wrote, invoking Scalia, “the Second Amendment allows a ‘variety’ of gun regulations.”
Why would Kavanaugh write such a concurrence if he also fully joined Thomas’ majority opinion? One possible reason is that Kavanaugh is looking ahead to future cases that will inevitably arise in the lower courts as legal challenges are levied against other gun control laws. Kavanaugh, joined by Roberts, may be signaling to the lower courts that, in his view, many such gun control regulations are presumptively constitutional, and lower court judges should therefore act accordingly. At the very least, many lawyers in future Second Amendment cases will be grappling with Kavanaugh’s concurrence.”
“The preliminary results of St. Paul, Minnesota’s, strictest-in-the-nation rent control law have not been good. Developers have fled, while applications for new building permits and property values have both collapsed. Now, a pair of landlords are suing the city, claiming the law is unconstitutional.”
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“The ordinance, written by local activists and passed by voters in November 2021, capped rent increases in the city at 3 percent per year, with none of the typical allowances or exemptions for inflation, vacant units, and new construction.
The policy is far stricter than basically every other rent control law in the country. Oregon’s 2019 state rent control law, for instance, allows for property owners to raise rents by 7 percent plus inflation and exempts buildings less than 15 years old from these price caps.
While the St. Paul ordinance did allow landlords to obtain exemptions to that 3 percent cap if it threatens their ability to earn a “reasonable return” on their investment, what would count as a reasonable return and how to secure an exemption were left up to the city to hash out. St. Paul came out with proposed rules for implementing the ordinance, including the exemption process, in early April 2022. These were finalized later that month, and everything went into effect on May 1. The final rules allow landlords to “self-certify” exemptions if they’re trying to raise the rent by no more than 8 percent, which involves filling out a short form and submitting it to the city.
Landlords are also permitted to raise the rent up to 15 percent. Doing so requires vetting from city staff and the completion of a 22-page worksheet that asks the applicant to provide exhaustive detail about changes in their expenses that might justify a rent increase. Because all exemptions can be appealed and subjected to a city audit, even landlords who can self-certify increases of up to 8 percent are encouraged (but not required) to fill out that 22-page worksheet as well.
It’s a daunting prospect for many of St. Paul’s smaller landlords.”
“the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education is getting a radical overhaul that will gut critical due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona touted the new proposals as necessary revisions to Trump-era rules that reasserted the need for colleges and universities to treat both parties to a sexual misconduct dispute fairly and equally. The Biden administration has apparently embraced the idea—one promoted by many progressive victims’ advocacy groups—that the rules propagated by previous Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made it too difficult to file sexual misconduct claims; Cardona’s proposals would substantially revert Title IX compliance to the Obama-era standards, under which hundreds of students allege that they were wrongfully expelled from college following adjudication procedures that were manifestly unfair.”
“The inconvenient truth behind all this fraud and waste is that these government programs never should have been designed as they were. For example, while the federal government justifiably boosted state unemployment benefits at the beginning of the pandemic, it was irresponsible to enhance the benefits by $600 a week. As a result, 76 percent of the individuals who received such benefits were making more by not working than by working. It was also irresponsible to extend the program long after the economy reopened and resumed growing.
The same is true of the overly generous three rounds of $1,200, $600, and $1,400 individual payments paid to people who either already received the enhanced unemployment benefits or who never lost their jobs. Most recipients of these funds didn’t need them. In fact, only 15 percent of people who received the first round of checks said they had spent it or planned to spend it. And there were other benefits on top of these checks.”
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“This non-fraudulent spending is now helping to fuel inflation.
Then, you have the money dispensed to corporations. In one way or another, that spending made up a huge share of the COVID-19 relief. Indeed, whether through the airline bailouts or the Payroll Protection Program, shareholders collected trillions of dollars in government handouts they didn’t need. Most of the PPP funding, for example, went to companies whose workers were never at risk of losing their jobs since they were well-suited to work from home.”
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“billions of dollars went to state and local governments, including for schools that stayed closed, even though many of these governments’ revenue growth equaled or exceeded pre-pandemic levels.
Of course there was some fraud, but the malfeasance happened only because the programs were created in the first place and designed to go to everyone regardless of need. This reckless “design” is the true scandal.”
“In early April, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott unveiled a controversial plan to send buses full of undocumented immigrants to Washington, D.C. The policy, Abbott said, would “help local officials whose communities are being overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants.”
But it turns out those communities might be stuck footing the hefty bill for Abbott’s busing scheme. According to state records obtained by Dallas–Fort Worth’s NBC 5, bussing costs came out to over $1.6 million in April and May. With 1,154 migrants transported during that period, the per-rider cost was roughly $1,400.
