“Cedar Point is a sign the radical new conservative regime that many Republicans crave and that liberals fear could actually be upon us. The Court fundamentally reshaped much of American property law in Cedar Point. It did so in a party-line vote. And it did so in a case involving labor unions — institutions that are often celebrated by liberals and loathed by conservatives.
The case involves a nearly half-century-old California regulation, which gives union organizers limited, temporary access to farm worksites. Under this regulation, a union may enter such a worksite for up to 30 days at a time, and it may invoke this right up to four times a year. On the days when the union is permitted to enter, it may only speak to the workers for three hours a day — the hour before the start of work, the hour after the end of work, and the workers’ lunch break.
Thus, union organizers are allowed on a farm’s property for a maximum of 120 days a year, and for a total of only three hours per day. And the union also must notify the employer when it wishes to invoke this right.
But the right of unions to enter onto a California farm to organize workers is now in deep trouble. In an opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that California’s longstanding regulation violates the Constitution’s “takings clause,” which provides that no one shall have their property taken from them by the government “without just compensation.”
And, in order to reach this result, Roberts rewrites decades of law interpreting that clause.”
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“Under the new rule announced in Cedar Point, any law or regulation that “appropriates a right to invade” private property amounts to a per se taking. If California allowed union organizers to enter an employer’s land for a single minute, then California committed a per se taking.
“The right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” Roberts writes. And much of his opinion suggests that any intrusion on this right to exclude amounts to a taking.”
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“One problem with Roberts’s expansive view of the takings clause is that it could prevent the government from performing very basic functions, such as health and safety inspections.
Suppose, for example, that a restaurant has a disgusting, rat-infested kitchen that violates numerous local health ordinances. The restaurant’s owners obviously do not want these violations to be discovered, so they refuse to admit any government health inspectors. Under Roberts’s reading of the takings clause, it’s not clear why the restaurant owner should not be allowed to do so — or why it shouldn’t be able to, at the very least, demand compensation from the government before health inspectors can be allowed on their property.
After all, if “the right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” why should an employer be allowed to exclude union organizers but not health inspectors?”
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“Roberts’s opinion recognizes that it would be untenable to hold that health and safety inspections violate the Constitution, so he carves out a special rule allowing such inspections to stand. “The government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits,” such as a license to operate a business, Roberts writes, so long as that condition “bears an ‘essential nexus’ and ‘rough proportionality’ to the impact of the proposed use of the property.”
Those are some very large and very vague words, and it’s not entirely clear what it means for an inspection requirement to be roughly proportional to “the impact of the proposed use of the property.” Nor is it clear why, if the government can require restaurants to admit health inspectors as a condition of doing business, it can’t also require that restaurant to admit union organizers as a condition of employing workers.
The Court has simply made a value judgment here. It views health inspections as sufficiently important to justify creating an exception to its new understanding of the takings clause, but it doesn’t view protecting a worker’s right to organize as important enough to justify a similar exception.”
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“the Court has revolutionized its understanding of the takings clause. And it did so in an opinion that applies an extremely skeptical rule to pro-union regulation while it simultaneously creates carveouts for regulations that the Court’s conservative majority supports.”
https://www.vox.com/22577374/reconciliation-bill-biden-medicare-climate
“there’s a gap between the desire for remote work and the availability, especially in fields outside of knowledge work.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/08/afghanistan-taliban-kunduz-war-502787
“The Taliban on Monday took control of another provincial capital in Afghanistan, an official said. The city’s fall was the latest in a weekslong, relentless Taliban offensive as American and NATO forces finalize their pullout from the war-torn country.
The militants have ramped up their push across much of Afghanistan, turning their guns on provincial capitals after taking large swaths of land in the mostly rural countryside. At the same time, they have been waging an assassination campaign targeting senior government officials in the capital, Kabul.”
“The premise of the unitary executive doctrine is that all officials who execute federal law must be accountable to the president. That means that the president typically must be able to fire agency leaders and other top government officials at will — a view that the Supreme Court upheld in 2020.”
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“The Court’s previous decisions..have some language suggesting that any action taken by an agency led by a director who is unconstitutionally shielded from presidential accountability is void — and that’s certainly how the plaintiffs in Collins read those decisions. They argued that literally every action taken by the FHFA since its creation 13 years ago must be declared invalid.
Had the Supreme Court agreed with this approach, it would have meant that all of the hundreds of billions spent to prop up Fannie and Freddie were spent illegally. It’s hard to even imagine how to unravel these transactions, and the process of doing so could have sparked another housing crisis similar to the catastrophic 2008 meltdown.
