#supreme court hearing pollution

[todayworldnews2k21]

Delhi air pollution: Supreme Court says GRAP-IV measures to continue till December 2 except for schools and colleges 

Anti-smog gun being used to sprinkle water to curb pollution in New Delhi on November 28, 2024. | Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap The Supreme Court on Thursday (November 28, 2024) said that the graded response action plan, GRAP-IV, measures in Delhi will continue till Monday (December 2, 2024) except for schools and colleges. The top court also said that the Commission for Air Quality…

[marisatomay]

Actually, I think that homophobes in Congress wanted to find a way to criminalize being gay well before a twink got fucked on camera in a Senate hearing room and the video was released to conservative media as an act of revenge porn because the staffer in question told a genocidal and homophobic congressman “Free Palestine” to his face.

There are rapists on the US Supreme Court and I’m supposed to clutch my pearls over two men having consensual sex in the Senate? Oh! Heavens to Betsy! The first time sex acts have been committed in a government building! Are the shades of Congress to be thus polluted?

But, for the record, no amount of sanitizing your sex life or sanding down of your LGBT edges will make bigots accept you. So, don’t debase yourself by capitulating an inch to them, especially in ways that throw your fellow community members under the bus.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - November 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! (sorry it's slightly late, the links didn't wanna work and I couldn't figure it out all day)

1. Wyoming's abortion ban has been overturned, including its ban on abortion medication

“Wyoming is the second state to have its near-total abortion ban overturned this month[…. Seven other states] also approved amendments protecting the right to an abortion. A lawsuit seeking to challenge the [FDA]’s approval of abortion medication recently failed when the Supreme Court refused to hear it[….]”

2. Patches of wildflowers in cities can be just as good for insects as natural meadows – study

“This study confirmed that small areas of urban wildflowers have a high concentration of pollinating insects, and are as valuable to many pollinators as larger areas of natural meadow that you would typically find rurally.”

3. Paris could offer new parents anti-pollution baby 'gift bags' to combat 'forever chemicals'

“The bag includes a stainless steel baby cup, a wooden toy, reusable cotton wipes, and non-toxic cleaning supplies as part of a "green prescription". […] The city will also have 44 centres for protecting mothers and infants that will be without any pollutants[….]”

4. Indigenous guardians embark on a sacred pact to protect the lowland tapir in Colombia

“The tapir is now the focus of an Indigenous-led conservation project[… A proposed “biocultural corridor”] will protect not only the populations and movements of wildlife such as tapirs, but also the cultural traditions and spirituality of the Inga and other neighboring Indigenous peoples[….]”

5. Denmark will plant 1 billion trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

“[…] 43 billion kroner ($6.1 billion) have been earmarked to acquire land from farmers over the next two decades[.… In addition,] livestock farmers will be taxed for the greenhouse gases emitted by their cows, sheep and pigs from 2030, the first country to do so[….]”

6. The biggest grid storage project using old batteries is online in Texas

“[Element operates “used EV battery packs” with software that can] fine-tune commands at the cell level, instead of treating all the batteries as a monolithic whole. This enables the system to get more use out of each cell without stressing any so much that they break down[….]””

7. Durable supramolecular plastic is fully ocean-degradable and doesn't generate microplastics

“The new material is as strong as conventional plastics and biodegradable, [… and] is therefore expected to help reduce harmful microplastic pollution that accumulates in oceans and soil and eventually enters the food chain.”

8. Big Oil Tax Could Boost Global Loss and Damage Fund by 2000%

“[… A] tax on fossil fuel extraction, which would increase each year, combined with additional taxes on excess profits would […] generate hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the decade to assist poor and vulnerable communities with the impact of the climate crisis[….]”

9. Rooftop solar meets 107.5 pct of South Australia’s demand, no emergency measures needed

“[T]he state was able to export around 658 MW of capacity to Victoria at the time[….] The export capacity is expected to increase significantly as the new transmission link to NSW[…] should be able to allow an extra 150 MW to be transferred in either direction by Christmas.”

10. Light-altering paint for greenhouses could help lengthen the fruit growing season in less sunny countries

“[Scientists] have developed a spray coating for greenhouses that could help UK farmers to produce more crops in the future using the same or less energy[… by optimising] the wavelength of light shining onto the plants, improving their growth and yield.”

November 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[mariacallous]

US environmental law is a relatively young discipline. The Environmental Protection Agency is a little more than 50 years old, and the Clean Air and Clean Water acts—legislation we today see as bedrocks of public health and environmental safeguards—were passed in 1963 and 1973, respectively. When the case that would become Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council was filed in the early 1980s, the EPA was just beginning to pump out rules that would have major economic consequences for business and industry.

In its decision last week overturning Chevron deference—a crucial legal precedent that gives federal agencies the ability to interpret laws that are otherwise vague or ambiguous—the Supreme Court has taken the future of an incalculable number of regulations on public health, clean water, and clean air out of the hands of scientists for organizations like the EPA and passed it along to nonexpert judges who will hear challenges to these regulations in court.

“Anybody who doesn’t like a federal-agency regulation can now bring it before a court,” said Jillian Blanchard, a director at Lawyers for Good Government. “It’s scary.”

Overturning Chevron is just a cog in the larger plan to dismantle the administrative state and environmental law as we know it—and the ultraconservative forces and fossil fuel defenders, like the Koch brothers, behind it are only getting started.

Ironically, the Chevron decision was initially seen as a win for polluting industries. The Clean Air Act mandates that new stationary sources of pollution go through an agency review, but it fails to define what exactly a source is. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s EPA—headed by Anne Gorsuch, the mother of current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch—expanded the definition of source to mean an entire factory or complex. This significantly cut down on red tape for polluting industries, which previously had to go through government approval processes to add individual smokestacks to larger facilities. The National Resources Defense Council sued the EPA and won; Chevron interfered and took the case to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 8–0 to reverse the lower court’s decision and handed a victory to the oil giant—and the EPA.

The doctrine established by the case was also seen as a good tool for corporate life. Industries rely on consistent federal guidelines to build their business models. Taking the specifics of regulations out of the courts and putting them into the hands of agencies provided stability for companies that needed to plan ahead.

“As the deference doctrine became known law, everybody just came to rely on it,” Blanchard said. “They may not like an agency’s decision on something, but they were able to rely on the fact, like, OK, at least we can trust the process.”

Subsequent administrations passed much stronger environmental regulations using the Chevron doctrine as a basis. The EPA, especially under Democratic presidents, increasingly came to be seen as an onerous, antibusiness body by industrial interests and ultraconservative figureheads alike. Even Antonin Scalia, who for most of his career was a champion of Chevron, showed signs of tiring of the doctrine in his later years.

