Sunday Mailbag

First week in a while where the majority of the letters are not about Donald Trump's legal shenanigans. Nope, this week the letters are about John Roberts' legal shenanigans.

The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: General Observations

J.J. in Richmond, VA, writes: I am an African-American alum of an Ivy League school. Words cannot begin to express my disgust at the Supreme Court decision, and the cynical nature that these right-wing groups mischaracterize Affirmative Action and continue to insult African Americans. While I was a student, the Black percentage of the Undergrad student body ranged from between 5% and 8%. That percentage, for undergrad, I believe is now closer to 5%. What the Supreme Court decision says to me and others like me, is that a measly 5% to 8% was apparently too much. Implicit in this entire case and in the is the sickening racist belief that they believe Black people to be so mentally inferior that even having us being 5% of the campus is too much. That's how sick this is. Basically, to these racists, having the Black percentage being anything more than 0% is affront to them, and is "taking away" from somebody else. It's enraging and steeped in the type of bigotry that would make David Duke blush. It's the darkest, most despicable racist garbage there is. A deep insult to every Black person. Worse yet, cynically far-right-wing activists used Asian Americans as a stand-in to attack Blacks. It's truly sickening to be pitting minorities against each other and, frankly, it makes the case even more bizarre. My alma mater, along with other Ivies range around 30% Asian. Often 4 or even 5 times the population of Black students. The logic that it would be even higher if it wasn't for the presence of any Black people, again is just rooted in flat-out racism. Also, there is the other elephant in the room. Any person, who has attended a university, not just an Ivy, knows there is a large swath of the student body that are there based on legacy, but the fact that the case is targeting the already small percentage of Blacks and Hispanics is disgusting, telling, and racist. I'm tired of this country lurching 60 to 70 years back in every respect, with bigotry being glorified at every turn. I'm tired of the mischaracterization of Affirmative Action. Judge Thomas willfully mischaracterizes it in the most despicable manner. I am proud of the dissents by Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. A sharp contrast to the paternalistic obtuse drivel by Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts should be "proud" to now be presiding over the most right-wing court since the days of Dred Scott. Considering how this Court is, they'd probably be proud to have ruled in that case.

But regarding Affirmative Action, President Biden explained it brilliantly in his speech on Thursday. A school, such as the one I attended, has an acceptance rate of 4%! It stands to reason that they will have a huge surplus of qualified applicants of all races, but deserving folks of all races will have to be rejected, as it is a numbers game... especially when so many legacies, who are overwhelmingly Caucasian, are part of the student body. Race is but one of the factors, as indeed sadly over the course of 400 years, those of my skin color have not had equal rights. But leave it to the Supreme Court to say that after 40 years of Affirmative Action, everything is now fixed, and that our mere 5% of us on campus was too much for them to stomach. We graduate at the same rates as the rest of the student body, but somehow we are the problem because of our very presence. But the legacy folks with worse grades, they are inherently more worthy than any Black or Hispanic student. Utterly shameful! Folks who refuse to understand the perspective of Blacks on this, and choose to remain willfully obtuse to this are the biggest problem. Happy Independence Day!

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H.M. in Murphy, TX, writes: I am extremely happy as an Asian (I am sure white liberals are not, based on their reactions) for the Supreme Court stopping the discrimination against Asians in getting admissions to elite colleges.

On a side note, why do liberals always call for expansion of the Court when the Court rules in ways which they do not like. SCOTUS has ruled many times against things that I do not like or sometimes conservatives do not like, but that is how jurisprudence works. All three liberal justices vote together on critical issues, just like how the two ultra-right-wing conservative justices (Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas) vote together. I find the three liberal justices to be just as extremely ideological as the two most right-wing justices are.

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J.C. in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, writes: I attended Occidental College, down the road from (Z), a few years before (Z) was in college and 10 years after Obama. Oxy has a strong commitment to reflecting the diversity of California, fully supported by their student body and alumni to the extent that the administration gets in trouble with them if they don't measure up. While this new decision is devastating to the school, I was also struck with how history might have been different without Oxy's commitment to multiculturalism. While Obama couldn't cut it at Oxy and after two years moved on to Safety School Columbia, he nonetheless started at Oxy, and gave his first political speech there (about disinvestment in S. Africa).

Obama went to the excellent Punahou high school in Hawaii but his grades were mediocre. It's arguable that he wouldn't have been accepted to Oxy without Affirmative Action, and then used that springboard to bigger and better things. Our nation and our world would have missed out on an amazing President—all the proof we need that a commitment to diversity and Affirmative Action isn't for the individual, but rather so the rest of us can benefit from the perspectives and contributions of that individual.

But perhaps for this SCOTUS, not having Obama as President would be a feature, not a bug.

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J.C. in Columbus, GA, writes: It seems perfectly clear at this point that SCOTUS is determined to deconstruct the Civil Rights Movement in order to restore a modern version of white supremacy. Although the unstoppable tide of demographic changes will likely swamp these efforts one day, folks my age (53) will likely not live to see it come to pass.

