#founding documents

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 9, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 10, 2024

Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States. 

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on. 

Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.

Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign. 

While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship. 

The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing. 

To keep the government from crushing those individual rights, the Constitution’s Framers wrote the Bill of Rights. Those first ten amendments to the Constitution hold back the federal government by, among other things, prohibiting Congress from making laws that would establish a national religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion, limit freedom of speech or of the press, or hamper people’s right to assemble peacefully or to petition the government for a redress of grievances. 

The belief that liberalism depended on a small government dominated the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the rise of industry in the late nineteenth century shifted the relationship between individuals and the government. Was everyone really equal when industrialists were worth millions and commanded state legislatures and Congress, while workers, consumers, and children had little leverage to protect themselves? 

The majority of Americans said no, and Theodore Roosevelt agreed. The danger for individuals in their era was not that the government would crush them, but that industrialists would. In order for the government truly to protect the people, Roosevelt argued, it must regulate businesses and support the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. A true liberal government, one that protected the rights of individuals, must be big enough and strong enough to act as a referee between workers, consumers, and businessmen. 

Roosevelt actually loathed Wilson, in part because Wilson ran for office in 1912 with the argument that as soon as the government broke up big corporations, the country could revert back to a small government. To Roosevelt, this made no sense. Unless the conditions of the modern economy were changed—and he believed they could not be, because the trend was always toward bigger and bigger enterprises—industry would always concentrate. Only a big government could stop those corporations from taking over the country.

Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence. 

A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence. 

And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience. 

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants. 

Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said. 

In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it. 

On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[lenaellsi]

local snake tells everyone he is very venomous, is actually a constrictor. embarrassing

[chriskotiesen]

I've shared a few pretty straightforward images using my CRT effect, but not much yet that really shows off what an over-engineered monstrosity I've created.

For a start, it's actually 3D. I built most of this in Blender.

Except for the optional bit that simulates composite video artifacts. I wrote that part in shader code and apply it to the base image as a separate step.

I made a high-res shadow mask texture, so it looks pretty good even from absurdly close up.

I can also adjust the scanline hardness and swap the slot mask for a dot mask or aperture grille to simulate different types of display.

Raytracing the whole thing ensures that all of these little details look nice and get sampled correctly, and if I want to change the glare reflecting off of the screen...

...I can adjust it by rearranging the furniture in the room.

So... yeah. That's what is current going on whenever I post pixel art with my CRT effect. It's not quite perfect yet, but I think it's getting pretty good.

[embershadowphoenix]

America's Founding Documents: Part 1

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

We don't really know what these documents say, so I'll post the highlights here. But really, please go educate yourselves and read them yourself.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

"...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

There are many offenses listed that the King of England did. And unfortunately, the government has done/is doing many of them. "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People."

(emphasis added)

[absoluteminimum]

Shockwave was doing his best to attend to Soundwave. His best was quite good.

The cables were hindering his efforts somewhat. They were quite… distracting.

[clownowo]

I think that if Miles Edgeworth were to ever have a Tumblr blog it would be entirely Steel Samurai based with a carefully organized tagging system. He posts lengthy formally worded analysis about Steel Samurai and nothing else. He doesn't check his notes. He does check his asks, because they're kind of like emails. He has anon asks and dms turned off. Someone sends an ask about his interests outside of Steel Samurai and he immediately blocks them. He doesn't have pronouns or a name to be called by in his bio. The only hint about Edgeworth's personal life is that when he refers to the death of Jack Hammer or the conviction of Matt Engarde he only refers to Phoenix as "that man".

Maya definitely has a tumblr and it has a canon Pink Princess url. She actually hoarded a bunch of Pink Princess urls long before the character was officially announced because she knew she needed to have them. Her tumblr header is "the real pink princess ask sal manella". Her pinned post has these

[ID: Two blinkie banners. The first has a lesbian flag background and says "Pink Princess is canonically gay." The second is light pink and says "PinkSteel shippers dni". End ID] (thank you @princess-of-purple-prose)

Maya follows him and sends Edgeworth asks periodically. He thinks she's a wonderful conversationalist. He has no idea of her identity. Maya is fully aware he's Edgeworth.

[bilolli]

Heyyyyyy @betweenblackberrybranches did you know that I like your automatons designs a lot?