In 1989 climate scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm about climate change in front of Congress. In the years that immediately followed, climate science was accepted by both Democratic and Republican politicians, and George H. W. Bush expressed support for climate change policies. The fossil fuel industry panicked and began organizing to combat what it saw as an oncoming wave of regulation. In the decades since, the industry and its allies have invested in politicians, scientists, and cultural figures to publicly sow doubt about climate science, transforming what should have been a straightforward policy problem into a cultural and political war that is still playing out today. Charles and David Koch, who had built up a massive chemical, industrial, and fossil fuel empire, were some of the most important funders of this campaign, almost single-handedly ensuring that climate action stalled for decades in the US. (It’s no accident that it took until 2022 for the country to pass any sort of climate change legislation.)

Those interested in casting doubt on science and clearing out the administrative bedrocks of environmental law had a valuable ally in Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society and one of the most influential figures in stacking the Supreme Court with ultraconservative judges. Although much of Leo’s massive funding to remake the courts comes from dark money, the Kochs have played a public and private role in supporting his efforts. In 2016 Leo coordinated a $10 million donation from the Kochs to George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, for which Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh have all served as faculty; Thomas’ long-standing appearances at Koch donor events was also facilitated by Leo, as ProPublica reported last year.

“This whole thing has been funded by the Koch brothers,” Blanchard said.

The Koch-funded, Leo-facilitated assault on the administrative state hasn’t been isolated to Chevron. On Monday, the court ruled along familiar 6–3 party lines in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, in a decision that creates new opportunities for companies to attack federal regulations years after they’re put in place.

“After today, even the most well-settled agency regulations can be placed on the chopping block,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. “Any established government regulation about any issue—say, workplace safety, toxic waste, or consumer protection—can now be attacked by any new regulated entity within six years of the entity’s formation.”

A day before the Loper Bright decision last week, the court ruled, again 6–3, in a decision against the Securities and Exchange Commission that could potentially force federal agencies to hold jury trials as a regular part of enforcement. Last year, the EPA issued more than 950 compliance orders, fining a wide variety of companies, industrial plants, and other entities for not being in line with federal standards. Pat Parenteau, an emeritus professor at Vermont Law School who served as regional counsel in the EPA’s New England office, said that administrative orders are the agency’s “bread and butter.”

“If you have to go to the DOJ to file a lawsuit [for the 900-plus administrative orders], the enforcement program is going to collapse,” he said.

The elimination of Chevron and other guardrails for administrative law doesn’t mean that all environmental rules will disappear tomorrow. The Supreme Court hasn’t used Chevron in a decision in years. Last year, in Sackett v. EPA, the majority justices sidestepped the doctrine altogether in their decision, which effectively wiped out federal protections for as many as half the nation’s wetlands—a preview of the type of decisions that can now be made without Chevron in play.

Lower courts have still consistently relied on Chevron and made decisions using the doctrine that, one analysis found, overwhelmingly favored federal agencies. Now, facing incapacitated enforcement mechanisms and a wide-open field to challenge federal regulations, with a host of conservative judges across the country ready to hear lawsuits, deep-pocketed polluters have little in the way of taking swings at the remaining laws holding them back.

There are a dizzying amount of opportunities ahead of them—and untold effects on the American public when environmental protections are dismantled. Agencies could begin to act more cautiously for fear of lawsuits, a trend that, as Blanchard’s organization points out, could have devastating effects during a crisis like the current avian flu epidemic, when entities like the Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention need to work together. The Supreme Court has already agreed to hear a case next year reconsidering denied approvals for a crude oil railway, and its decision could do away with how the government calculates potential fossil fuel emissions associated with infrastructure projects.

“We have by no means seen the end of the assault on the administrative state—which is environmental law,” said Parenteau. “Environmental law is the administrative state.”

Parenteau said that although the Clean Air and Clean Water acts are likely to be the first targets of proponents of Chevron’s demise, conservative towns and cities could eventually decide to take new federal regulations intended to protect the public from “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, to court. “The costs of monitoring and testing for those PFAS chemicals in the parts per trillion is going to be exorbitant,” he said. “My guess is there’s going to be a real pushback as these rules start to take effect.”

For Leo’s part, he has already signaled where he intends to turn next. In recent months, his network has launched public and private campaigns to persuade the Supreme Court to take up a case involving the city and county of Honolulu’s suit against a handful of fossil fuel companies, one of dozens of such climate suits being launched across the country. If the conservative court decides to hear the case, it’s likely to deal a blow to one of the newest strategies to hold Big Oil accountable—and one of the last remaining lines of defense for a nation that’s rapidly losing its ability to make polluters pay to clean up their messes.

[rjzimmerman]

Many of you know that I'm a lawyer, retired, but still a member of the bar. I don't practice law (can't), but I still read professional articles and media reports about environmental law and other laws that interest me. From my humble perspective, some of the recent decisions of the US Supreme Court are invalid because the decisions were issued by the Court acting not in its constitutional capacity of a court of appeals, but acting as a court of original jurisdiction. If I'm correct (and I'm sure I can find a slew of right wing lawyers who are laughing at me), then the executive branch of the US government, i.e., the President, is not obligated to enforce those decisions. Plus, the ethical issues of Justice Thomas.......what the fuck is he doing participating in a decision on trump's January 6 sins when Thomas' wife was furiously clicking away on e-mails encouraging the rioting and insurrection? Wishful thinking, but somehow sometime somewhere something dramatic has to happen to smack down the Supreme Court, or at least create some sense of doubt in their tiny little pointed heads.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

A spate of decisions over the past two years by the Supreme Court has significantly impaired the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit pollution in the air and water, regulate the use of toxic chemicals and reduce the greenhouse gasses that are heating the planet.

This term, the court’s conservative supermajority handed down several rulings that chip away at the power of many federal agencies.

But the environmental agency has been under particular fire, the result of a series of cases brought since 2022 by conservative activists who say that E.P.A. regulations have driven up costs for industries ranging from electric utilities to home building. Those arguments have resonated among justices skeptical of government regulation.

On Friday, the court ended the use of what is known as the Chevron doctrine, a cornerstone of administrative law for 40 years that said that courts should defer to government agencies to interpret unclear laws. That decision threatens the authority of many federal agencies to regulate the environment and also health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more.

But more remarkable have been several decisions by the court to intervene to stop environmental regulations before they were decided by lower courts or even before they were implemented by the executive branch.

On Thursday, the court said the E.P.A. could not limit smokestack pollution that blows across state borders under a measure known as the “good neighbor rule.” In that case, the court took the surprising step of weighing in while litigation was still pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The court also acted in an unusually preliminary fashion last year when it struck down a proposed E.P.A. rule known as Waters of the United States that was designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands from pollution, acting before the regulation had even been made final.