Let's take the near-abolition of the last legal vestiges of Affirmative Action. The conservative justices are surely intelligent enough to realize that announcing that colleges must be color blind and admit students based solely on "merit"is simply a right-wing talking point and not the result of serious analysis. For Justice Thomas to pull the Affirmative Action ladder up behind himself, when his entire life he has benefited from Affirmative Action, up to and including his seat on SCOTUS, defies any rational understanding.

How can we be so sure that the current SCOTUS deconstruction is about re-establishing white supremacy, rather than a meritocracy? The answer is because there is no real way to judge students based on "merit." After all, what does a high SAT score show if not, at least mainly, one's "merit" at... succeeding on standardized tests. We know that Black students as a cohort score lower on standardized tests than their white and Asian peers. Is that because Black students are intellectually inferior? Only a white supremacist would think that way in 2023. No, it is because standardized tests emphatically do not, at least precisely, measure actual merit—if merit means an applicant's ability to thrive in college and then afterwards. The actual correlation between standardized test scores and real academic merit is somewhat loose. If we start with the premise that Black students possess the same intellectual capacity as their white counterparts (and that white students possess the same intellectual capacity as their Asian counterparts), then the disparate standardized test results are themselves conclusive proof that the measuring stick we use to assess "merit"is imperfect. Further, if we are confident that Black, white, and Asian students, as statistical groups, possess equivalent intellectual potential, then a true meritocracy would result in admissions to student bodies that reflect the relative numbers of the groups within the applicant pool.

When viewed in this light, insisting that students be judged based on "merit,"when we know the measuring stick being used is flawed in a way that reinforces white supremacy, is itself a white supremacist policy choice. Given the education and intellects of the members of SCOTUS, there can be only one conclusion. This is intentional. (One could reasonably argue that Justice Thomas is not motivated by a desire to bolster white supremacy, but if that is so, then what could be Justice Thomas's motivation—perhaps membership in a highly exclusive club that lavishes him with expensive gifts from the billionaire class?)

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M.F. in Oakville, ON, Canada, writes: In discussing alternatives to race-based Affirmative Action you wrote: "There are many ways to use admissions to promote diversity, even if race is not an explicit factor. For example, studies have shown that a student's family's net worth—information that universities already have, due to financial aid—is a pretty good indicator of whether the student comes from an underserved community."

It occurs to me that this effectively class-based approach to Affirmative Action might be a significant improvement. It would more effectively target students needing a hand up from within disadvantaged racial cohorts (e.g., poor Black students rather than merely Black students), but it would have the added benefit of helping disadvantaged cohorts among the white population who might not otherwise have benefited. Politically, it would be tough to frame a populist attack on an Affirmative Action approach that benefits not only Black kids from Watts or Harlem, but also white kids from Appalachia.

Right-wing populism depends on keeping those who are being screwed by the system fighting each other instead of fighting the system. If a new form of Affirmative Action benefits both poor whites and poor Blacks (and both poor whites and poor Blacks can see that), the Republicans may wonder what they have wrought.

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T.C. in Richmond, VA, writes: I work for a consulting firm which assists colleges and universities in connecting with prospective students. In anticipation of the Supreme Court ruling the way that it did, I was asked several weeks ago to build a statistical model which predicts if a student was non-white and a second model which predicts if a student was neither white nor Asian.

Using readily available ZIP Code based census data and consumer data based on smaller-than-ZIP-Code geographic regions, you can predict with pretty good accuracy if a student would have been eligible previously to be considered for Affirmative Action, even if you don't have family income data (for applicants who didn't file a FAFSA).

While the ruling presents a challenge, it doesn't eliminate the ability to incorporate factors highly associated with Affirmative Action into an admission decision.

The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: White Privilege?

R.B. in Cleveland, OH, writes: I also follow the "All Hat No Cattle" blog each day, and noted they had relayed the following observation about the recent SCOTUS rulings:

So we're clear: The Supreme Court ended affirmative action yesterday by saying you CAN'T discriminate by helping a minority group, then turned around today and said you CAN discriminate by hurting them.

It sums up the Roberts court rather nicely.

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J.Z. in Baltimore, MD, writes: What makes my eyes roll, water, and pop right out of my head is Mike Pence, Whitest Man in America, presuming to declare we now live in a post-racial world by paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Jr. I seriously just... can't even with these people.

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S.R. in Knoxville, TN, writes: Of Donald Trump, you wrote: "Good to see that the former president is such a fan of merit-based admissions. After all, his admission to Penn was undoubtedly 100% merit-based, right?"

If race cannot be considered as a factor in college admissions then it's also time we ended the practice of legacy admissions at elite universities. Tiffany Trump was admitted to Penn as a legacy because of her father, not because of academic performance, race, or any other factor other than the money her father gave to the institution.

My experience with Penn and legacy admissions in the recent past was instructive. My son's mother is a Penn grad and when he was preparing college applications in 2017 and 2018 for fall admission he contacted the admissions department to have an informal conversation about legacies, Early Decision and his academic record. His academic record being stellar: HS class valedictorian, highest GPA ever recorded at his school, multiple academic awards and named art student of his class by the teaching staff. Through a chance business contact, I ended up meeting a Penn Fund trustee at a trade show during this process and mentioned that my son as a legacy was getting ready to apply at Penn. He immediately asked what our aggregate contribution to the Fund was and I replied zero. I was told that the first thing the admissions department at Penn was going to do for legacies was look at the dollar contribution level and if it was zero there was almost no chance he would be admitted, irrespective of academic qualifications. I continued this conversation with this individual in follow up e-mails and later my son alluded to it in an e-mail with the admissions department. In a fairly obtusely worded reply to avoid spelling out in plain English what the situation was, they admitted that despite his claimed academic qualifications that as a legacy with zero dollars contributed his chances of being admitted were probably very slim. With this knowledge in mind, he decided to both abandon even applying to Penn and to seek out scholarship money from other schools. He ended up being admitted to a large high-ranking university in the Midwest on a full ride room and board academic scholarship.