Scans under the cut

[m1ssunderstanding]

So I was reading through the Northern Songs Wikipedia page today. Did you guys know John and Paul were also legally bound with equal shares in two more companies? Maclen published their music in the US and Lenmac published it in the UK.

Also this was super dark and twisted. When Dick James bought all those Northern Songs shares he took out a life insurance policy on them worth 500,000 so he could protect his investment if one of them died?

[philsmeatylegss]

Yesterday, in NYC, a man lit a woman, who was sleeping in a subway car, on fire until she died. So the man arrested will be charged with terrorism as well as murder, correct? His attack was also threatening the lives of other homeless people (which it is assumed she was so). Surely he will also be charged with terrorism for scaring those people, right?

Or is it only terrorism when rich people are threatened?

Also, surely the fact the person who did this being an undocumented immigrant won’t be mentioned in every single news article about it, right? A woman was brutally murdered. Who gives a shit where the perpetrator is from, all we should care is that he is detained and punished.

Right?

We all agreed to this, right?

Or does race and immigration status only matter when a non-white and or undocumented immigrant commits a crime?

Same place, same police.

And I think we all know how differently this murder will be treated. And why.

[bucephaly]

It's kinda shocking to me how few people seem to know how prevalent the 'my great grandmother was cherokee' myth is and how it's almost never actually true, especially when it comes with things like 'never signed up' or 'fell off the trail' or 'courthouse burned down destorying the documentation' etc etc.

People just don't even seem to know the history like.. when the Trail happened. My great great great grandfather was 2 years old during Removal in 1838, so peoples 'my great grandmother hid in the mountains!' is so clearly wrong. And we have rolls. From before and after removal, rolls done by cherokee nation and others by the government, rolls that were not stored in one random flammable courthouse. It's not difficult to find the actual evidence of ancestry.

And just.. there are lots of ways those family stories get started. It was a practice during the confederacy to claim cherokee ancestry to show one's family had 'deep roots in the south' that they were there before the cherokee were removed. Many people pretended to be cherokee and applied for the Guion-Miller payout just to try to steal money meant for cherokees - 2/3rds of the applicants were denied for having 0 proof of actual cherokee ancestry. [We even see lawyers advertising signing up for the Miller roll just to try to get free money.] And the myth even started in some families in the cherokee land lotteries, where the land stolen from us was raffled off, including the house and everything that was left behind when the cherokees were removed. We have seen people whose families just take these things stolen from the cherokee family and adopt them into their own family story, saying that they were cherokee themselves.

If you had some family story about being cherokee and you wanna have proof one way or the other, check out this Facebook group run by expert cherokee genealogists that do research for free. Just please read the rules fully and respect the researchers. They run thousands of people's ancestries a year and their average is only around 0.7% of lines they run actually end up having true cherokee ancestry.

[sketchspook]

Mr. Myers

Another piece I threw together like nobody's business. Not the cleanest, but need not speak on it.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Ann Telnaes :: @AnnTelnaes :: The Supreme Court hears Trump immunity case.

* * * *

This Supreme Court has broken my heart

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

APR 29, 2024

It’s not just that so many of the court’s decisions have been manifest in finding ways to strip rights from citizens that previous courts have done their best to secure.  It’s not the ham-handed, ignorant, nakedly political way they have done it.  It’s not because two of the justices got on the court by yelling at Senators and in one case weeping as he told lies to get himself confirmed.  It’s not even that the Chief Justice has set forth purposefully to permit the court he leads to become corrupted by bribery, outside political influence, and conflicts of interest.

It’s that the court has been transformed over my adult lifetime from democratic institution you looked up to, doing work for the nation that inspired you, into a small place doing small things for small purposes more concerned with petty grievances and enrichment of a few than the needs and aspirations of the many. 

All the so-called conservatives on this court but one, Justice Thomas ironically, were appointed as part of a movement created with the sole purpose of politicizing the court in a direction that can only be described as anti-democratic.  You will not find among the decisions of this court since the Federalist Society gained traction with the most anti-democratic president in our history, Donald Trump, a love for this nation, for its political traditions and norms, for the joys of life in a democracy, or for the court itself.  What you find instead is a political movement constricted by ambition, disrespect of other courts, including past Supreme Courts and lower courts, and a disrespect of history and intellectual rigor that found its nadir in a decision written by the Chief Justice that stripped Black Americans of protections for a right to vote they had shed blood to secure.  Astonishingly, as if he were writing not a Supreme Court decision but his first essay as a 7th grader, Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  

The decision, in Shelby County v. Holder, ended certain protections of the right to vote for Black citizens in the Voting Rights Act.  Within days of the decision, states in the South that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary by denying their Black citizens the right to vote, went right back to “discriminating on the basis of race” in their voting laws.  