Similarly, in a 2022 challenge to an E.P.A. climate proposal known as the Clean Power Plan, the court sharply limited the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, even though that rule had not yet taken effect.

That kind of intervention has little in the way of precedent. Usually, the Supreme Court is the last venue to hear a case, after arguments have been made and opinions have been rendered by lower courts.

“This court has shown an interest in making law in this area and not having the patience to wait for the cases to first come up through the courts,” said Kevin Minoli, a lawyer who worked in the E.P.A.’s office of general counsel from the Clinton through the Trump administrations. “They’ve been aggressive on ruling. It’s like, we’re going to tell you the answer before you even ask the question.”

Collectively, those decisions now endanger not only many existing environmental rules, but may prevent future administrations from writing new ones, experts say.

“These are among the worst environmental law rulings that the Supreme Court will ever issue,” said Ian Fein, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They all cut sharply against the federal government’s ability to enforce laws that protect us from polluters.”

The march of environmental cases is not over: The court has agreed to hear a case next term that could limit the reach of National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that requires federal agencies to analyze whether their proposed projects have environmental consequences. Businesses and industries have long complained that the reviews can take years, inflate costs and be used by community groups to block projects.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics (10.07.2024):

This morning also marks the beginning of the Supreme Court’s 2024-25 term, which will be the focus of today’s newsletter. The court’s last term was marked by highly charged political cases, several of them decided with the six conservative justices in the majority and the three liberal justices in the minority, including Trump v. United States (which set the standard for how presidents can and can’t be prosecuted) and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (which significantly reduced the power of the regulatory state). The court also weighed in on disputes over racial gerrymandering and bump stocks for firearms (also along the same 6-3 battle lines), as well as cases involving January 6th, social media, abortion pills, opioids, pollution, and Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for the White House (all of which were decided along more mixed ideological lines). [...]

That’s the context in which the nine justices will appear from behind the bench this morning to hear their first oral arguments of the term at 10 a.m. ET. The term ahead does not — yet — have as many controversial cases on the docket, but there are still several high-profile disputes. Here are some of the key cases to watch this term:

United States v. Skrmetti: After years of the issue roiling the country, this will be the Supreme Court’s first formal foray into adjudicating transgender health care. The case stems from the federal government’s challenge to a Tennessee law banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-transition surgeries for minors. The court’s decision will have broad national ramifications, likely carrying over to the 24 other states with similar prohibitions on the books.

Garland v. VanDerStok: Like last term, which included multiple gun control cases, the Supreme Court will take up another Biden administration gun regulation later this week. This one involves “ghost guns,” firearms that are put together with kits at home — and therefore don’t have serial numbers and are untraceable by authorities. In 2022, the Justice Department unveiled a rule requiring vendors who sell ghost guns to treat them as fully completed firearms; gun rights groups are now challenging the regulation.

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton: Another��hot-button culture war issue is at the center of this case, which involves challenges to a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify their users’ ages. The Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult entertainment industry, is arguing that the law violates their First Amendment rights, while Texas says the statute protects children. As in 10 other states with similar laws, the site Pornhub has opted to block access to users in Texas rather than comply with the requirements.

Other cases involving the death penalty, nuclear waste, and vaping are also poised to reach the court.

SCOTUS will have some big cases on the docket this term:

United States v. Skrmetti (gender-affirming care)

Garland v. VanDerStok (ghost guns)

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (age verification)

[agreed-upon-solutions]

Why Direct Democracy?

(This is a lightly edited version of a reply to a question we received on Reddit, which we felt had independent interest here.)

We think direct democracy is preferable to a dictatorship for what I hope are obvious reasons, totalitarianism does not result in good outcomes (eg, the upcoming climate change fight is going to be insane).

We prefer it to the current United States government for what are also probably obvious reasons. Gerrymandering ruins the notion of representation within states, the senate means voters in Wyoming are represented 20x more than voters in New York, the supreme court means the opinions of nine unelected people make laws at the constitutional level that supersede the elected branches of government entirely, and there are many local optima in governing where the entire system just shuts down (see our ongoing difficulties keeping a funded government.)

The broad failure modes of representative democracy even in theory are also often terrible. A slight majority opinion is easily magnified into unanimous consensus at the policymaker level. In a single issue election, if something has 55% across all states, 100% of representatives will support it. With more issues voters don't even get a say in which ones, it makes protection of minority rights at the legislative level a joke. Institutional capture means often parties don't even try to represent their base: a majority of Democrats want a ceasefire in Gaza, but the party line is hard against it. There is no attention given to long tail issues, like plastic pollution or restrictions on advertising. Copyright reform has no supporters. (Tangentally, restrictions on advertising are a *hell* of a sleeper issue, it comes up more frequently than anything else we poll and opinions are uniformly negative.)

Direct democracy has the potential to solve an enormous number of problems, if various technical challenges can be solved. Extremely representative government is one aspect, but certainly not the only one. One of my favorites is that it has the potential to decouple every issue from needing a central party to make forward progress. It makes no sense that annoyance at trans people should also influence the antitrust enforcement priorities of the FTC. I believe the reason Donald Trump won is because although neither candidate represents a consensus bundle of issues, Harris missed the cluster that would have saved her.

There are also issues too unpopular at the national level to even be considered by a national party, but we could give them a fair hearing. An opinion of mine that falls into this bucket is that we should strive for full prison abolition, I don't think carceral justice is a concept that makes sense for the stated goal of "reintegrating the offender into society". With a national party system, I can't even get this concept on the agenda, with Agreed Upon Solutions I can just make my argument and have people vote. I will likely still lose, but I was at least given a fair shot, and any particularly reasonable points I can make might still be incorporated. Advocating for low maximum sentences for specific crimes certainly has potential to be agreeable.

Here are the main flaws that we see with direct democracy, and how we fix them:

* Difficulty scaling

* People are uninformed

* Suppression of minority rights

-

The scale problem I think you can see how we're approaching. Having a list of "Every Thing", as silly as it is, has dramatically increased comment participation over the open discussion, and solicited a lot of comments from what would normally be considered long tail issues. "Indigenous rights" is in our top 100 issues, I'm very proud of that. Our metrics look great, and we're very hyped for V2.

-

I will pretend like a representative democracy means we elect informed representatives, and that anyone at all has solved the problem of writing high-quality expert informed policy.