If college admissions are supposed to be a meritocracy then it's time we enshrined that with legislation that prohibits using any factor other than academics to admit students. If it's not 100% a meritocracy then the decision made by the Supreme Court is a grave injustice to anyone seeking admission at a top university. If we are going to embrace what is "fair" then it has to be all the way, not part way. Period.

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M.D. in the Poconos, PA, writes: Inside Trump's Days at Fordham.

Trump "was rejected from the University of Southern California, he chose to attend Fordham". He transferred to Penn avoiding the normal admission process. So Trump wasn't even qualified enough, or his daddy rich enough to get accepted at USC.

(V) & (Z) respond: Do you know how underqualified you have to be when USC refuses to let you buy your way in?

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S.B. in Palm Harbor, FL, writes: Since Trump believes nothing is more meritorious than having wealth, of course his "admission to Penn was undoubtedly 100% merit-based."

The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: The Service Academies

E.W-H. in New London, CT, writes: On Friday, you wrote: that you "don't understand the motivation"for letting service academies keep using Affirmative Action, "unless it's just "Anything the military does is automatically good."Having taught at a federal service academy for over 25 years, I'm happy to explain.

While the degree varies from one service to another, the enlisted members of all U.S. military services are much more diverse than their officers, which are still whiter and more male. There is good evidence that a gap between the diversity of enlisted ranks and officers can pose a threat to unit cohesion (real unit cohesion, not the fake "social cohesion' once used to keep gays and lesbians from serving openly), and thus to national security. The service academies have argued in court that race-based admissions are needed to increase the diversity of the officer corps so that it more closely reflects the diversity of the enlisted members they supervise. This is the "distinct interest"referenced in the decision.

While the recent decision is horrible, the exemption for service academies may actually increase our ability to attract outstanding members of underrepresented minority groups, who will be less likely to choose Harvard over a service academy. Of course, admissions are just the first step: The academies must retain and graduate more of these minoritized applicants to increase the diversity of the officer corps... but don't get me started on that.

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N.N. in Baltimore, MD, writes: As a reserve officer, I know exactly what the academies' "potentially distinct interests"are: ensuring that the enlisted corps and officer corps are demographically as similar as is feasible. If the enlisted continue their proud tradition and the academies start to crank out 3,000 Doug Neidermeyer clones every year, pretty soon the military of the future will look like the South of the Antebellum Era.

The Supreme Court and Gay Websites

D.E. in Lancaster, PA, writes: Well, it seems a picture is worth a thousand words after all. Witness the photograph of the web designer, Lorie Smith, who was the plaintiff in Creative v. Elenis, a case recently decided by Roberts' Hack Court as a justification to deny gays certain rights:

In the case, Smith wanted to be able to discriminate against gay couple who might want to use her services to design wedding webpages. Take note of the word "might." What makes the case horrible jurisprudence is not just the fact that it legitimizes bigotry but that no harm was done to Smith because no gay couple had asked her to design a webpage for their wedding. It was an entirely speculative case, which goes to show that SCOTUS is less concerned about addressing legitimate concerns than it is casting a wide net for a case, any case, that they can use to further their agenda. Sounds like certain "Supremes" are more interested in making laws than interpreting them. Doesn't that smack of judicial activism, like a raw flounder to the head?

But back to the photo of Smith. There are two things in it that are major tells. First off is the "Create Freely" board she is posing beside. I would suggest that if you use the plastic letters that fit on the signs in Funeral Homes that let you know which body is in which viewing room, to spell out "Create Freely" and then you cram those words into the bottom left hand corner of what looks like plastic wood panelling that was salvaged from a 1960's family den and then surround it with white racks you picked up at Hobby Lobby adorned with cheap generic cards with the most pithy of aphorisms, then maybe creativity is not the field you should be in. I could be tacky and say no self-respecting gay couple would ever ask her to design a webpage; but that would be unfair since I don't think any couple looking at that unimpressive pedestrian display would say, "Wow, I need this woman to express our love and commitment for our upcoming marriage in the form of a webpage!" At least that cake decorator had a little bit of talent. This woman's works make Brutalism look all warm and fuzzy.

Second, and possibly the most ironic of all, is the horribly bourgeois sign that says "stay humble/work hard/be kind" but the "be kind" line looks like Smith has tried mightily hard to erase from existence. Naturally she would make being unkind her mission because Jesus never welcomed people of all walks of life, from tax collectors to prostitutes to lepers, to be in his company. There's nothing like ignoring Jesus' Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would like them to do to you, to prove your sanctimoniously pious beliefs. The simple act of being kind and of showing compassion is just a hill too far for the Religious Right, where it's all about the cruelty.