This terrible decision, and others just as bad such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, are what passes for precedent in the Roberts court.  In the Dobbs decision, Justice Samuel Alito cited abortion-banning laws dating from the 1700’s and 1800’s, finding essentially that if we didn’t have laws allowing abortions generations ago, we shouldn’t have those laws now.

It would seem to be impossible to turn both progress and history on their heads simultaneously, but this court has figured out a way to establish upside down and backwards as a controlling legal theory.

But it is the smallness of the Republican justices on the court that is truly and astonishingly depressing.  That they walk the earth on little bitty feet and manhandle the law with teeny tiny hands was established clearly last week in the hearing on Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution.  The Supreme Court did not have to take the case.  The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had found Trump’s claim that he enjoys immunity from charges that he conspired to overturn the election of 2020 to be without merit in a unanimous decision by both Republican and Democratic appointed judges.  The Supreme Court could have let that decision stand by refusing to hear the Trump appeal.

Instead, they took the case, and two of the so-called conservative justices summed up the attitude of the Roberts court succinctly, which is that the facts don’t matter, only politics does.

Justice Samuel Alito told the attorney representing Special Counsel Jack Smith, “I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case.”  Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed his disinterest in the same subject this way: “Like Justice Gorsuch, I'm not concerned with the here and now of this case, I'm concerned about the future.”

Which raises the obvious question:  why did they agree to take the Trump appeal in the first place?

The answer to that question is the reason my heart is broken.  This Supreme Court has shown itself again and again to be disinterested in the facts and the law and has reached the point that it now bluntly says so.  The idea that the Constitution not only established a democracy but provided protections for it in the clear language of its text is less important to Roberts and his court than what outcomes they can fashion for the anti-democratic masters that put them there.

Even with the heart and intellect and dedication of the Democratic minority standing tall for us, I fear that by the time the Republican Party’s Gang of Six is finished, there will be no protections left in our founding document for the nation it was written to establish and support.  It is as if we are Ukraine, and our Russia is within and wearing robes.  The question we face in this election and every election from now on is this:  will we allow them to tear it all down, or will we fight?

[0xeyedaisy]

Random stuff

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

What can I say? They're my favorite.

[arafinweanappreciation]

“Tell me…” the exhausted king said, looking directly into the commander’s eyes. He was covered in grime, soot and dirt, ash and blood, mud and sweat. His eyes were haunted. The War took its toll, after all, the very ground itself turning against them. The ruby light of the flames only served to reveal their hollowness. “The forces here. The orcs. Never before have I ridden against a host who parts and flees at the very sight of me. Why do they do so now?”

The king was sharp of mind and quick to understand. He knew that a legend of his prowess or brutality would not put them off, nor travel so quickly, besides. The commander only shook her head, and gestured for him to follow.

They hauled themselves to their weary feet and made for the river.

When they reached the banks, far enough back that they could be sure that they would not fall into its poison currents, the commander pointed. 

There was an island there, untouched by the corruption around it, green and flourishing despite all else. It was marked by fallen stones. Ruins.

“That,” the commander explained, “Is Tol Sirion. Or Taur-In-Gaurhoth, depending on who you ask. It was your son’s stronghold first, then your grandson’s; then, it was overrun by Sauron.”

“This is where…” the king trailed off, staring at the ruins. The commander carefully did not notice the tears in his eyes.

“Yes. It cleansed the isle, and protects it now.”

The king swallowed thickly before he could speak. “And what does this mean?”

“I met him. More than once. You bear nearly the same countenance.”

“So I have been told.”

“They believe you to be the Werewolf-Slayer, returned for his revenge.”

He laughed, harshly. “No, no. The Werewolf-Slayer lies safe in the halls of Tirion, waiting for the birth of his first child. He seeks no revenge,” he hesitated, just for a moment, and his voice came back, quiet and mild, “But perhaps I will seek to avenge him.”

[radarchives]