This is a subtle problem to fix, and we dedicate a lot of thought behind the scenes to it. We have a number of proposals; the most fleshed out ones center on the observation that while people may not be informed on a specific issue, they do have a reasonably good sense of who is. Given this observation, you can do tons of things: You can vote to reassign your vote to an expert. You can calculate something akin to PageRank for a given trust graph. You can use something like the ranked pair voting resolution method, (begin with the most strongly agreed on set of priorities, then add more recursively as long as the new position does not contradict the older ones,) using domain experts in a generic capacity. The promoters of AI claim it can also be used to solve this problem, but is an extremely unreliable technology for now and we don't want to depend on it.

The most ridiculous way would be if we can solve the enormous ballot ranking problem well enough, we can scale up again: We also have a list of Every Notable Person. It's about 6M entries, the vast majority of whom I have never heard of, so solving at this size is highly nontrivial. But, getting anything usable at all out of Every Thing was nontrivial, and we succeeded there even without a complete ranking.

There is a reasonable objection that this simply reinvents representative democracy, but I think the difference is academic. You are still expressing your individual opinions, and your individual opinions are being reflected in the final decision. Your opinion just happens to be "this person can answer these questions better than I can." It's a more expressive individual vote, not a departure from directness.

-

As mentioned above, representative democracy is usually terrible for minority rights, due to its conformity magnifying features. The "fix" for this problem in a representative democracy is to have some form of judicial review, essentially subjugating the entire democratic process to a handful of electorally unaccountable actors.

The problem with this idea is that there is no such thing as a non-political actor. Judges are also making political decisions, they simply claim that the legal political tradition (philosophies of interpreting laws, "judicial norms", etc) is somehow more objectively correct than that of the unwashed masses. If you believe that to be true, then only letting lawyers vote is a better system. This strikes me as a spiritual return to the philosophy of "only landholding males should be allowed to vote", which we believe has been conclusively rejected by history.

However, this area is where the twothirds system shines. It has strong built-in protections for minority rights, and the implementation methods we're looking at for the future make it even more robust.

-

Before I get more deeply into how that works, I'd like to clarify a point that's a bit too subtle to use in promotional posts: Traditional direct democracy and the twothirds system are not the same thing. The twothirds system is not total, meaning it does not always reach a decision. This makes it a kind of quasigovernment, which needs some sort of underlying mechanism that is total. This could be anything, from a dictatorship to an ad-hoc mess designed in the 1700s. This is where the existing United States government slots in: It's too large and carries too much infrastructural weight to be dismantled, it needs to be patched before major changes can be made. This notion of patching was the origin of the twothirds system: It's original design goal was to prevent the government from going off the rails, while simultaneously providing a channel where progress could always be made if the consensus was clear enough.

The twothirds system can be derived from first principles, if you frame the problem appropriately. We agree that simple majority rule is a *terrible* idea, and this fact falls out very naturally from the mathematics of the situation.

A government is a just a consensus algorithm. It is a process for taking pieces of text, and deciding "yes" or "no" to all of them. That's it. Using this capability, it is able to hire bureaucrats, purchase guns, and levy taxes; but all of them are organized exclusively through the ability to write down yes or no, and broadcast it consistently to everyone in the country.

This formulation of the problem of government suggests an analysis from the perspective of a distributed database. In this setting consensus problems have been extensively studied, and the gold standard for a given algorithm is known as "Byzantine fault tolerance", which measures how robust to manipulation a given system is for some number of malicious actors.

Let's pretend there are three parties, called Yes, No, and Screw You. Yes and No are attempting to have an honest debate over a yes-or-no question. Yes and No both respect each other's opinions, and both agree that their decisions should be made by voting. Screw You, on the other hand, is an actively malicious adversary. Screw You has perfect knowledge of the wrong answer, and it attempting to corrupt the outcome in any way they can. Screw You is allowed to corrupt some fraction of voters through mind control, making them do whatever causes the worst case outcome.

Your goal is to never make a mistake. You just detect the majority opinion of Yes and No wherever possible, but you must *never* allow Screw You to flip the outcome. There must also always be a way to make forward progress: Screw You should never be able to block a unanimous vote.

Some important notes: Screw You does not always vote for the worst outcome. Screw You votes to corrupt the system as a whole. If the system is reputation-based, Screw You may vote normally for a long period of time to gain access, then begin corrupting their vote. Additionally, Screw You does not need to choose the same people to corrupt for every vote. For any given vote, any subset of people may be compromised, assuming it is less than some predetermined limit; The goal of this analysis is to remain correct under as high a limit as possible.

These labels also do not have a moral dimension. Yes and No are the "correct" subset of voters, and Screw You absorbs the real world crap. These arguments are purely numeric, so defining "correct" is only a matter of making sure they remain a large enough fraction of the population. So for instance, if you wanted to propose a model where only voters with a certain level of information are "really qualified" to vote, but uninformed voters are able to get in, all you need to care about is whether or not the uninformed subset is smaller than the maximum threshold for Screw You. You are allowed to throw any number of voters under the bus for any reason, as long as the total number is below this threshold. Consensus algorithms are characterized by how large a fraction of the population can be Screw You before the majority opinion of Yes and No can no longer be reliably determined.

In a simple majority system, decisions can come down to 50.1%/49.9%. Screw You can control the vote with an arbitrarily small fraction of the population! This is why Democrats get so furious at the 0.4% of voters who went for Jill Stein, that 0.4% could be argued to have decided the vote.

Raising the threshold for agreement solves this problem, to a point. A 60% agreement threshold requires Screw You to control 20% of the vote to flip. But, if you make the threshold too large, Screw You regains power. A 99% threshold for agreement means Screw You only needs to control 1% of the population to shut down all progress on all issues.

It turns out the mathematically optimal threshold for decision making is the twothirds threshold. Screw You must control 33% of the population to control or shut down the vote. This can be strengthened a bit through pigeonhole arguments, Screw You cannot be the largest of the three parties. This is a reasonable assumption for all realistic scenarios, if it isn't then why are you surveying this population?

I like this system because it is maximally robust. There is *no* system that achieves a higher threshold of resilience, and there are theorems to back this up. If you elect representatives, then your threshold is a few hundred people. Money can easily corrupt the votes of a few hundred people, it's almost trivial. Right now it's so extensive that between the pressures of party politics and dependence on fundraising, politicians have almost no room to even attempt to do their jobs. They represent whatever makes them money. An "impartial" judge can take away minority rights just as easily as grant them. An "impartial" panel can do the same thing. A series of nested leaders, doing the most complex nested checks-and-balances dance you can imagine, will always be corruptible by controlling those involved. Appointing 3 million people would be an absurd number of people to assign to doing the tasks of representative government, and that's still only 1% of the population!

Consider the problem of trying to directly screw over a given minority. A directly elected representative system can fail at minority protection with 51% average approval. A gerrymanderable system can fail with 34%. A party system with mixed incentives can fail with 0%. The twothirds system always requires 67% before it reaches a conclusion.