Which brings me to my main complaint about these Holier Than Thou web designers, cake makers and what nots is that they should read that Bible they hold so dear. In it, Jesus elegantly says, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." If they can't separate Caesar from God in their business than might I suggest that they're in the wrong business. If their beliefs overrule everything else, then I have good news that there is a profession that will allow them to focus all their energy on those religious beliefs; the only problem is the pay is poor. To paraphrase a classic, "Get thee to a nunnery, Smith" or else shut up. She poses and preens like a Pharisee! Given her obvious lack of any creativity, frankly her whole effort of protesting so loudly seems like a desperate ploy to hustle up gullible religious clients to her probably failing business. Grift is always so sweet when mixed with cruelty.

Of course, the Supreme Hacks don't have any problems using her in like manner because the ends always justify the means or the law. Can we just start ignoring them as the morally compromised ethically challenged irrelevant partisans hacks that they are? And Roberts' ploy of throwing a few small fish to lessen the violence of the upcoming rape of the law is so transparent. In some ways it's the Affirmative Action of Jurisprudence, in that so many cases are given to prove they're just calling balls and strikes. Yeah, right. Throwing a few morsels at the left to compensate for the bombshell to come calls into question the legitimacy of all their decisions. At the least, it is an admission that the bombshell on the horizon is on dubious legal grounds and that Roberts is trying to lessen the damage to their credibility. Or at worst, it says that their decisions are merely arbitrary and that rulings are not made by sound legal theory but rather for the outcome the "Justices" wish to achieve. All that's left now for Roberts and his trolls to do is to start physically destroying the Court building as they flutter and flap to delegitimization.

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R.E.M. in Brooklyn, NY, writes: I think your analysis of the various Supreme Court opinions this week is correct. The Court reached out to find standing in the web-designer and student-loan cases. I'd add that the North Carolina-Independent State Legislature case was probably moot because the state Supreme Court had overruled the original decision.

I do believe that the majority in the web-design case ignored the standing problem to reach a political result, with at least Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito motivated by their well-known anti-gay bigotry. But substantively, the decision is correct (even a corrupt squirrel finds a legitimate acorn once in a while). This is not a public accommodation case, like a lunch counter or railway car, where no forced speech is implicated. Web design is a creative endeavor, which means it has speech as a material component. If I am a painter, no one should be able to show up with a commission check and force me to paint what they want. Or consider this hypothetical: The Colorado statute bars discrimination on the basis of religion, too. Suppose the web designer were a Wiccan who despises Christians because of their history of oppressing followers of Wicca. Would you require her to create a website for a Christian fundamentalist wedding? Would you require a gay web designer to create a website for the Westboro Baptist Church?

Anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry in individuals is deplorable, but allowing the government to force speech is worse. Consider that if the government were allowed to force speech from individuals what the legislatures of places like Florida and Texas might do. I've supported Lambda Legal since the 1990s, and the pain of this decision is a real as the one allowing Nazis to march in Skokie in 1977. But free speech can't be limited to speech we like; it has to include speech we despise, or else the First Amendment means nothing.

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D.S. in Palo Alto, CA, writes: We Evolutionary Big-Bangists insist on spending the hours from 10:00 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. every day contemplating our place in the universe and the implications of our actions—a kind of cosmic Butterfly Effect. We can now demand of our employers a work schedule that accommodates this need. (But what are the chances?)

Seriously, established religions represent, in my view, such an entrenched set of conspiracy theories, largely based on ancient desert stories, that we have accepted them as an ordinary and even laudable part of life, to be validated in myriad laws and increasingly catered to by jurists. I can hardly wait to see what the Satanic Temple comes up with. No doubt it will be even more disruptive to business than my mid-day carve-out.

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L.Y. in Scranton, PA, writes: While there have certainly been some high-profile disappointments in the SCOTUS decisions this year, I'd like to suggest that the "most important case"was decided in the right way: Moore v. Harper. While the negative effects and unintended consequences of the affirmative action, debt cancellation, stalking, and LGBT wedding websites will not be fully realized for quite some time and with the aid of retrospection, my personal opinion is that Moore v. Harper stands in a class by itself. The case was nothing less than "shall we allow individual states to become fascist experiments or not if the legislature wants to go rogue and become all-powerful?"

As a thought experiment (and I understand that things aren't quite this simple), imagine that Moore were decided the other way, but all of the other bad decisions were decided however you wanted them to have been decided. You'd have gotten the results you wanted now, but you'd also be spectacularly disenfranchised, potentially, from ever having a hand in how the future would look and who might sit on a future Supreme Court (or be elected to any other position of power). Whereas this way, despite the ongoing issues with partisan gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and other problems in the electoral system, your state legislature still has to obey its own constitution for elections. Your Republican-controlled state legislature can't just decide to grant Donald Trump your state's electoral votes in Jan. 2025 even when he will have lost, for instance.

So take some comfort in that. There's still a war against democracy and against the United States afoot, but you are still empowered to VOTE and to get others to vote in order to change the course of the future. A reversed decision on Moore v. Harper would have foreclosed that for much of the country. If everyone who reads E-V.com were to get one additional person to vote in 2024, that would help tremendously. And remembering that all of these things are downstream effects from the fateful election of 2016, perhaps the Democrats and democracy-loving Independents and Republicans voters will make damn sure to vote in every single election from now on to extinguish the MAGA cult.

