Steve Vladeck – BlueAnon legal institutionalist selling tribalist lies

I can't remember when I started following him on Substack; in part, I can't remember whether, in a chicken-or-egg moment, it was before or after I read his seemingly at the time very good book, but one which now comes off as a petard-hoister. (More on that in a minute.)

I know I'd seen Kuffner reference him a few times before either the chicken or the egg. I should have been more skeptical then, but was not.

So, what "triggered" me?

This Substack of late Monday, trying to .... ameliorate?? ... Bagger Vance and his comments about the judiciary exceeding their bounds. What he says Vance is right about is a commonplace; what he claims Vance is not right about is petard-hoisting.

The wrong is getting wrong the rulings of John Marshall in Worcester (and a degree on Cherokee Nation) and Roger Taney in ex parte Merryman.

I fired first on Merryman, being a Civil War buff and quite familiar with the basics of it. On Lincoln vs Taney on Merryman, Lincoln DID ignore Taney until submitting the matter in general to Congress. Plus, Wiki notes that there’s a question of just what type of decision Taney was making. 

To expand beyond that as a Substack note? Lincoln asked Attorney General Edward Bates for a legal opinion, but only a day AFTER he sent a message to Congress as part of the start of its special session that he had called.

On Worcester, since Indians are “sovereign nations” under the constitution, Jackson’s US government would, in theory, be needed to enforce the ruling if white traders ignored Cherokee policing. So, Vladeck is hair-splittingly wrong there.

Here's where the nutgraphs come

That said, Marshall was chicken-shit for not compelling US Marshals, if nothing else, per Wiki’s article, to enforce it. That said, Taney was also chicken-shit, in that he never actually ordered Merryman’s release. And, THIS is the bottom line.

And, Vladeck knows it.

In both these significant cases, Chief Justices deliberately chose NOT to push their theoretical enforcement power so as to not see how much it would be folded, spindled and mutilated.

Then, there's this.

But the reality is that there is no history or tradition in this country of presidents ignoring judicial rulings on the ground that they are “illegal.”

The fact he has "illegal" in scare quotes, in my opinion, says that he knows he's engaged in hand-waving. 

Also, and related, with Lincoln, as the Merryman piece notes, later on in 1861, various officers of his administration more fully ignored habeas writs, including blocking or even arresting the people serving the writs. That's despite Taney explicitly saying that was verboten.

I'm sure Vladeck knows all I wrote in the paragraph above, or he should If not, he should, including that Lincoln, AFTER the July 4 special session of Congress to boot, had these arrests or blockings, which Congress had not addressed, merely the presidential power over suspending habeaus when it was not in session.

Finally, the petard-hoisting, since I have a quote from Vladeck's book that I typed into my review, namely:

The Court cannot ... independently coerce obedience to its decrees. ... (The Court's power) lies in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people's acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation's law means. ... The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decisions on the terms the Court claims for them, as truly ground in principle, not as compromises with social and political pressures.

I love the sound of petards being hoist in the morning!

And people are forking over, cumulatively, tens of thousands of dollars a month for such tribalist #BlueMAGA brilliance?

Texas Progressives talk vaxxes, raids and more

Expect more of this the next four years. A West Texas county with a kindergarten vaccine rate of just 84 percent is the center of a measles outbreak. 

TCEQ is way behind the curve on distributing money for a program designed to address leaking abandoned oil wells. Shock me. But? It's also laughable the lege only put $10 million in the program. Also shock me.

Yeah, the thought of the Railroad Commission actually regulating carbon dioxide injection capture wells is laughable. 

We've seen these massive immigrant raids in Tex-ass before. Back in Shrub Bush's presidency. The Monthly revisits Cactus, Texas, site of a massive 2006 raid.

Many Panhandle ranchers are struggling with recovery from last year's wildfires and some are selling. Here's a longform overview.

SocraticGadfly offers his thoughts on that crazy Luka-AD trade.

Off the Kuff is not impressed by Greg Abbott's loosely professed support for sports betting in Texas. 

Franklin Strong bemoans the end of the Department of Education's civil rights investigations into school book bans.  

CultureMap Austin considers the possibility of Lockhart becoming the state's live music capital.  

The Barbed Wire published a long expose on sexual harassment at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music.  

Deceleration shared photos from the San Antonio student walkouts that protested ICE raids and other anti-immigrant actions.  

Texas Monthly profiles Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the nonprofit Democracy Forward, which just scored a win in court against the Trump administration’s proposed buyouts of federal employees.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said John Whitmire’s narrow conception of public safety excludes traffic safety & fighting for democracy. 

Buffy Sainte-Marie has officially been stripped of her Order of Canada award over her pretendian claims.

White South Africans tell Trump "no thanks" on his offer of economic and persecuted refugee immigration.

Trump and Putin — one talk is not day one

And, that precaution in the header is not just for the MAGAts but also the Simplicius types, who thought they had Trump pegged.

In reality, going behind the Reuters story?

We know that Trump's incoming administration was behind the late-Biden team's final energy sanctions on Russia. We know that Trump has not lifted them. We know that, while Trump and Elmo have paused, scrambled and fucked up foreign aid in general, Trump has not stopped sending bombs to Ukraine.

For the Simplicius types, those are all facts on the ground.

Trump and his team's general statements, from Jan. 1 on, before he officially was sworn in, come off as various ploys on trying to buffalo Putin. John Mearsheimer has talked about that on at least one dialogue with Andrew Napolitano. (Both also mentioned his cluelessness in claiming 1 million Russians have been killed.)