Genocide should be controversial. If a call to genocide converges to agreeable, every other deterministic voting system in the world will have failed first. If yours doesn't, you provably got lucky on a nondeterministic coin flip: Screw You didn't decide to fuck you over.

Escaping this line of reasoning requires arguing that humans are straight up incapable of governing themselves: The more people vote, the less likely it is that the correct decision will be reached. In this view humans are animals, too stupid to organize for their collective benefit at all. In that case it's tragic that these animals are probably going to wipe themselves out, but ultimately the death of humanity has no moral significance beyond that of the death of crayfish. My life is ultimately a meaningless game, I can cross humans off my list, die, and not worry about it.

I don't believe that to be true, but the best system of government in that scenario is a dictatorship; this is Condorcet's Jury Theorem. I reject dictatorship, therefore I believe in the twothirds system.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

...The disillusionment is all the keener because Biden defied expectations early in his White House term, signing landmark legislation to alleviate poverty and tackle the climate crisis that thrilled his progressive wing. But with an election looming, critics say, he is gravitating back towards his comfort zone in the centre ground, and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza has caused particular fury.

“Progressives in the movement were pleasantly surprised to see President Biden push on a lot of domestic progressive priorities that we have been calling for,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director of the progressive group Justice Democrats. “But without question he has erased much of that progress with his continued support for a genocide that’s happening at the hands of a far-right Israeli government.”

Biden, 81, was long perceived as a middle-of-the-road moderate, representing Delaware for 36 years in the Senate before serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president. He came under scrutiny for a cosy relationship with the banking sector, his role in drawing up a 1994 crime bill that ushered in an era of mass incarceration and his failure to protect witness Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s supreme court confirmation hearing.

Yet once Biden reached the White House in 2021, he proved more ambitious than many expected. He appointed progressives to his administration, the most diverse in history, and the first Black woman – Ketanji Brown Jackson – to the supreme court, along with numerous judges of colour. He gained further credit on the anti-war left by pulling US troops out of Afghanistan after two decades.

The coronavirus pandemic invited him to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Biden delivered trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing, invest in infrastructure and combat the climate crisis. His lifelong support of trade unions came to the fore. A Wall Street Journal column, arguing that he would effectively run for a re-election in 2024 as a democratic socialist, offered the headline: “Joe Biden Is Bernie Sanders.”

But there were seeds of discontent. Some observers felt Biden could have used different tools to fulfill his promise of widespread student loan forgiveness, a plan ultimately struck down by the supreme court. There was disappointment that he did not use his bully pulpit more effectively to push Congress to pass police reform and voting rights legislation. Biden also received criticism for fist-bumping the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who approved the 2018 assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Even on climate, critics say, his record remains decidedly mixed. The Inflation Reduction Act directs $394bn to clean energy, the biggest such investment in history, and just last month the president ordered a pause on exports of liquefied natural gas, hailed as “a watershed moment” by activist and author Bill McKibben.

Yet Biden also approved the Willow oil-drilling project in a remote part of northern Alaska. Indeed, he has rubber stamped more oil and gas drilling permits on federal land than Donald Trump at the same stage of his presidency. US oil production reached an all-time high last year.

Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for climate-focused youth group Sunrise Movement, said: “The way that Joe Biden is acting right now, if it continues for the next nine months, is a recipe for him losing millions of votes from young people and losing the election.

“So many young people have been frustrated with Biden for approving new fossil fuel projects. His administration has made some important shifts around Fema [Federal Emergency Management Agency] rules, for instance, around air pollution. But while he’s making these steps forward, he’s also taking these really loud steps back that honestly made many young people more disillusioned with him than less.”

Last month progressives condemned Biden’s decision to launch retaliatory strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. They argued that he violated the constitution by not seeking congressional approval first and was breaking his promise to keep America out of intractable wars in the Middle East.

Meanwhile the president threw his weight behind a bipartisan Senate bill to tighten border security – and send military aid to Israel and Ukraine – which would severely curtail migration and limit asylum in a way that broke a campaign promise. Biden even adopted Republican language, saying he would “shut down the border” when he was given the authority to do so.

Andrabi of Justice Democrats said of the bill, which failed in the Senate: “We saw Biden work with mostly Republicans and Kyrsten Sinema, who has left the Democratic party, zero Hispanic caucus members, zero border state Democrats to craft a Trump-like Republican anti-immigration bill that Republicans were never going to vote for.

“To prove what? Maybe that he’s willing to treat migrant families like Trump did, as long as it comes with funding for war. That’s not sufficient. That is not progressive. That is not even core Democratic.”

But nothing has done more to drive a wedge between Biden and the left than the war in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s attacks in Israel on 7 October that left 1,200 people dead and more than 240 taken hostage. He championed Israel’s right to defend itself and only gradually voiced concerns about its rightwing government’s destructive military campaign that has killed more than 27,000 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.

A recent NBC News poll found 15% of voters under 35 approve of Biden’s handling of the war while 70% disapprove. Protesters disrupted his speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina as the president spoke out against racism, at a United Auto Workers gathering in Washington and at a political event in Columbia, South Carolina. It is a vivid schism as the president, already facing concerns over his age, gears up for a hard fought race for the White House.

Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, said: “A lot of independents and Democrats are sickened in a gut punch sort of a way. Biden is so out of touch with the base that he absolutely will need this fall to be re-elected. Young people are more politicised and more energised than ever before and some of these Gaza demonstrations are propelled by young people turning out. They’re just disgusted with Biden and it didn’t have to be this way.”

The backlash threatens Biden’s chances of re-election, not because progressives will switch from him to likely opponent Trump in decisive numbers, but because a sliver might choose to sit out the election or turn to a third party candidate such as Cornel West – potentially enough to make all the difference in Michigan and other swing states in the electoral college.

Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the the New School for Social Research in New York, said: “Part of me thinks that Biden has basically given up on reassembling on the Obama coalition and decided that the number that they lose among progressives and the young they will make up with [Nikki] Haley Republicans, moderates and independents.

“Since there’s no meaningful primary, he doesn’t have to appeal to the base. All of that makes for a campaign where he’s going to run to the centre and progressives are going to feel very much in the wilderness.”

For the third election in a row, progressives are confronted with the argument that a vote for anyone but the Democratic nominee is effectively a vote for Trump, a man who has demonised immigrants, vowed to shut down the border immediately and resume construction of a border wall. There is no reason to believe that he would urge Israel to exercise restraint in Gaza.

A dulling of the early optimism about Biden’s progressivism may have been inevitable as the presidential election loomed. When Republicans won the House in the 2022 midterm elections, the window of opportunity for sweeping legislation slammed shut. The war in Ukraine has consumed huge time and resources. The cracks between Biden and a younger generation over Israel were always there but it took the Hamas attack to bring them to the surface.