The 2024 Presidential Race

J.M. in Sewickley, PA, writes: While I agree wholeheartedly with your view that a flat tax, as normally proposed, is very regressive, I have a proposed flat tax which is actually progressive. What I don't understand is why the Democrats don't also offer a flat tax. But with a slight twist: What if any movement of value was taxed at a flat rate?

Let's assume (and this is way higher than it would be, but...) that the flat tax is 1%:

• I buy lettuce for a price of $1.00, I pay $0.01 in tax.
• I buy a car for $40,000, I pay a tax of $400.00.
• Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) buys $250,000.00 of Paypal Holdings stock (May 10), he pays $2500.00 tax.
• UBS buys Credit Suisse Group (June 9)... well, that's somewhat problematic, as some of the value is not in the USA, so maybe we shouldn't tax that portion of the value movement which is not in the USA, but presumably we could figure out what percentage of their business value is in the USA, and tax them (0.01) x (% value in USA) x ($3.25 Bn) for that transaction.

Seems like a flat tax is not really as regressive as most people think—provided that we actually tax things, instead of what is regularly proposed as a flat tax.

And to be clear—I am not proposing VAT. Let's tax the entire value, not just the added value!

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M.M. in San Diego, CA, writes: I have a pet (crank?) hypothesis regarding the extremist right and the IRS. All those eager militia members, anti-government paranoids, and everyone else howling about government "tyranny"have all managed to run afoul of the IRS at some point, and that's what they are really rebelling against. Rather than admit that they are at fault for failing to file, fiddling the numbers, or underestimating their quarterly business taxes, they harbor longstanding resentment once caught and on the receiving end of substantial penalties, which can be financially devastating. Certainly explains a lot of the loony, defensive and hostile behavior, if I am correct.

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R.V. in Pittsburgh, PA, writes: When I saw the quote from GOP consultant Jeff Timmer—"Ron DeSantis is the worst candidate I've ever seen. It's like he's been assembled from the discarded spare parts of Bobby Jindal, Bill deBlasio, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker."— as a horror film fan I couldn't help but to think of Peter Cushing in 1957 film "Horror of Frankenstein" as he's trying to put together the creature in his lab. Ron DeSantis is a collection of parts making up one bad creature...

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E.S. in Maine, NY, writes: I fairly often make trips to Rochester, NY. The most recent was up I-86 and I-390 and back through Finger Lakes and Ithaca (both truly beautiful areas of the country). I took some different roads to continue my total non-scientific flag survey. Results: Lots of American flags, which is no surprise, July 4th is coming up. More U.S. Marine Corp flags,and more Buffalo Bills flags than Trump flags. Maybe 10 total.

But what I noticed was the general value of the houses or outbuildings with Trump flags. A little less than half were trailer trash, from single-wides with junk filling the yard to well-kept older double-wides. (Note: We are proud trailer trash! Having lived in a 1973 single wide with 1" of insulation with walls that sometimes had ice on the insides before we build our house. Fun times but not at our age!) And most of the others were reasonably nice but smaller, or somewhat bigger but not too well kept. Three that I can recall were what you would nice houses, including this one:

My dollar-store psychoanalysis is that the more well off, in general, are somewhat reluctant to show support for Trump these days.

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R.H.D. in Webster, NY, writes: After reading the missive from S.S. in West Hollywood, I would like to offer a polite disagreement with their assessment. S.S. talked about how President Biden and the Democrats were not fighting back or commenting on the recent legal woes of Donald Trump. They also say that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would be the only alternative right now to Trump.

I disagree on two points. First, what Biden and the Democrats are doing right now is absolutely correct. A major rule of politics is when the opposition is causing unforced errors, or committing self-inflicted wounds, it's best to not get into the fray. Also, if the blue team were to inject themselves into Trump's mess, they would be playing right into the hands of his base and followers who claim this all politically motivated. It's best now for the blue team to not get into the gutter with the red team. However, should Trump become the GOP nominee and he has this federal case still lingering over his head by the time of the general election, then it would be appropriate for Biden to get involved and highlight the stark differences between him and Trump.

Secondly, Chris Christie doesn't have a chance of becoming the GOP nominee. It's simple. To get the Republican nomination, or to win in the general election, you need to get a good chunk of the base. Who makes up the base these days? It's the dyed-in-the-wool Trumpers. They will never get behind a guy like Christie, who has gone behind the Dear Leader's back. To me, the eventual Republican nominee with either be Trump or Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). That's it. Otherwise, they either stay home or vote third-party.

We are still about 6 months away from the first votes being cast in this presidential cycle. This is a long game. President Biden has been at this for a long time and knows how to win. This century, he's 3-for-3 at the presidential election level (two as Obama's VP, and his own win in 2020). He is acting presidential. I'm certainly glad he is handling the current powder keg in Russia rather than his immediate predecessor. Some may want a fighter. Others want a leader. There's a difference between fighting and leading.

