Interesting if this ruling can be used to kick the TX non-state law allowing individuals to sue people seeking an abortion.
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I think this is a macro economic issue because it seems to me to fall under the interstate commerce clause.
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In somewhat related news: a budget bill in the House was pulled from consideration.
A rider had been amended to the bill that purported to outlaw state and local laws banning employer discrimination against employees who use birth control.
Can’t post a link, because it names names that can’t be named, but Google will bring it up.
Surprise…Surprise…who would have thought that the “leaders” in the House would try to use “must pass” legislation as a conduit to enact extremist measures.
/sarcasm
Steve
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What is interesting and so dumb is that that has not been challenged yet up to the Supremes. It is well beyond time that it was declared unconstitutional.
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When the court is a coward, and doesn’t want to take a controversial case, they can get very persnickety about “standing”. That is how the Congressionally passed laws establishing religion have survived since the 50s.
My bet is SCOTUS would require a challenge to the TX law be brought by someone who was sued by someone under that statute, and lost.
Steve
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The Court is (finally) realizing that it has far far overstepped its legitimacy and is now hunkering down. It is becoming obvious, looking at the younger voting cohorts replacing the fading geezer boomers, that if we get through 2024 without a collapse of constitutional order many recent SCOTUS decisions will be reversed.
david fb
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Sadly, that is a big IF
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Yes. And WHY must we discuss (carefully, respectfully) this political H-bomb? Because, amongst other tea leaves at the bottom of our current cuppa, Moodys just pointed screamed out a warning to Wall Street and Capitol Hill, although the latter is incapable of reacting coherently, let alone giving a damn, my dear:
I believe our economic picture from a purely normal METARist perspective would be rather bright, if our politics were not so extraordinarily poisoned.
What am I doing? Well, I remain happy with my Mexican and European investments, mostly in GCC proof & sweetwater endowed real estate, but also in a small port of private loans to logistics and transportation small businesses in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties of Southern California. I am pulling out of other securities and using the funds to pay off residual mortgages in Europe and to stick “under my mattress” mostly in the form of copper funds and Euro CDs. I am also doubling my annual contributions to charities that benefit from my estate anyway when I die.
Is anyone else reacting financially specifically to the increasing political risks in the USA?
david fb
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I am in cash. Better days to invest will be coming.
My art career is beginning to look up. Ethereum is now in a bull market. Yeah, pullbacks happen but it has begun to go mad again. It will be gone mad for the next two years.
On a different note the FED is not hiking rates currently in front of the holiday buying seaon. That makes sense.
But worse the FED wants to see if we default. If we default rates will hike themselves in the marketplace. The FED unspoken has no faith in the House.
If the sailing is smooth in the new year the FED will hike rates at least twice. Come early January the pundits will be making the odds with a better view of the math.
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That Constitutional order thing? Like democratic processes? Like people accepting they lost?
Sticks in my mind that I recently posted about a Shiny faction in Michigan trying to invalidate the vote of “we the people”, who wrote reproductive rights into the state constitution last year, passing with 56.66% approval.
Today, on the news wire, I saw that an equally Shiny faction in Ohio is pushing legislation to prohibit state courts having any jurisdiction on interpreting the reproductive rights amendment the people of that state recently approved. If the amendment is beyond the jurisdiction of the courts, seems the amendment would be unenforceable. This sounds much like the earlier “sovereign state legislature” case, where plaintiffs contended that actions of the state legislature are not restrained by either the state constitution or state courts.
As one Shiny “thought leader” recently offered “elections don’t work for us anymore”, implying they intend to have their way by means other than a mandate from voters.
Steve
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The amendment is, by definition, a part of the constitution (of the state). If the courts can not rule on something in that constitution, then the state no longer has a constitution and is in violation of the US Constitution. So the attempt to make something in the constitution beyond the reach of the courts is null and void, by definition.
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Well, we will see what develops. As in Michigan, the Ohio amendment passed with about 57% of the vote.
And what do the L&Ses in Columbus say?
“To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative,” said the mix of fairly new and veteran lawmakers who are all vice-chairs of various House committees. “The Ohio legislature alone will consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing laws based on public hearings and input from legal experts on both sides.”
Here is an article on the SCOTUS decision, last June, on the sovereign or “independent legislature” theory, that claims state legislatures are not constrained by constitutions or courts.
Writing for the court majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that the U.S. Constitution does not, as the lawmakers had claimed, insulate their actions from review by the state courts. To the contrary, he said, state legislative power is constrained by the federal and state constitutions, as well as ordinary state laws.