Matt Bennett, an executive vice-president of the centrist thinktank Third Way, describes Biden as a moderate by disposition who believes in compromise. “He’s governed the way he promised he would when he ran for president, the way he has always portrayed himself, which is somebody who’s at the centre of the Democratic electorate,” he said.

“He’s not on the liberal fringe; he is not a conservative Democrat. He’s always navigated to about the middle point of where the party is. That’s why he got there before Obama did on marriage equality, famously, because he saw where the party was headed and that’s where he has steered quite successfully as president. No one’s going to be happy with him all the time but most Democrats should appreciate that he’s done an extraordinarily good job.”

But Andrabi of Justice Democrats is less sanguine. He warns that Biden is failing to follow the will of the voters who elected him – and could pay a price.

He said: “It’s imperative that the Biden administration and Democratic leadership listen to those voters who are screaming at the top of their lungs in rallies, in meetings, everywhere they go that the current state of the Biden administration’s policies in Gaza, on immigration, on climate change is insufficient for core bases of their voters that got President Biden elected, that got Democrats a majority in the Senate and that is going to be crucial to getting Democrats to flip the House.

“But they’re not listening and lip service is not going to convince anyone when what we are seeing on the other side is nearly 30,000 dead Palestinians, let alone the ongoing existential crisis of climate change or an immigration system that is broken and their solution is to criminalise more folks. None of these are what the core base of the Democratic voters support.”

[beardedmrbean]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday is taking up challenges by commercial fishermen to a fee requirement that could achieve a long-sought goal of business and conservative interests: limiting a wide swath of government regulations.

Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in front of a court that, like the rest of the federal judiciary, was remade during Donald Trump’s presidency by conservative interests that were motivated as much by weakening the regulatory state as social issues including abortion.

Lawyers for the fishermen are asking the justices to overturn a 40-year-old decision that is among the most frequently cited high court cases in support of regulatory power, including on the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections.

Lower courts used the decision known colloquially as Chevron to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that herring fishermen pay for government-mandated observers who track their fish intake.

The 1984 decision states that when laws aren’t crystal clear, federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details as long as they come up with a reasonable interpretation. “Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court in 1984, explaining why they should play a limited role. The court ruled 6-0, with three justices recused.

But the current high court, with a 6-3 conservative majority that includes three appointees of Trump, has been increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. At least four justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have questioned the Chevron decision.

Opponents of the Chevron doctrine argue that judges apply it too often to rubber-stamp decisions made by government bureaucrats. Judges must exercise their own authority and judgment to say what the law is, the lawyers for the company that owns the Rhode Island based Relentless and Persistence fishing boats told the court.

They also say that agencies effectively act as judges in their own cases. “It is patently unfair for a court to defer to an agency’s interpretation in cases where the agency itself is a litigant, before that same court, in the actual case at hand,” the lawyers wrote.

Defending the rulings that upheld the fees, the Biden administration said that overturning the Chevron decision would produce a “convulsive shock” to the legal system.

“Chevron gives appropriate weight to the expertise, often of a scientific or technical nature, that federal agencies can bring to bear in interpreting federal statutes,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote on behalf of the administration.

Environmental, health advocacy groups, civil rights organizations, organized labor and Democrats on the national and state level are urging the court to leave the Chevron decision in place.

Gun, e-cigarette, farm, timber and home-building groups are among the business groups supporting the fishermen. Conservative interests that also intervened in recent high court cases limiting regulation of air and water pollution are backing the fishermen as well.

The justices are hearing two cases on the same issue. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is recused in one case, from New Jersey, because she took part in it at an earlier stage when she was an appeals court judge. The full court is participating in the case from Rhode Island, which the justices added to their docket several months later.

[oberoilawchambers]

SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS BAN ON FIRECRACKERS FOR A POLLUTION-FREE DIWALI: A LEGAL PERSPECTIVE

The Supreme Court has announced that upholding the ban on the sale and use of firecrackers across the country.

The Supreme Court has announced that upholding the ban on the sale and use of firecrackers across the country has far-reaching implications, not only for public health and environmental protection but also for legal precedent and the interpretation of fundamental rights. The court’s ruling, which was first imposed in 2018, has been challenged by several petitioners, but the court has reaffirmed its position, citing the well-documented health and environmental hazards associated with fireworks. The court emphasized that the right to celebrate Diwali does not supersede the fundamental right to clean air and a healthy environment.

LEGAL STATUS QUO

It must be noted that bursting crackers lead to a violation of Fundamental rights along with the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981; The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; and The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000. regulations. The decision has significant legal implications, not only for the regulation of firecrackers but also for the interpretation of fundamental rights and the application of environmental protection laws. The court’s ruling sets a strong precedent for future cases involving conflicts between individual rights and environmental protection.

The decision also highlights the importance of scientific evidence in informing legal decisions. The court’s reliance on scientific studies on the health and environmental impacts of firecrackers demonstrates the importance of evidence-based policymaking.

Moreover, the court’s decision has far-reaching implications for environmental jurisprudence in India. The court’s recognition of the right to a clean environment as a fundamental right and its emphasis on the precautionary principle and polluter pays principle have strengthened the legal framework for environmental protection in the country.

The Supreme Court’s decision is a major victory for public health and environmental protection. Firecrackers are a major source of air pollution, particularly in urban areas. They release harmful pollutants such as particulate matter and sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory problems, heart disease, and other health problems.

In addition, firecrackers can cause noise pollution, which can disrupt sleep, increase stress levels, and even cause hearing loss. The Supreme Court’s decision will help to reduce air and noise pollution and improve the overall quality of life for millions of Indians.

CASE LAWS SUPPORTING THE BAN

The Supreme Court’s decision is grounded in a strong foundation of case law that has established the importance of environmental protection and the fundamental right to clean air. Key case laws supporting the ban include:

Arjun Gopal vs. Union of India (2018): In this landmark case, the Supreme Court recognized the right to a clean environment as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The court also emphasized the precautionary principle, which states that even in the absence of scientific certainty, if there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm to the environment, precautionary measures must be taken.

M.C. Mehta vs. Union of India (1987): This case established the principle of polluter pays, which holds that the polluter must bear the cost of pollution. The principle has been applied to various industries, including the firecracker industry.

Vellore Citizens Forum vs. Union of India (2011): In this case, the Supreme Court recognized the right to a healthy environment as a part of the right to life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The court also emphasized the need for environmental impact assessments to prevent pollution.

BALANCING THE FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL

The Supreme Court’s decision is also a significant development in the interpretation of fundamental rights. The court recognised that the right to celebrate Diwali is a fundamental right, but it is not absolute. The court held that the right to celebrate Diwali must be exercised in a manner that does not infringe upon the fundamental right to clean air and a healthy environment.