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C.Z. in Sacramento, CA, writes: I'm sick of people saying that President Biden is too old to hold office, just because they don't like the way that he walks. He has spinal arthritis and peripheral neuropathy in his feet, which combined, cause him to walk with a stiff gait. You can get both of those at any age, depending on heredity, among other things. Let's not forget that our greatest President (in my opinion) was confined to a wheelchair due to polio.

BTW, tRump's psychopathy is also hereditary, has no cure or remedy, and is much more dangerous for our country.

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F.C. in Sequim, WA, writes: Best info I can get is that the U.S. spent roughly $300 million per day in Afghanistan. You would think the cost-conscious Republican House would be thanking Joe Biden profusely for getting the US out! Nope! Nary a "Thank you, Joe!" Instead, the hypocrites keep digging for dirt which doesn't exist. We are now creeping up on the 2-year anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal. Biden, according to my numbers, has saved the U.S. over $200 billion and will hit $220 billion at the 2-year mark. Last number I saw was $370 billion for the loan forgiveness package. Which means Joe Biden will have the student loans paid for by August of 2024!

All Politics Is Local

J.L. in Paterson, NJ, writes: Concerning the two Democrats in the Wyoming State Senate, you wrote: "Together they represent 6.5% of the Senate, even though Joe Biden got 27% of the vote in Wyoming in 2020. Thank gerrymandering for that disparity."I disagree about pointing to gerrymandering. If the Democrats in Wyoming were distributed around the state completely at random, and if the district lines were drawn by a nonpartisan commission or an objective computer program, then one would expect every district to have about 27% Democrats, and hence a Republican state senator.

The only reason there are any Democrats in the Senate is that voters aren't distributed randomly. As you point out, these two senators represent districts with an unusually high proportion of liberals. That means that the rest of the state has even fewer than 27% Biden voters. In general, there's no reason to believe that members of a 27% minority will sort themselves out in such a way as to constitute a majority in 27% of the districts, even with districts fairly drawn. More commonly, the overwhelming majority of them will find themselves in districts that their party has no chance to win. Only statewide proportional representation would change that.

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C.J. in Lowell, MA, writes: I'm writing to push back on your suggestion that the 36-3 (with one seat currently vacant) Democratic advantage in the Massachusetts Senate could only be the result of gerrymandering. After a couple of bad experiences we have become very transparent and inclusive of a variety of interests when drawing our maps while respecting political boundaries and communities of interest. The truth is the three remaining Republican districts are among our reddest areas due to natural clustering of partisan preferences. We do not have districts that are of obnoxious shapes and a different map is not likely to produce a much different result. Under the leadership of the state party chair who recently completed his tenure, the Democrats flipped 19 elected positions and not a single Democrat seeking re-election lost. We as a party are well organized and simply good at what we do. The other thing to keep in mind is that in Massachusetts the Democratic Party embraces a wide ideological spectrum and we can find candidates acceptable to a variety of constituencies, especially in the House, which is also overwhelmingly Democratic.

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R.L.D. in Sundance, WY (formerly of Austin, TX), writes: I'm happy to see that your comment about Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) trying to eliminate all property taxes is an exaggeration for the current special session, but not at all surprised to see that this is his stated goal in the long run. Since Texas is rabidly anti-income-tax at all levels, so much so that they wrote it into the state constitution twice, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX) is right that any serious replacement of local (and school) property taxes with state funds is going to require substantial increases to the sales tax. It wouldn't surprise me to find out the governor sees that as a feature, not a bug, but that could be my cynicism showing through.

In any case, Texas relies so heavily on property taxes, I don't see any realistic way to do what the governor is asking, which tells me it's as much about posturing for his next re-election bid as anything else. Based on what I'm reading, the other thing I think Abbott is doing is trying to show that he can bully his legislature as well as Ron DeSantis can and it's not working. Also an unrealistic expectation, I think. He'd be better off taking the tried-and-true method of buying them off like Uber and Lyft did several years ago. Allegedly. I don't have any proof, but I also don't have any doubts.

Also, "Montanans don't like bomb throwers" and describing Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) as a "proven loser" are at best exaggerations of the situation in the Montana Senate Race. Yes, Rosendale is a bomb thrower and did lose to Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) previously, but he also won statewide when Montanans chose him to be their only representative in the House in the 2020 election. Perhaps his "bomb thrower" reputation is more solidified now, and maybe that will make a difference, but Democrats might want to be careful about wishing for this particular matchup in the general, as the risk of backfire is considerable.

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K.J. in Seeley Lake, MT, writes: You wrote, of U.S. Senate candidate Tim Sheehy: "but in Big Sky country, voters tend to look askance at anyone whose family hasn't been present since, oh, World War II."

As a Montanan currently sitting in Seeley Lake, MT, all I can say is "Nailed it!" That and he's against mifepristone, much less abortion...

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M.S. in Canton, NY, writes: You mentioned the jokes about the face-to-face nature of campaigning in the New Hampshire primary. I lived in Hanover, NH, during the primary in 2000. At a Saturday morning youth basketball game, I overheard a conversation between two boys, who looked roughly 13 years old: "Can you come over this afternoon?" Reply, in a disgusted tone of voice: "No. My mom says I have to go meet the Vice President."