That’s far more expensive than a commercial bus or train ticket would’ve cost—a one-way journey from El Paso, Texas, to Washington, D.C., runs somewhere between $200 and $300 as of this article’s writing. It’s also more expensive than a first-class plane ticket from a border town to Washington, which NBC 5 reported ranged between $800 and $900. And it’s more than the public spends on average to transport a student to school for an entire school year.
NBC 5 notes that costs are so high in part because the state has hired security guards to staff each bus.”
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“Costs are further inflated by the fact that buses drive back to Texas from Washington empty, having dropped off their passengers. Texas, however, gets billed for all total mileage.”
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“Abbott’s busing plan is by no mean his only expensive anti-immigrant endeavor. He vowed last year to build a wall along his state’s border with Mexico, initially transferring $250 million in state revenues to the project as a “down payment.” A donation page for the wall has collected $55,322,273 as of May 27—unlikely to make a significant dent, given that a section of former President Donald Trump’s border wall in Texas came out to $27 million a mile. Abbott’s border-securing mission, Operation Lone Star, costs taxpayers over $2.5 million per week. That effort also left hundreds of migrants in pretrial detention for weeks or months over misdemeanor trespassing charges”
“Somehow, Germany, a country where the government is firmly committed to “green” energy, is preparing to fire up coal-burning power plants. The move is even more remarkable given that officials stubbornly refuse to restart mothballed nuclear facilities, or even reconsider the timeline for retiring those that remain online. It’s an astonishing situation for a country that very recently boasted that it would soon satisfy all its energy needs with sunshine and cool summer breezes.”
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“Germany’s problems predate the war in Ukraine and are closely linked to the goals the country’s political class made about their energy future in the absence of a realistic plan for getting there. In 2011, after an earthquake and tsunami triggered a disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the German government recommitted itself to closing all of its nuclear plants and getting its electricity from solar and wind. The decision was motivated by public fears of nuclear power, but also by loud insistence that the energy source had no place in a sustainable future.”
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“But “nuclear power is very close to the same shade of green as that of most renewables” when you compare mining and manufacturing inputs to each approach, energy expert Gail H. Marcus wrote for Physics World in 2017. And nuclear is reliable—the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow, which means electricity produced by those sources ebbs and flows. That’s a big problem for electrical grids that require steady supplies of energy.
“Large amounts of intermittent electricity create huge swings in supply which the grid has to be able to cope with,” Bloomberg reported in January 2021.”
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“Germany’s plight is disturbing testimony of where you can end up if you commit yourself to a vision of a “green” future that has no place in it for the most reliable source of clean-ish electricity. By contrast, neighboring France plans to build as many as 14 new nuclear reactors because of, not despite, its environmental goals. That attitude reflects energy analyst Marcus’s assessment and is shared by the inter-governmental International Energy Agency (IEA). “Long-term operation of the existing nuclear fleet and a near-doubling of the annual rate of capacity additions are required” to meet clean-energy goals by 2050, the organization specifies.
Visons of a cleaner future based on technologies that are more efficient and less polluting are praiseworthy and shared by just about everybody. But to get from here to there requires planning and realistic decisions. Unfortunately for the German people, most of their political leaders relied on strongly held wishes and pixie dust to bring a green utopia and are instead delivering literal lumps of coal.”
“There’s only so much that schools can do to defend against a determined individual with access to guns. Militarizing public schools doesn’t foster a welcoming learning environment, nor is it particularly cost-effective for taxpayers.
“Installing bulletproof glass in all the windows — stuff like this is hideously expensive and not sensible. There’s only so far you can go to harden a public facility,” said Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.
But a simple security upgrade could have made it harder for the shooter to enter the school: ensuring that the doors were locked. There were three exterior doors in the west building where the shooting took place, and all three had been left unlocked, according to the report. The door to one of the classrooms where the shooter took his victims was also known to have a faulty lock, but no one had created a work order to repair it. School staff also frequently propped doors open, especially for substitute teachers who didn’t have their own keys.”
“The bill would repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which previously defined marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman, and it would guarantee recognition of same-sex marriages and interracial marriages under federal law. House Democrats emphasized that this vote was important to enshrine federal protections in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Justice Clarence Thomas’s statement that other rights, like same-sex marriage, could be considered next.
It’s not yet clear what the fate of the legislation will be in the upper chamber, however.”
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“Passage of this legislation would be historic.
It would codify the right to same-sex marriage under federal law and would prevent states from trying to nullify same-sex marriages and interracial marriages if they were valid in the places where they were performed. Ultimately, it’s both a preemptive move that House Democrats are taking if the Supreme Court were to overturn the precedent set by Obergefell v. Hodges and a way for them to get Republicans to take a stand on the issue.”