But the Shinier factions are trying to invalidate votes of “we the people”. The old gang of (L&Ses) in Michigan repeatedly tried to overturn or ignore the vote of “we the people”. Some years ago, the people of Michigan voted to repeal the “emergency manager” law, where a Governor appointed bureaucrat usurps the power of local, elected officials. So, the (L&Ses) simply passed a new “emergency manager” law to restore the Gov’s dictatorial powers. When “we the people” voted to take redistricting away from the (L&Ses), they held a lame duck session to try and gut or invalidate that law too, but failed, so far.
Here’s an article about the goings on in Ohio.
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All I know is that one political party is taking this country down a very dark and dangerous path and it greatly concerns me.
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We need to eliminate the bad political party and have one party rule for a few decades. That’s how all the good things can really get done politically.
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We need to take it down a notch so they remain a minority party, the opposition is needed, helpful to keep the path centered… A bit of camber…
The reasonable people need to split from the extremists. Parties in the US have split, and new parties risen, before.
Trouble is, we have gotten to the point where the extremists think they can ignore the outcomes of elections. We have seen it in Michigan, and we are seeing it in Ohio now. For several years now, the Shinies have embraced the “US is a republic, not a democracy” narrative, as if a republican form of government, and democratic processes, are mutually exclusive. That narrative was promoted by Robert Welch, founder of the John Burch Society.
Nor was this Welch’s only anticipation of the present-day reactionary temper on the right; he and his anti-statist allies saw social democracy as the harbinger of eventual Communist takeover, and so loudly insisted that the U.S. was never meant to be a democracy and that the embrace of democracy spelled certain ruin. Recommending The People’s Pottage, an anti–New Deal tract by his friend Garrett Garrett as “required reading” for all Birchers, Welch hailed its clear-eyed account of “the Communist-inspired conversion of America, from a constitutional republic of self-reliant people into an unbridled democracy of hand-out seeking whiners.” A common refrain of the Bircher faithful was that America is “a Republic … not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way!”
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As the number of “reality” shows multiplies on TV, ever more singing and dancing and “bachelorette” shows, I wonder what mechanism is at work. Is it entirely that the shows are cheap to produce, so they make a handsome profit, even with mediocre ratings? Or is it because they do not tell a story? They do not have a message? I have read that TV in the 50s became mindless pap, to not run afoul of the “red menace” hysteria that gripped the country.
In the 60s, after Joe McCarthy had expired from whatever his indulgences were, TV became more innovative. Nearly every episode of the original Star Trek had a message, which would be derided as “woke” today. “I Spy” dared to show an African America have equal status with a white man. Even “The Dick vanDyke Show” had black faces in the crowd, though, at the moment, I only recall Greg Morris having a significant part. Mary Tyler Moore wore slacks. Radical for the time.
So, is the media now retreating from saying anything, out of fear of the weight of “right thinking” government landing on them?
Steve
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They’re cheaper. Yes. They are vastly cheaper to produce. A reality show can cost between $100,000 to $500,000 per hour to produce. An hour of scripted drama will run you $3M to $5M, and will have higher residuals for the rest of its life as well. The two genres will produce modestly different ratings, but the cost is so overwhelmingly tilted that the economic decision is easy.
Networks long ago took over the studio function of ownership* because they could recoup on the back-end through syndication and other windows, but that model is breaking down because of cord-cutting and over-proliferation of choices for viewers, making re-runs less appetizing for monetization. [*Hey, nice idea for a show. How’d’ya like to give me half ownership so it gets on TV someplace?]
It’s unpopular to offer “too much choice” as a problem, but when I stand in front of the ketchup aisle for 10 minutes trying to find the one I want, I sometimes wonder. Likewise with the proliferation of cheap programming, which has crowded out much of the well funded stuff and produced cracks in the historical television model.
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An hour of NOT WATCHING “reality shows” can save your life.
So, DON’T WATCH.
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There was a thread on the DIS board, about the company looking to sell ABC. Once in a while, I read one of the click bait “has your favorite TV show been cancelled” articles. Clicking through the shows that have been spiked, I have noticed many of them are exclusively on a streaming service, vs a broadcast network. Then add cable cord cutting, and the botched transition to ATSC 3.0 for over the air broadcast, and I start thinking there may not be much value in the traditional networks going forward.
I have noticed many TVs on the market now seem to be geared more for streaming than conventional network program viewing. They no longer have number keypads on the remote to direct tune specific channels. They are voice activated, so you ask “Alexa” to find a particular program for you. My new Samsung still has a number keypad on the remote, but was defaulted to turn on to the last streaming channel viewed, rather than the last channel I viewed, which was over the air broadcast. It was also defaulted to turn on with the streaming app menu on the bottom half of the screen, rather than going to an unobstructed view of the channel the set was tuned to.
Steve
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