Jews and Abortion

R.W. in Brooklyn, NY, writes: The claim by M.S. in Newton that Jews believe that life begins at conception is highly misleading. Given that cells are alive, everyone believes that life begins at conception. The real question is when the fetus is regarded as a person entitled to rights. In that regard, the large majority of Jewish scholars, including Orthodox scholars, maintain that personhood begins at birth. Although M.S. cited no sources for their assertions, I will provide two, here and here.

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D.S. in Chicago, IL, writes: You have recently posted some items about abortion and Jewish Law. I found "Do Abortion Bans Violate Jews' Religious Rights?" to be clear and informative.

Corporations Are People, Too

M.S. in Knoxville, TN, writes: If corporations can vote, can they be drafted into the military?

(V) & (Z) respond: If so, we understand the Trump Organization has just developed a bad case of bone spurs.

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D.J.M. in Salmon Arm, BC, Canada, writes: If, as a Canuck, I register a corporation in Delaware, I may be able to vote. Don't worry though—it actually takes too much of my time.

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D.T. in Knoxville, TN, writes: If corporations can be considered "people"with voting rights; what is to stop an enterprising DA from charging a corporate Board of Directors that steer their corporation into bankruptcy with murder! Love to see this attempted.

To merge, do corporations have to purchase a marriage license? If there are multiple mergers, are those Boards of Directors considered polygamous?

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R.W. in Brooklyn, NY, writes: Regarding Delaware considering allowing corporations to vote: You neglect to mention that all four towns that have either given corporations the vote or are pushing for it are in Sussex County. In the last presidential election, Sussex County went for Donald Trump by a large margin (55.1% to 43.8%). So it's not so much a blue state engaging in "antidemocratic lunacy," it's yet another red area doing so.

Legal Matters

R.H. in Santa Ana, CA, writes: Donald Trump did not have to post the $5.5 million to appeal the E. Jean Carroll defamation decision. He posted the supersedeas bond to prevent her from attempting to collect the judgment during the pendency of the appeal.

Had he not posted the bond, her attorneys would have sent garnishments to his banks and other entities holding his money or property and they could have filed liens and started collection against his real estate. (It's possible New York has a statute that says they'd have to try to grab his cash before going after his real estate, but maybe not.)

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J.M. in New York City, NY, writes: In a letter about the E-V.com remark that prosecutor Jack Smith has a legal-cost advantage over Trump due to the seemingly infinite resources of the federal government, S.G. in Newark wrote that "large businesses and plutocrats"often "have more money, more lawyers, fancier experts, better tech"to deploy on a given case than a particular arm of the U.S. government.

I offer anecdotal evidence to support this assertion.

My dad was a lawyer for the federal government; one stretch was with the now vanished Interstate Commerce Commission, where the mission in a nutshell was to protect smaller companies from the anti-competitive price policies and kickbacks used between regional or national shippers and their giant customers. Think 100-car freight trains full of steel or coal as a basic trading unit.

Dad's title was "trial attorney,"and his job was to avoid a trial at all costs. In other words, to get settlements. He even kept a handwritten tally of the dozens of settlements he helped produce with major railroads, mining corporations, steel producers, etc. (The average was perhaps $15,000; if this sounds like wrist-slapping, well, this was the 1960s and that was somewhat real money.) He once told me if a case ever went to trial, a defendant like U.S. Steel had "buildings full of lawyers"to send into the fray, where his own department might have at most a pair of attorneys and maybe a deputy commissioner.

The ICC simply could not afford such frivolous shenanigans as court trials.

One time, Dad's ICC officemate, a younger hotshot, got to a point in negotiations with a major defendant where a court trial looked imminent. This fella, we'll call him Joe, was pleased with himself and confident of victory for the feds. Indeed, one morning the phone buzzed: it was a functionary in the Commissioner's office summoning him. Joe, convinced he was about to be showered in praise, leapt from his desk to bask in glory. Minutes later, he trudged in, dragging his sorry behind. Joe had received "the talk"about how things were supposed to work.

History Matters

J.L. in Richmond, VA, writes: You answered the question of why some free Black people owned slaves. One reason not mentioned is that many free Black Southerners purchased their own family members, but some states (like Virginia) had laws that if you freed an enslaved person they had to leave the state, to discourage too many of them potentially giving bad ideas to those still enslaved. Since those free Black folks who were already free when the laws were passed were grandfathered in, they could stay, but if they then purchased their family members and freed them, the newly freed would have to leave. So, they often purchased their family and kept them technically enslaved, even if they essentially lived as free people.

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J.D. in Portland, OR, writes: I wanted to make a comment on how references to the O.J. Simpson criminal verdict have long appeared periodically on this site, sometimes assuming he was guilty, sometimes not assuming that.

It's no secret in criminology and to anyone who has worked in prisons (as I have, as a psychiatrist) that a significant percentage of the people in prison are innocent. That 10% of the people in state prisons are not actually guilty is a common estimate, though published percentages are lower. Some say more than 10%. (Even a DOJ attorney, that I worked with at one point, agreed with me on this, though I also agreed with him that federal prisons have a far lower innocence rate.) Many of these innocent people have committed other crimes (as Simpson did), but these false imprisonments are still miscarriages of justice. (It's indeed because of this common hypocrisy, that I say to my own children: "Make sure you never become one of the usual suspects; you are then sure to get blamed for things you did not do—and it will not help you that that's wrong.")