The new reality appears to be (I have to say "appears to be" because I'm not a Russia or Putin expert and nobody is a Trump expert) is that Trump seems to be accepting that the buffaloing has failed — or, at a minimum, that's failed without an accompanying "good cop" second track.

So, Trump's team and Putin's are talking. As noted above, buffaloing may resume in the future. If so, it will fail again.

Or, maybe they're not talking. Kremlin spox Dmitri Peskov refuses to confirm or deny any conversations. Putin will let Trump twist slowly in the wind a bit.

By the start of Ukrainian-Russian spring, when the possibility of events on the battlefield will start up again, Trump (or people working around him) will accept that buffaloing won't work, period. At that point, having wasted months already, they'll finally get around to talking more seriously to Zelensky. How those talks proceed then will depend on the start of this week's battlefield action. Also by that point, surely, some sort of appropriation will be needed for new Ukrainian arms, and of course will face trouble in the House.

So, approximately two months from now, skids may start being greased. But, even then, looking at it from now, we won't know where things will land.

Now, that said? Today, Mr. Skank, Deaf Secretary Pete Hegseth, said that NATO expansion to Ukraine was off the table and it needed to accept it wouldn't get pre-2014 borders. That still doesn't mean a lot as long as Trump is still sending bombs (and more) to Zelensky.

Also, an alleged upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin in Saudi Arabia guarantees no actual action. Donald Trump as peacemaker strikes me as nothing like Teddy Roosevelt. Besides, as of right now, the only guaranteed meeting appears to be representatives of both sides in Munich. And, all of this ignores what the response of Zelensky — or of European NATO members — will be to a proposed peace treaty by diktat.

Since then? It appears that for Trump, a Zelensky shakedown is first, an actual peace deal is second. Shock me. And, Zelensky has said no, at least in its current form.

I generally agree with the likes of John Mearsheimer and other paleoconservative types as well as fellow leftists that we need to get out of Ukraine; if an actual peace treaty is part of that, all the better. But, given that Transactional Don is at the helm, the possibility of this administration actually doing that continues to shrink. So, my header isn't a BlueAnon roasting of Trump; it's a leftist one.

UT-Dallas fails (so far) to censor pro-Palestinian students and newspaper

Pro-Palestinian journo students at UT-Dallas, who went on strike after administration sacked their editor, Gregorio Olivares Guiterrez, last year over pro-Palestinian protest issues, have officially not only abandoned the official student newspaper but started a competitor. (This will be something that Kuff has nothing about, of course, unless it's in his friend's "Dispatches from Dallas." After all, he never wrote about UT-Dallas' prez Richard Benson, or Jay Hartzell running the Tea Sipping flagship in Austin calling in state troopers to attack those protestors.) 

I was originally going to run this as part of this week's Texas Progressives roundup, but it needs its own pull-out.

The piece goes on to note that Benson refused to talk to staff at the official student newspaper, before sacking Olivares Guiterrez, or be officially interviewed for any stories, then had his staff accuse the Mercury staff of "journalistic malpractice" after they extracted words of his from a Morning Snooze op-ed since he refused to be interviewed by the Mercury.

The Mercury staff published multiple stories that questioned whether UT-Dallas should have brought state troopers in to dismantle an encampment and arrest 21 people on May 1. The Mercury reported the university did not respond to numerous requests for comment, so they included some of what Benson wrote about the incident in an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News.

Benson said UT-Dallas “staunchly protects the rights of free speech and free assembly,” but had to call law enforcement after it became clear the protesters would not comply with a request to move or disassemble the encampment, which was impeding faculty, staff and students from their daily tasks.

“It is important to note that no one was arrested for being a protester,” he said.

One of the Mercury’s top stories was an interview with an art history professor who was arrested. It garnered more than 100 comments online, most of them critical of the university and Benson.

Olivares Gutierrez said after publication, an administrator called him and then-Mercury managing editor Maria Shaikh into a meeting. That administrator told them they had committed “journalism malpractice,” but wouldn’t explain how.

Behind all this?

Here's the keystone:

Courts have repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment forbids college administrators from censoring or taking adverse action against student publications unless they can show a story would lead to a violent disruption in the educational environment or is obscene, libelous or invades someone’s privacy.

Some states have built upon those rights, enacting laws to protect college student journalists from censorship and advisers from retaliation for refusing to censor them. Texas is not one of them, and this is a time when student journalists are under pressure the likes of which have not been seen since the Vietnam War. Some who have covered protests to the Israel-Hamas war have been expelled and arrested in the past year, said Jonathan Gaston Falk, a staff attorney at the Student Press Law Center.

Yeah.

ICE in churches and Wilkes and Dunn Xn nationalist hypocrisy

The Observer rhetorically asks the Wilks and Dunn folks how ICE agents invading churches is not a First Amendment violation. In an interview, David Brockman, a TCU prof who is also an outside scholar at Rice's Baker Institute, notes this in spades:

I’ve been studying Christian nationalism for the past 10 years, and one of the common claims by Christian nationalists about church-state separation—if they’re not outright denying that it exists at all—is they will call back to the idea that the wall of separation is a one-way wall that is meant only to keep the government out of the church, not to keep the church out of government. It’s a common claim that they make. With this change of policy, the president they support is potentially sending government agents into the churches, synagogues, mosques, and so forth to seize and arrest worshippers. That’s not keeping the government out of the church. I found that very ironic, to say the least.

There you go.

Brockman goes better, though, and this is important because these raids are generally in urban areas. He notes that liberal Christian leadership needs to reach beyond Christianity, and he's not just talking Jews — he means Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus. Sadly, he doesn't list secularists.