On the menu today, a smorgasbord: Hey, how’s that hunt for the Supreme Court leaker going? Progressive Democrats fume that even with two months’ warning of the Dobbs decision, the Biden administration still seems blindsided and slow-footed. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats’ idea of putting abortion clinics on federal lands in red states faces a slew of financial and logistical hurdles. The latest evidence for a wild GOP midterm tsunami comes from a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives since 1992. The New York State Supreme Court strikes down the New York City law that would have permitted noncitizens to cast legal ballots. And once again, the Communists are proposing five-year plans.
Hey, How’s That Hunt for the Supreme Court Leaker Going?
Almost two months ago, Chief Justice John Roberts declared the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “a singular and egregious breach” of trust and an “affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here,” announcing that he had “directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leak.”
You notice that the leaker has not yet been identified. The Supreme Court has only a few hundred employees, and the list of clerks and employees who had access to the draft cannot be that long. It has been about a month since Supreme Court officials asked clerks to sign affidavits and turn over their cellphone data. Members of the public started to dig into past social connections between the Politico reporter who broke the leaked draft and particular clerks. From early on, some suspicious minds speculated that one of the justices abdicated his or her duties to colleagues and the institution and committed this breach. The longer the investigation goes on without any conclusion, the more people will suspect that identifying the leaker would compound the damage already done to the Court’s reputation.
Progressives Fume at the Biden Administration’s Dobbs Response
One of the oddities of the past two months is that the public received that leaked draft copy and knew the odds were good that the majority would vote to overturn Roe, and yet when the decision did come down, it still felt like a bombshell.
Intriguingly, some congressional Democrats see a president and White House that didn’t seem prepared for this scenario either:
“He made a strong statement the day of. I would have liked to see some more specific actions rolled out,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We all knew this was coming.”
Jayapal spent part of Monday in meetings with Biden officials and encouraged them on the sidelines to do more, urging a look at further agency-level moves to protect abortion access — the sort of action that White House aides say is coming soon, albeit without specifics so far.
If the Biden administration is listening to the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it might decide the first and easiest thing it could do would be to “open abortion clinics on federal lands in red states right now.” AOC characterizes this as “the babiest of the babiest of the baby steps.”
But every type of federal land presents its own financial and logistical challenges to this scheme.
For starters, the Hyde amendment bars the use of federal funding to pay for abortions; the only exceptions are cases involving rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger. Any attempt to build abortion clinics on federal land would be in violation of that provision and spur an instant court challenge contending that the Biden administration is breaking federal law.
Second, Congress has not authorized or appropriated any funding to set up new abortion clinics on federal land; diverting funding from some other source without congressional approval would spur another round of lawsuits — to say nothing of, for instance, the U.S. Forest Service complaining that their firefighting budget is being diverted to build abortion clinics.
Third, Pentagon officials will not want lines of civilians traipsing into military bases (which occupy federal land) to get abortions. It is hard to see Americans embracing the idea of setting up abortion clinics within national parks or on Bureau of Land Management properties; even if they did, as Greenwire observes, these stretches of wilderness are not near population centers and aren’t designed to handle the kind of traffic that clinics might generate.
One of the odder bits of speculation is whether Native American reservations in red states could set up abortion clinics, beyond the legal authority of the state governments. It does not appear that anyone advocating this idea bothered to check with Native American tribes to see if they want their reservations turned into sites where non-Natives go to get abortions. As it happens, so far, Native tribes are not enthusiastic about the idea.
The Good GOP Polling in, Er, Rhode Island?
What kind of a midterm wave are we looking at?
The Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey of Rhode Island’s second congressional district has Allan Fung, the candidate currently favored to win the Republican primary, ahead of Seth Magaziner, the candidate currently favored to win the Democratic primary, 45 percent to 39 percent. Fung is ahead of all the other Democratic opponents as well. President Biden’s approval rating in the state stands at 38 percent, his disapproval rating at 52 percent. Almost 69 percent of respondents say Biden should not run for another term.