In any event, when confronted with the possibility of being responsible for one of the greatest financial crises in modern American history, Justice Alito blinked, as did most of his colleagues. Collins did not lead to an apocalyptic event; instead, it will stand as a warning of what can go wrong if the Court is too cavalier about remaking our constitutional system in a conservative image.”
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“Though the head of the FHFA must be removable at will by the president, Alito argues in his opinion that “there was no constitutional defect in the statutorily prescribed method of appointment to that office” — that is, an FHFA director who is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate may still exercise executive power. Their previous actions are not void.
It’s as good a reason as any not to light the nation’s economy on fire.”
“critical race theory, created four decades ago by legal scholars, is an academic framework for examining how racism is embedded in America’s laws and institutions. It is just now receiving widespread attention because it has morphed into a catchall category, one used by Republicans who want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.
Over the past six months, Republicans in more than two dozen states have proposed bills that aim to stymie educational discussions about race, racism, and systemic oppression in the US — potentially eliminating the conversations altogether.
It all began as racial justice protests took off across the country in the summer of 2020 and a Fox News story fashioned critical race theory as a boogeyman. Though the school of thought had been relatively obscure outside of academia, a conservative campaign was launched against it, and by September, then-President Donald Trump had signed an executive order restricting implicit bias and diversity trainings by government agencies. His exit from office didn’t put an end to the assault on critical race theory, though — it only amplified it.”
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“Critical race theory emerged in law schools in the 1970s and ’80s as an alternative to the mainstream discourse and classes on civil rights law, many of which held that the best way to fight racial discrimination was to enact legal reforms. According to the doctrine of the time, when these reforms took root, they would eventually phase out racial discrimination. Critical race theorists saw this as a surface-level understanding of the role of race and racism in the law and instead posited that racism is endemic and institutionalized in the United States. For example, one legal reform can’t undo decades of housing discrimination that have kept Black people out of the housing market, nor can one bill end the health care inequities that created poor health outcomes for Indigenous communities.”
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““Critical race theory is not one coherent school of thought. It’s simply an effort to confront our history of race and racism and to give us a capacity to think about what its implications are today,””
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“Since March, Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” nearly 1,300 times, according to an analysis by Media Matters. In March, Rufo, the man who spearheaded much of the outcry, declared a victory on Twitter: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.””
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““The strategy basically takes an academic concept that’s been around for three decades and suddenly turns it into an existential crisis in American politics,” said Crenshaw. Republicans “filled it with any kind of meaning — with the worst nightmares of those who believe that the American republic has turned their backs on them, that they’re seeking to replace them, that no one cares about them,” and then created “a scare tactic around it that works because there hasn’t been much conversation and critical thinking about race in the public square.””
LC: Some critical race theory inspired trainings really have gone too far, but so does banning and demonizing an entire paradigm of intellectual thought on race.
“Ethiopia’s Tigray region is facing a deepening hunger emergency, with about 350,000 people threatened by famine. It is the most severe starvation crisis in the world right now, and it is almost entirely manmade.
The region, located in the north of the country, has been engulfed in conflict since November, when a political dispute between Ethiopia’s central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that represents the Tigray region, erupted into open warfare. The Ethiopian National Defense Force has since partnered with troops from neighboring Eritrea and other militias within Ethiopia, specifically Amhara forces, in the battle against the Tigrayan defense forces.
The fighting has had horrific consequences. There have been credible reports of atrocities being committed by all parties in the conflict, including mass killings, mass rape, and destruction and looting of property. As of April, more than 1.7 million people had been internally displaced, and more than 60,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Sudan since November.
Aid access has been inconsistent, and in May the United Nations confirmed a CNN report that Ethiopian federal troops and allied forces were blocking humanitarian supplies from entering parts of Tigray — a charge the Ethiopian government has denied.”
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“About 350,000 people in Tigray are facing a food “catastrophe,” which means they’re suffering from famine conditions. That classification is based on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global index that relies on assessments from United Nations agencies and other regional and international nongovernmental organizations.
“Catastrophe” is the highest classification, at Level 5. According to the IPC’s assessment, the risk of famine exists in several vulnerable pockets throughout Tigray, but millions of others across the region are at risk of falling into this category. Right now, more than 5.5 million people — about 60 percent of Tigray’s population — are facing acute food insecurity. As many as 2.1 million are in the “emergency” phase, a level below catastrophe, and 3 million people are in the “crisis” phase.”
“The vast majority of Americans want to age in their home and community, spending their twilight years in a familiar and comfortable setting. But the choice is not always their own.
The US long-term care system — such as it is — is broken. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are on waiting lists for home-based care. More than 40 million people report that they have cared for a loved one over 50 without any pay in the last year. The United States ranks near the bottom of developed economies in the number of older adults who receive long-term care at home. Meanwhile, America’s nursing homes are staffed by overwhelmed and underpaid workers, and for-profit takeovers of those facilities have led to worse care for patients.