This decision is a reminder that all rights must be exercised in a responsible manner. The right to celebrate Diwali does not give individuals the right to harm the environment or the health of others. The Supreme Court’s decision is expected to have a significant impact on future cases involving conflicts between individual rights and environmental protection. The court’s ruling sets a strong precedent for future cases and will likely be cited in many future legal challenges.

The decision is also a reminder that the courts have a crucial role in protecting the environment. The courts can use their power to enforce environmental laws and regulations and to hold individuals and businesses accountable for their actions.

CONCLUSION

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban on firecrackers is a landmark ruling that prioritizes public health and environmental protection while upholding fundamental rights. The decision is a testament to the court’s commitment to upholding the Constitution and ensuring the well-being of all citizens.

By upholding the ban, the court has sent a clear message that public health and environmental protection are paramount. The decision is expected to have a significant impact on air quality during Diwali, particularly in urban areas, and contribute to a healthier environment for all.

Tammana Bahl Oberoi Law Chambers Contact Us

[odnewsin]

SC to hear pollution cases related to Delhi, other cities today

New Delhi: The Supreme Court will expand its focus on air pollution to other cities in India during a hearing scheduled for Thursday. A Bench led by Justice Abhay S. Oka has sought details from the Central government about the country’s most polluted cities, indicating that the issue will be addressed in phases. This follows proceedings that were held December 16, where the Division Bench of…

[hindustanmorning]

Supreme Court criticizes AAP, appoints commissioner to investigate pollution

The Delhi pollution case was presented in front of the Supreme Court. While in the hearing, the court showed its dissatisfaction with the Delhi government. The court stated its skepticism regarding the Delhi government’s claim. While in the court session, there was a request to take into account the restrictions enforced under GRAP-4 because of pollution in Delhi. Supreme court announced that it…

[tfgadgets]

Supreme Court Raps Punjab, Haryana Over Stubble Burning

New Delhi: The Supreme Court grilled the central – and Punjab and Haryana – governments on Wednesday as arguments over states’ non-compliance with, and failure to enforce, anti-pollution measures, rolled into yet another hearing, even as air quality in Delhi and the national capital region remains ‘very poor’ and prompts concern over the risk of increased respiratory diseases. A bench of Justice…

[mariacallous]

so what's next in American Judicial Antics? 5th circuit issuing a nationwide injunction requiring everyone to vote for trump? SCOTUS ruling that corporations have a constitutional right to poison the water?

Here's the cases SCOTUS agreed to hear (so far) and will issue rulings on by next June:

Williams v. Washington, No. 23-191

Issue(s): Whether exhaustion of state administrative remedies is required to bring claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in state court.

Glossip v. Oklahoma, No. 22-7466

Issue(s): (1) Whether the state’s suppression of the key prosecution witness’ admission that he was under the care of a psychiatrist and failure to correct that witness’ false testimony about that care and related diagnosis violate the due process of law under Brady v. Maryland and Napue v. Illinois; (2) whether the entirety of the suppressed evidence must be considered when assessing the materiality of Brady and Napue claims; (3) whether due process of law requires reversal where a capital conviction is so infected with errors that the state no longer seeks to defend it; and (4) whether the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals' holding that the Oklahoma Post-Conviction Procedure Act precluded post-conviction relief is an adequate and independent state-law ground for the judgment.

Garland v. VanDerStok, No. 23-852

Issue(s): (1) Whether “a weapon parts kit that is designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive” under 27 C.F.R. § 478.11 is a “firearm” regulated by the Gun Control Act of 1968; and (2) whether “a partially complete, disassembled, or nonfunctional frame or receiver” that is “designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to function as a frame or receiver” under 27 C.F.R. § 478.12(c) is a “frame or receiver” regulated by the act.

Lackey v. Stinnie, No. 23-621

Issue(s): (1) Whether a party must obtain a ruling that conclusively decides the merits in its favor, as opposed to merely predicting a likelihood of later success, to prevail on the merits under 42 U.S.C. § 1988; and (2) whether a party must obtain an enduring change in the parties’ legal relationship from a judicial act, as opposed to a non-judicial event that moots the case, to prevail under Section 1988.

Bufkin v. McDonough, No. 23-713

Issue(s): Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims must ensure that the benefit-of-the-doubt rule in 38 U.S.C. § 5107(b) was properly applied during the claims process in order to satisfy 38 U.S.C. § 7261(b)(1), which directs the court to “take due account” of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ application of that rule.

Royal Canin U.S.A. v. Wullschleger, No. 23-677

Issue(s): (1) Whether a post-removal amendment of a complaint to omit federal questions defeats federal-question subject matter jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331; and (2) whether such a post-removal amendment of a complaint precludes a district court from exercising supplemental jurisdiction over the plaintiff’s remaining state-law claims pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1367.

Medical Marijuana v. Horn, No. 23-365

Issue(s): Whether economic harms resulting from personal injuries are injuries to “business or property by reason of” the defendant’s acts for purposes of a civil treble-damages action under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Bouarfa v. Mayorkas, No. 23-583

Issue(s): Whether a visa petitioner may obtain judicial review when an approved petition is revoked on the basis of nondiscretionary criteria.

City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 23-753

Issue(s): Whether the Clean Water Act allows the Environmental Protection Agency (or an authorized state) to impose generic prohibitions in National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits that subject permit-holders to enforcement for violating water quality standards without identifying specific limits to which their discharges must conform.

Delligatti v. U.S., No. 23-825

Issue(s): Whether a crime that requires proof of bodily injury or death, but can be committed by failing to take action, has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force.

Advocate Christ Medical Center v. Becerra, No. 23-715

Issue(s): Whether the phrase “entitled ... to benefits,” used twice in the same sentence of the Medicare Act, means the same thing for Medicare part A and Supplemental Social Security benefits, such that it includes all who meet basic program eligibility criteria, whether or not benefits are actually received.

Facebook v. Amalgamated Bank, No. 23-980

Issue(s): Whether risk disclosures are false or misleading when they do not disclose that a risk has materialized in the past, even if that past event presents no known risk of ongoing or future business harm.

E.M.D. Sales v. Carrera, No. 23-217

Issue(s): Whether the burden of proof that employers must satisfy to demonstrate the applicability of a Fair Labor Standards Act exemption is a mere preponderance of the evidence or clear and convincing evidence.

Kousisis v. U.S., No. 23-909

Issue(s): (1) Whether deception to induce a commercial exchange can constitute mail or wire fraud, even if inflicting economic harm on the alleged victim was not the object of the scheme; (2) whether a sovereign’s statutory, regulatory, or policy interest is a property interest when compliance is a material term of payment for goods or services; and (3) whether all contract rights are “property.”