Rhode Island’s second district is currently represented by Democrat Jim Langevin, who is not running for reelection. Langevin won 58 percent of the vote in his most recent bid for reelection in 2020.
The last time a Republican represented Rhode Island in the U.S. House of Representatives was in 1992, when Ronald Machtley was reelected in the first district.
A Blow against Noncitizen Voting
At the beginning of the year, New York City’s mayor and city council enacted a measure that would have allowed more than 800,000 noncitizens in the city to vote in municipal elections. Under the law, most noncitizen legal permanent residents of the city would have been able to vote in elections for mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president, council member, and other city-government positions.
This change was enacted right around the time President Biden gave his infamously incendiary address on voting rights, in which he asked, “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice?” And answered: “I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies — foreign and, yes, domestic.”
But President Biden never said much about whether he believed noncitizens should be voting in local U.S. elections.
On Monday, as our Diana Glebova reports, the New York Supreme Court struck down that New York City law. Staten Island justice Ralph J. Porzio wrote: “The New York State Constitution expressly states that citizens meeting the age and residency requirements are entitled to register and vote in elections. . . . Though voting is a right so many citizens take for granted, the City of New York cannot ‘obviate’ the restrictions imposed by the Constitution.”
Hey, Remember Covid-19?
In the U.S., Covid-19 is an afterthought, overtaken by all kinds of other problems, such as inflation, gas prices, and even monkeypox. (See below.) Meanwhile, there’s a report that over in China, once again the Communists are proposing five-year plans:
A story first posted in the Beijing Daily, the official publication of the capital’s ruling party, quoted former mayor and current party chief Cai Qi as saying the city will uphold the controversial “zero-COVID” policy “for the next five years.”
The quote from Cai, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Jinping, provoked a quick and furious social media backlash. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, the hashtag “for the next five years” was banned in response to the uproar.
So China will be shutting down cities every time somebody sneezes until 2027?
You don’t see as many “What the U.S. can learn from China’s response to COVID infections” articles as you used to see. For two years, major U.S. publications liked telling the story of China’s smoothly implemented, efficient, and ruthlessly effective policies to shut down the virus, while the stumbling, bumbling, unruly, and chaotic Americans accumulated the highest death toll and infection rate in the world. The New York Times’ narrative of “how China beat the virus and roared back” on the strength of “power, patriotism, and 1.4 billion people” looks silly now. That was always a misleading, stage-managed narrative promoted by an authoritarian regime, hoping their own subpar vaccines and draconian lockdowns could keep a virus as contagious as the common cold at bay.
Anyone with eyes can see that the official Chinese figures on Covid-19 infections and deaths are nonsense. The Chinese government would have you believe that, out of China’s total population of 1.4 billion, it has recorded only about 225,000 total infections since the start of the pandemic — fewer than in Montenegro, with a total population of 621,000! — and only 5,226 deaths — fewer than in Latvia, with a total population of 1.9 million. China would have you believe that between April 2020 and April 2022, the country suffered a grand total of five deaths from Covid-19. The Economist, looking at China’s annual death rates compared to the historical average, estimated that China’s true death toll from Covid-19 could be as high as 2 million.
The Chinese government lies a lot. For what it’s worth, our government is no longer investigating the origins of Covid-19, at least publicly. Most of our governmental, scientific, media, and cultural elites have simply accepted a global pandemic that killed at least 6 million people, and likely many more, as just bad luck, requiring no further investigation into the country of origin.
ADDENDUM: I mentioned monkeypox above. In the New York Times, Dr. Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical School, writes that “the United States has, yet again, been caught flat-footed when confronted with another virus.” He worries that “many problems with the Covid-19 response by the United States are being repeated: limited access to testing, contact tracing, vaccination and isolation support, and scant data from public health officials about how and where people are being infected.”
That’s impossible! In January 2021, I was assured the adults are back in charge!