Joe Biden vs. SCOTUS: President Joe Biden, who is no longer seeking reelection following a scandal related to his decline in cognitive fitness, has decided to use his last gasps of both vigor and presidential power to attempt to institute term limits for Supreme Court justices.
He is expected to unveil this slate of proposals publicly at an event in Texas later today. Biden will likely “argue that the current system of lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices gives a president undue influence for decades,” reports The New York Times. “He will propose a process in which a president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years on the bench.”
Biden has very little chance of actually being able to get this through. Reforming the Court in such a manner would be controversial, and it would require congressional approval. Without greater Democratic control of Congress, Biden has low odds of being able to pass such a thing. But legal challenges or unfeasibility, as made evident by his work on student loan forgiveness, doesn’t mean he won’t try. More to come once the proposal has been announced.
“Now that I have honorably limited my government service to just 51 years, I think the proper limit for a position that is supposed to be lifetime should be 18 years. Rules start NOW!” https://t.co/lt5ENXgE0H
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) July 29, 2024
What J.D. Vance believed: “He’s just a bad man,” J.D. Vance wrote of Donald Trump, years before the presidential candidate picked Vance as his running mate. “A morally reprehensible human being.”
Texts and emails between Vance and Sofia Nelson, a transgender classmate of his at Yale Law, have now been published in The New York Times. Dating from roughly 2014 to 2017, they show Vance as sane and reasonable in private correspondence, treating his friend humanely and politely as their gender identity shifts. The younger Vance’s disapproval of Donald Trump is not news, but some of the other views he expressed—such as “I hate the police”—may come as a surprise to Vance’s fans today.
Following the protests and riots that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Vance told Nelson: “I love the body camera movement, and anything that puts cops back in the mindset of service and protection instead of control and coercion. I hate the police. Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t imagine what a black guy goes through.”
“There have always been demagogues willing to exploit the people who believe crazy shit,” he wrote in 2015, expressing concern about a perceived rise in Islamophobia as Trump was ascending. And, following then–Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comments, Vance wrote: “I’m trying very hard to deal with people in a way that persuades them and changes the conversation…the best way to help the race issue is to try to persuade. The more white people feel like voting for trump, the more black people will suffer.”
The two friends reportedly had a falling out in 2021, which has seemingly motivated Nelson to leak the messages. According to a spokesman, Vance “has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a dad and starting a family, and he has thoroughly explained why he changed his mind on President Trump.”
Scenes from New York: The city’s average daily hotel room rate is $318, “the highest for any major U.S. market,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Of the existing hotel stock, about 30 percent of the city’s total rooms are in nonunionized hotels, which a new bill seeks to regulate, making it impossible for such establishments to contract out food, housekeeping, and the like. Regulations like these would drive up hotel room prices in a city with a tourism market that may not be able to bear it.
QUICK HITS
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been declared the victor of Sunday’s election there, despite disputes over who actually received the most votes. It turns out talking about toxic masculinity for years on end and acting like straight white men are the problem doesn’t make those people want to vote for you. A really interesting thread on whether voters have qualms about voting for minority women. (Spoiler: They don’t, but the media apparently has an issue with reporting these findings.) Donald Trump claimed this past weekend that he would commute the sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht if reelected president. Watch this speech from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz:
One effect of Joe Biden stepping back in the race is that even though we’re not getting the full mini primary, there is suddenly a lot of attention being paid to Democrats who are just much much much much better at delivering bite-size talking points about progressive politics https://t.co/fjTx3kHDIG
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 28, 2024
School choice would solve pretty much all of the toxic elements of this discourse:
I also get really irritated by “you should send your kids to bad public schools because people like you doing that is what makes them into good public schools”. I’m willing to make a lot of sacrifices for my community. Wronging my kids isn’t one of them.
— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) July 27, 2024
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