While Simpson clearly deserved to be a suspect (an ex-husband of one of the murdered, with prior guilt of severe domestic violence), the main issue in the trial was that the LAPD had clearly manipulated evidence, in many instances and in many ways, making it not possible to say Simpson had to also be guilty of the double murder beyond a reasonable doubt (even though lay logic would require "Well, then, who did do it?"). To many Black people in Los Angeles and all over the country, and to the jury, the evidence of evidence tampering was easy to understand, even though white people all over the country felt Simpson was obviously guilty anyway (either because they misunderstood the evidence, the media misconstrued the evidence, or even regardless of the evidence: that of course a large Black man few into a jealous murderous rage, when he saw his white ex-wife in the company of a young white man—though actually Ron Goldman appeared gay to many people, and was not necessarily a stereotypical threat to toxic straight masculinity in Los Angeles, though that was publicly unspeakable at the time).

The LAPD also saw Simpson as obviously guilty anyway (or at least as their most-catchable suspect; both Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman have been alleged to have been connected to someone else in the LA club and drug scene that was similarly-gruesomely knifed the prior year, but the LAPD could not solve that murder, and so there was no suspect to carry over to the Simpson case), and so the LAPD manipulated the evidence against Simpson—an efficient strategy for closing cases (or you can call it a survival strategy for burned-out police), that they had long used with Black men: arrest the usual suspects and then frame them; honest strategies are time-consuming and bound to fail. To learn more about this with the LAPD, just begin with the Rampart scandal, or watch ESPN's superb, eight-hour, Oscar-winning documentary on the broad cultural bonfire of the Simpson case. Many libraries have the DVD set. And, of course, the issue is not confined to the LAPD.

We live in a supposed era of Black Lives Matter and awareness of systemic injustice in policing, but I think we still have further to go, almost 30 years later.

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D.L-O. in North Canaan, CT, writes: This isn't a comment on anything published on E-V.com. I simply want to note an educational experience and share it with anyone on E-V.com who might be as interested and captivated as I was.

I recently came across several news articles describing various Juneteenth celebrations around the country. One of these also expressed a deep concern about keeping this holiday "small"in the sense of preserving smaller, more intimate celebrations. The writer was concerned specifically about commercialization of the holiday.

I had never even been aware of Juneteenth and its history and purpose until the past few years. Yesterday, however, I decided it was time to understand more about this holiday and specifically what it meant to Black people. While pondering this, looking for something to entertain me for a few hours on a rainy afternoon, I went to The New York Times' "The 50 Best TV Shows on Netflix Right Now"list. Scrolling down this list I found Descendant: The Past Is Always Present. This is a fascinating, engrossing and enlightening documentary on the community of Africatown, Alabama, and the discovery of the wreck of the last slave ship, the Clotilda. The story of the Clotilda and its cargo was first told in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, which I had never heard about and which was not actually published until 2018. I plan to read it now.

Descendant documents the stories of the people of Africatown, their history and struggles, from the founding of the community by Cudjoe Lewis (the last surviving descendant of the 1860 voyage of the Clotilda, whom Hurston interviewed for her book), to the eventual discovery of the wreck of the Clotilda. It forms a broad and arresting saga. And it also encompasses the undercurrents of stress and struggle directly related to that discovery and how it affects the community. I will never forget the people of that town. I highly recommend this documentary to anyone who wants a broad and narrow, deep insight into a Black community and people whose history extends backward in time to the horrors of the slave trade.

Gallimaufry

A.M. in Brookhaven, PA, writes: I enjoyed reading this week's Freudenfreude about the Tuskegee Airmen. However, I think you missed a couple of letters in the title of the piece. How about "Goodbye, Farewell and A(ir)men?

(V) & (Z) respond: Can't believe we didn't think of that.

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T.B. in Leon County, FL, writes: Your item on Fox's new line-up started with "7:00 p.m.: Laura Ingraham (was Jesse Watters)." For a moment I thought this was a list of Fox personalities who just came out as trans. I mused (for a half second) how far Fox had come from the days of gay-bashing. It was a nice muse...

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J.T. in Orlando, FL, writes: You ballparked that over 20 years, E-V.com has racked up a word total of about 27 Harry-Potter-book-series-equivalents (SI approval pending). Then you wrote: "Think how many tickets we'll sell when our work is finally adapted into a movie!"

No, it'll be straight-to-Beta. One of those two-Betamax-cassette box sets where it fills the first cassette and then the last 4 minutes spills over into the second cassette. It will be epic. I'm saving up.

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L.S. in Queens, NY, writes: This does not give the plot away: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2, episode 3 has the plot complication occur in CANADA!

It had to happen sooner or later.

(V) & (Z) respond: Well, that IS where Will Riker is from... right?

Final Words

D.K. in Oceanside, CA, writes: The actor Richard Belzer died recently. His last words were: "F**k you, motherf**ker." He did not go gently... I think he must have been a believer, though not in a worshipful way.

My mother's last words were, "Why is this taking so long?" She was never very patient. Though I don't wish to hasten the day, I look at death as the last adventure. I think I'll probably say something like, "See ya later."

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