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If you’re an American Christian, you’re probably very angry. You look around and see nothing but deviance, sin, and filth in your country. To make matters worse, the government tolerates it, and even calls you a bigot when you complain. Clearly, something radical needs to be done–fast!

You are effectively asserting a right not to be offended. It is a “right” that doesn’t exist in the Constitution. It has less historical validity than the “penumbral” right to privacy that pisses you off every day of your life. Logically, it should protect your opponents from your views, too, which is hardly what you have in mind. And yet, it drives you to support illiberal political movements, because you think your culture and even your very existence are at stake.

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing oblique references to this “right” in Supreme Court opinions, even from supposedly originalist justices who should know better. It is the ultimate culture war battleground.

Breyer and Kagan are traditional realo liberals. Sotomayor trends more towards the fundis. Roberts–an institutionalist–is a PBP. Alito and Thomas are bomb throwing Reactionaries who barely bother to give lip service to the rule of law. Barrett is a more principled Reactionary. Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are. . . well, we’re not totally sure yet. Either PBPs or Reactionaries. Time will tell.

Yes, it is true that Supreme Court justices are more than politicians in robes. Yes, it is true that their varying approaches to jurisprudence matter in both the short and the long run. Yes, it is true that they don’t move in lockstep. Yes, it is true that most of the cases heard by the justices are not “political” in the most narrow sense. The bottom line, however, is that their political opinions largely dictate the outcomes of the most significant cases. If they didn’t, why would Mitch McConnell care so much?

This will become more significant next year. Expect the right to coalesce over abortion and guns. The Court’s direction will become more obvious; the only questions will be how far, and how fast.

Biden to Putin: “The bromance is over! From now on it is just business–not personal. We will make deals with you when we can, based purely on self-interest, but we will resist you ferociously if you step over the line.”

If it sounds like something from “The Godfather,” that makes perfect sense, because Putin is a cross between a KGB agent and an organized crime leader. We have to deal with him accordingly.

I saw Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham call Biden weak and soft on Russia over the last few days. That makes sense, since they fearlessly took on Trump when he sucked up to Putin, and voted to remove him over the Ukraine issue.

No? That’s not how you remember it? How can that be?

The only real question was whether the decision would be based on standing or severability. The Court chose standing, which was prudent from both a legal and political perspective.

Will the GOP continue to tilt at this windmill? I think the leadership would prefer to leave it alone, but some of the state and local folks are too invested to give up, even though it is a proven loser, and they have no plausible alternative.

Blue America isn’t going to take the abolition of abortion rights in red states lying down. You can expect to see people raising large sums of money for poor women to travel to blue states for abortions. Offers of assistance with abortions will appear immediately on the internet, along with information about how to perform a safe abortion at home. It will be the 21st century equivalent of the Underground Railroad.

As with the original version, you don’t think the red states will just acquiesce to this, do you? The great state of Texas, to cite one example, will try to criminalize this kind of behavior, even if the perpetrators live in blue states (think the Fugitive Slave Act here). The result will be massively important litigation revolving around state versus federal control of the internet, the ability of red states to interfere with the activities of people outside their boundaries, and the First Amendment. How will that turn out? We’ll see.

According to the Supreme Court, the issue presented by Hobbs is whether any restrictions on abortion in the first trimester can be constitutional. Unlike most recent abortion cases, this is an invitation to revisit Casey and Roe. Few doubt that the current majority on the Court will do so. How far will they go?

As I see it, here are the possibilities:

1. Keep Casey and Roe in place, but make their legal standards meaningless: In this scenario, the “undue burden” test is implicitly redefined to permit virtually any kind of abortion restriction.
2. Overturn Casey and the trimester balancing test in Roe: Here, the Court decides that the balancing test has no basis in the history and text of the Constitution, but keeps the idea of the right to privacy in place.
3. Overturn both Casey and Roe, but keep Griswold in place: There is still a “penumbral” right to privacy, but it doesn’t include abortion, based on originalist thought.
4. Overturn Casey, Roe, and Griswold: No more “penumbral” right to privacy! States are free to prohibit contraception as well as abortion.
5. Personhood: This is the whole enchilada. The Court not only overturns all of the privacy cases, but finds that a fetus is a person with Fourteenth Amendment protections, thereby effectively banning abortion by judicial fiat in all fifty states without any need for legislation or a constitutional amendment.

What can you expect? Either #2 or #3. I don’t think the majority will be satisfied with #1; #4 would result in a huge political backlash; and #5 is a legal bridge too far, even for this Supreme Court.

So what happens after that? See my next post.

It is 1865. McClellan won the 1864 election after Sherman failed to take Atlanta. The Copperhead faction of the Democratic Party has driven him to seek a negotiated peace with the Confederacy in spite of his promise to continue the war. He offers a ceasefire and the status quo ante, but the South is not interested; for the Confederacy, after all of its losses, it is complete independence or nothing. Under enormous pressure to end the war, McClellan gives in. What happens next?

It would have been very difficult to negotiate a meaningful peace for two reasons: the border states and the territories. The only obvious answer to the border state question would have been a series of referenda, which inevitably would have turned each of them into a Kansas-style battlefield. As to the territories, most of them were physically unsuitable for cotton plantations, but the Confederacy could not have conceded that point without implicitly admitting that the ostensible reason for the rebellion–Lincoln’s position on extending slavery in the 1860 election–was bogus.