NVIDIA Corp. v. E. Ohman J:or Fonder AB, No. 23-970

Issue(s): (1) Whether plaintiffs seeking to allege scienter under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act based on allegations about internal company documents must plead with particularity the contents of those documents; and (2) whether plaintiffs can satisfy the Act's falsity requirement by relying on an expert opinion to substitute for particularized allegations of fact.

Wisconsin Bell v. U.S., ex rel. Todd Heath, No. 23-1127

Issue(s): Whether reimbursement requests submitted to the Federal Communications Commission's E-rate program are “claims” under the False Claims Act.

Feliciano v. Department of Transportation, No. 23-861

Issue(s): Whether a federal civilian employee called or ordered to active duty under a provision of law during a national emergency is entitled to differential pay even if the duty is not directly connected to the national emergency.

Republic of Hungary v. Simon, No. 23-867

Issue(s): (1) Whether historical commingling of assets suffices to establish that proceeds of seized property have a commercial nexus with the United States under the expropriation exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act; (2) whether a plaintiff must make out a valid claim that an exception to the FSIA applies at the pleading stage, rather than merely raising a plausible inference; and (3) whether a sovereign defendant bears the burden of producing evidence to affirmatively disprove that the proceeds of property taken in violation of international law have a commercial nexus with the United States under the expropriation exception to the FSIA.

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, No. 23-975

Issue(s): Whether the National Environmental Policy Act requires an agency to study environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority.

Dewberry Group v. Dewberry Engineers, No. 23-900

Issue(s): Whether an award of the “defendant’s profits” under the Lanham Act can include an order for the defendant to disgorge the distinct profits of legally separate non-party corporate affiliates.

Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida, No. 23-997

Issue(s): Whether, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a former employee — who was qualified to perform her job and who earned post-employment benefits while employed — loses her right to sue over discrimination with respect to those benefits solely because she no longer holds her job.

U.S. v. Miller, No. 23-824

Issue(s): Whether a bankruptcy trustee may avoid a debtor’s tax payment to the United States under 11 U.S.C. § 544(b) when no actual creditor could have obtained relief under the applicable state fraudulent-transfer law outside of bankruptcy.

U.S. v. Skrmetti, No. 23-477

Issue(s): Whether Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all medical treatments intended to allow “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or to treat “purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity,” violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

[rjzimmerman]

Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to California Tailpipe Emissions Limits. (New York Times)

My guess: The five neanderthals on the US Supreme Court (chief justice roberts and justices kavanaugh, alito, thomas and gorsuch), perhaps to be joined by barrett) will rule in favor or trump and the continued degradation of Earth. Why? Because trump wants them to do that, and because they have pea-sized brains and no sense of the law, other than what their pea-sized brains think the law is.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to consider whether business groups may challenge an unusual federal program that lets California set its own limits on tailpipe emissions to combat climate change.

The groups, including fuel producers and sellers, told the justices that the court’s intervention was needed to prevent California from effectively setting national policy. “Without this court’s immediate review,” their petition seeking review said, “California’s unlawful standards will continue to dictate the composition of the nation’s automobile market.”

The challengers asked the court to decide two questions: whether they had suffered the sort of injuries that gave them standing to sue and whether the Environmental Protection Agency program granting California a waiver to set its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions was lawful.

The court agreed to decide only the first question, on standing, and did not act on a separate petition from 17 states asking the court to rule on whether Congress had violated the Constitution in empowering the E.P.A. to give California a special status.

The law authorizes the E.P.A. to grant California a waiver from nationwide standards even though other states and localities are not free to set their own limits. In their petition, the challengers said the law improperly deputizes California to act as a “junior-varsity E.P.A.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in an unsigned opinion in April, rejected the lawsuit, ruling that the challengers lacked standing. The appeals court reasoned that fuel producers would not be directly harmed by the waiver, which directly affects vehicle manufacturers.

The California waiver, created under the 1970 Clean Air Act, has for decades served as a tool to allow the state, which has historically had the most polluted air in the nation, to enact tougher state-level clean air standards than those set by the federal government.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Elections are about the future. That’s why I am excited about Vice President Kamala Harris. She represents a fresh start for American politics. She can offer a hopeful, unifying vision. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president. And I know she can defeat Donald Trump. There is now an even sharper, clearer choice in this election. On one side is a convicted criminal who cares only about himself and is trying to turn back the clock on our rights and our country. On the other is a savvy former prosecutor and successful vice president who embodies our faith that America’s best days are still ahead. It’s old grievances versus new solutions. Ms. Harris’s record and character will be distorted and disparaged by a flood of disinformation and the kind of ugly prejudice we’re already hearing from MAGA mouthpieces. She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share. I know a thing or two about how hard it can be for strong women candidates to fight through the sexism and double standards of American politics. I’ve been called a witch, a “nasty woman” and much worse. I was even burned in effigy. As a candidate, I sometimes shied away from talking about making history. I wasn’t sure voters were ready for that. And I wasn’t running to break a barrier; I was running because I thought I was the most qualified to do the job. While it still pains me that I couldn’t break that highest, hardest glass ceiling, I’m proud that my two presidential campaigns made it seem normal to have a woman at the top of the ticket. Ms. Harris will face unique additional challenges as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party’s ticket. That’s real, but we shouldn’t be afraid. It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible. After all, I won the national popular vote by nearly three million in 2016, and it’s not so long ago that Americans overwhelmingly elected our first Black president. As we saw in the 2022 midterms, abortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before. With Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave. [...] Ms. Harris is chronically underestimated, as are so many women in politics, but she is well prepared for this moment. As a prosecutor and attorney general in California, she took on drug traffickers, polluters and predatory lenders. As a U.S. senator, she rigorously questioned squirming Trump administration officials and nominees and was inspiring to watch. As vice president, Ms. Harris has sat with the president in the Situation Room, helping make the hardest decisions a leader can make. And when the extremist Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, she became the administration’s most passionate and effective advocate for restoring women’s reproductive rights.

Hillary Clinton for The New York Times detailing the sexism and double standards for women in politics face in regards to her 2016 Presidential run and Kamala Harris's 2024 Presidential run (07.23.2024).

Former First Lady and 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wrote an excellent opinion column in The New York Times detailing the sexism and double standards for women in politics face, particularly in regards to her 2016 Presidential race and Kamala Harris’s 2024 Presidential race.

The sexism and misogyny-laden attacks against Harris will make the ones aimed at Clinton look like a minor league baseball game, because Harris is Black and South Asian.

Let this be a reminder that we need to elect a Momala and not a fascist felon!