Covid-19 has made this long-term care crisis impossible to ignore. More than 130,000 nursing home residents have died in the pandemic, accounting for nearly one in four US deaths. Residents of large institutions died at higher rates than those who live in the community.
In America, aging people who need care — in a nursing facility or at home — either must be wealthy enough to pay for it themselves or must deplete their income and assets enough that they qualify for Medicaid. Almost by accident, the health insurance program for low-income Americans has become the main payer for nursing home and home-based care. Experts describe long-term care in the US with a sense of disbelief.
“If you were starting from scratch, you would never design a system this way,” David Grabowski, a Harvard professor who studies the economics of long-term care, told me.
Tricia Neuman, who studies long-term care at the Kaiser Family Foundation, put it even more baldly: “We do not have a system of long-term care in our country.”
America has been struggling for decades to figure out a balance between having people age in long-term care facilities and age at home. President Joe Biden has proposed a massive infusion of federal spending on home-based care. Experts say it should start to address these structural problems — but it’s only a start.”
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“More than three in four people over the age of 50 said in a 2018 AARP survey they want to stay in their community as long they can. But fewer than half thought that would be possible — and many of them may end up being right, as the long waiting lists for home- and community-based services attest. As of February 2020, more than 820,000 Americans were stuck on their state Medicaid program’s waiting list for home- and community-based services, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and their average wait time is longer than three years.
Even for those lucky enough to be able to afford in-home care, the US long-term care system hasn’t done them any favors. Virginia Veliz, a 70-year-old in Santa Clarita, California, has been coordinating care for her 90-year-old mother, who has Lewy body dementia and Parkison’s disease, for the past five years.
“You really have to treat it like a job,” she said.”
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“There are some people for whom institutional care makes sense — those with severe cognitive decline, for example. Others might simply prefer to live in a nursing home with other people instead of living alone at home.
But the idea is that it should be the patient’s choice. The US still has not found a way to put that decision entirely in the patient’s hands.”
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“Prioritizing home-based care appears to be the preferred solution for both patients and policymakers. But it will cost money. The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden are considered global leaders in providing community-based services, but they also spend a substantially higher share of their GDPs on long-term care (around 3 percent) than the US (0.5 percent).”
“One reason the US isn’t very good at building transit cheaply is that it doesn’t practice.
“If you look at Paris or Seoul or Shanghai, they’ve been building [transit] pretty much nonstop for decades now. New York, on the other hand, built its subway at a breakneck pace until 1940 and then cooled it,” Goldwyn explained.
Agencies aren’t routinely in charge of building new things, so every time they do, it’s back to the drawing board.
“There’s a learning curve, almost with every city, when they’re introducing rail, because you don’t have a local knowledge base on how to do this,” explained Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. “Whether that’s on the construction side or the oversight side or public management side. You do see a lot of cities stumble out of the gate when they’re trying to get their first projects done.”
Then there’s the complexity of building across multiple jurisdictions. The federal government often provides funding for a project that requires multiple cities or counties to coordinate, all to complete a multibillion-dollar project unlike one they’ve probably ever accomplished before, often without a clearly defined leader — it’s like the most dysfunctional group project ever.”
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““Here in the United States, we as a country are not very accepting of disruption,” Goldwyn told Vox. In Los Angeles, workers constructing the Purple Line could only work weekends — then Covid-19 hit, and stay-at-home orders made it possible for them to work 24/7. The result?
“They completed the project seven months ahead of schedule.””
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“There are also myriad ways the US needs to streamline the process for developing transit projects. Lewis explained to me that European regulators were often shocked that American transit agencies have to go through their own process to get authorization to shut down a street or prepare an area for construction.
“A lot of the [processes] that we use here in the United States are too slow or too cumbersome and outdated. We need to make it easier to build more and better transit projects,” Lewis explained.”
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“As the Action Committee for Transit, a local pro-transit organization, documented, residents of the wealthy DC suburb of Chevy Chase have led a decades-long crusade against the light rail project, which will benefit the entire region, by claiming that a “tiny transparent invertebrate” might be at risk. “When no endangered amphipods were found,” the detractors turned to other arguments. However, repeated references to the potential harm to the Columbia Country Club and also a public comment disparaging the needs of people in less affluent communities makes clear that much of the stated concern was likely never environmental or financial.”
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“Any major project will incur harms on some group of people — construction can impede traffic, new structures can obstruct a view from your porch, things that reasonable people would agree are annoying or costly. But transportation projects have to go somewhere, and one only has to look at the housing market to see the costs of allowing individual citizens to derail projects due to real or fabricated harms.”