In all likelihood, if the two parties had somehow reached an agreement, the outcome would have been continuing strife, miniature civil wars on the borders, and an ever-increasing disparity in population growth and power between the Union and the Confederacy. The South would have been penned into the borders of the Confederacy. The rest of the world had already learned to live without its cotton. Its political system granted too much power to the individual states to be effective, and its infrastructure was in ruins. In the long run, the Confederacy was doomed, regardless of what happened in 1864 and 1865.

Sally Hemings was the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and a slave, which, of course, made her the half sister of Jefferson’s wife. The accounts we have suggest that Hemings and her half sister looked very similar. Jefferson and Hemings had children that could pass for white. But, for all of the remarkable biological similarities between Jefferson’s legitimate and illegitimate families, they had a completely different status under the laws of Virginia. One group of children was free; the other was not.

Did the absurdity of this ever occur to Jefferson? You would certainly hope so.

Citing the outcome of the House and Senate races in 2020, some left-leaning commentators think that Trump should be off limits as a topic of discussion in the midterm elections. Are they right?

It depends on the district, but mostly no. The problem with talking about Trump in 2020 is that the connection between GOP House and Senate candidates and Trump’s pandemic response was very thin. If the candidate in question effectively supported the rioters by denying the legitimacy of Biden’s election, by voting against impeachment, and by rejecting the investigation of 1/6, his complicity in Trump’s efforts to destroy liberal democracy will be clear, and should be discussed openly in 2022.

During the campaign, I created a foreign policy test for the various Democratic candidates. The gist of it was that you had to know how to behave if Putin showed up late for a summit, and with his dog. Some passed; some failed.

Biden passed. Now he has an even better solution to the problem–a big, ferocious dog of his own! That’s what I call creativity in diplomacy!

(Joe Biden has come to meet Putin. The latter, familiar with Major’s reputation, has wisely left his dog at home.)

B: How’s it going, Killer?

P: (Sounding pained) Please don’t call me that, Mr. President!

B: Why not? You clearly relish your fearsome reputation. What about Chechnya? What about Syria?

P: We do what is necessary for the best interests of the Russian people. We don’t take any particular pleasure in it. But if you get in our way, you’re gone.

B: What about Navalny? Poison in his underwear? That sounds like something from Monty Python!

P: That was probably the CIA trying to gain some sympathy for my opposition. They have been known to do such things, you know.

B: In my country, that would be called implausible deniability. And you know it. You rely on it to keep your opponents terrified.

P: Believe what you like. That’s not my problem.

B: Anyway, that isn’t the main focus of this meeting.

P: And that is?

B: Cyberwarfare. Criminal hacking of our businesses and institutions. It needs to stop.

P: We don’t have any hand in that.

B: At this rate, this is going to go down in history as the Malarkey Summit.

P: Again, believe what you like. We don’t condone hacking.

B: You had better not.

P: Or else, what?

B: You forget that America created the internet. We have even more and better hackers than you do. We can bring your country to a standstill without you even knowing it. It will get ugly, I promise.

P: I’ll keep that in mind. And now, I have a message for you, Mr. President.

B: Which is?

P: You think the future belongs to you, but you’re wrong. Trump and I have exposed the hollowness of your so-called democracy. America will look like Russia in a few years.

B: I understand your vision of the future. No NATO, no EU, and a disengaged America. Russia looks like the most powerful country in Europe.

P: That’s it!

B: But there are two problems with your vision, so be careful what you ask for.

P: Which are?

B: China is on your doorstep, and without NATO, Germany has nukes. You think life was scary with us having nukes–think what it would be like if the Germans had them!

P: We’ll see. (He leaves)

Robert Bruce owned extensive lands in England as well as Scotland. He spent about as much time sucking up to Edward I as he did fighting him. He only irrevocably committed himself to an independent Scotland after he killed a political rival in a church. And yet, he is revered as the founder of the Scottish state. Is there a message here for Americans?

Yes–a bigger and a smaller picture can coexist with regard to historical events. For example, it is perfectly appropriate to admire the military acumen of Lee, Jackson, and many other Confederate leaders, and to respect their work against a superior Union Army, without buying into the Lost Cause. Individual Confederates may have had positive qualities, but the big picture is that they were fighting for an evil cause, so they cannot be heroes. In addition, the statues put up to them were typically intended to send a message of white supremacy years after the fact. As a result, they need to come down. All of them.

With difficult Brexit implementation issues looming, Boris needs friends. You can be sure he is bending Biden’s ear on this matter during the G7. Will he succeed?

To a large extent, yes. Biden may have been an opponent of Brexit and an EU partisan in another life, but his primary objective is a united front against China. He needs to have the rest of the G7 reading from the same page. As a result, you can expect him to function as a mediator of sorts between the UK and the EU for the foreseeable future.

Give Trump “credit” for being consistent; he supported authoritarianism both at home and abroad. At home, he wanted to run the country the same way he ran the Trump Organization; abroad, he thought dictators were more reliable (and more fun) partners than democratic leaders. It was an unprecedented development in American politics.

If Trump is our next GOP president, we know we can expect more of the same. But what of the rest of his party, which supports the use of pro-democracy rhetoric abroad, while suppressing liberal democracy at home? How will they paper over the contradiction, and how will the rest of the G7 respond?

Let’s hope we don’t find out anytime soon.