The Awful 88th

The Texas Observer has written a re-cap of the 88th Session of the Texas State Legislature.  The Texas Lege meets only every OTHER year, and then, for only 5 months at a time.  Maybe it's a good thing, because it limits the time they can write horrible bills. 

The Texas Observer

The Awful 88th

Losers included taxpayers, teachers, trans youths, and anyone who uses electricity.

by Texas Observer Staff

June 6, 2023

As writers scanning the political horizon noted a faint glimmer of hope that, perhaps this time, lawmakers would locate their statesman-like qualities and, at long last, spend the spring giving relief to taxpayers, the environment, electricity-users, public schools, teachers, and other long-neglected government workers.

Well, it was only ever a faint hope. Instead, the Lege lived down to its reputation, and, for the most part, spent this session in, as Observer Senior Writer Justin Miller imagined it then, a race to the bottom that took us to depths “previously unknown and unimaginable.” Think of it as the Awful 88th.

Republicans, riding a wave of authoritarian successes, wasted most of the session on an assortment of cruel social policy proposals aimed at making points with their far-right supporters and, as feared, failed to address truly important things like the electric grid, gun control, and school funding. They didn’t even accomplish their own top priority, which was property tax cuts. It wasn’t all bad, but parts were very, very bad, especially for LGBTQIA+ Texans. And now there’s a special session for added thrills. Here are a handful of highlights and a lot of lows.

GOOD LUCK ON THAT GRID

The failure that may come home to roost the fastest has to do with the state’s sagging electric grid. On May 3—about a month before his resignation—Public Utility Commissioner Peter Lake warned that Texas’ demand for electricity this summer will exceed the amount that can be generated from natural gas plants.

“The Texas grid faces a new reality,” Lake said. “Data shows for the first time that the peak demand for electricity this summer will exceed the amount we can generate from on-demand, dispatchable power, so we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on.”

Despite what’s been at stake since 246 people died and 4.5 million homes and businesses lost power during Winter Storm Uri two years ago, Texas lawmakers blew another chance to fix the grid. Instead, the Republican majority spent the last five months attempting to undermine the renewable energy industry and enrich oil and gas companies at the expense of taxpayers and consumers.

Last year renewable energy saved Texans $11 billion. But lawmakers proposed about a dozen bills to hamstring renewable energy production in Texas, now the nation’s largest producer of wind and solar energy. One bill would have required renewable energy developers to obtain a state permit, an environmental impact statement from the Parks and Wildlife Department, and hold multiple community hearings—regulatory hurdles that don’t apply to natural gas and coal plants. Another bill would have raised the costs for renewable energy producers to sell their electricity in the state’s marketplace.

That meant the bulk of the legislative session was spent with a broad coalition of players—environmentalists, manufacturers, energy generators, and even oil and gas advocates—playing defense: stopping the legislature’s attempts to kill renewable energy and minimizing handouts to the oil and gas industry at consumers’ expense. One bill would have offered zero-interest loans in taxpayer money to help maintain natural gas power plants. Another, Senate Bill 7, would have saddled taxpayers with a $6 billion check for a new energy finance tool, called the Performance Credit Mechanism, which rewards gas and coal plants for simply existing, without mandating they generate more power. As passed, the bill was capped at a still-painful $1 billion. The Legislature also passed a bill that offers $5 to $10 billion in taxpayer money for low-interest loans for new gas plants.

Thus, Texans face another hot summer and winter without any real resolution of the potentially deadly power grid problem. Citizens and businesses still largely rely on gas and coal supplies, vulnerable to extreme weather. Energy costs will continue to increase. And with the growing number of people moving into the state, energy demands will continue to outpace supply. Perhaps the Legislature would have done just as well offering a free paper fan to residents.—Josephine Lee

GOOD AND BAD NEWS ON GOOD GOVERNMENT

For the past decade, tens of thousands of state government employees across Texas toiled away without a pay raise while taking on ever-heavier workloads. The state’s largest and most-critical agencies, from child protective services to health and human services to the state prison system, were plagued by institutional crises and policy failures driven by political agendas and chronic underfunding. Turnover rates among government workers ticked up.

Then came the pandemic, which exacerbated everything. In almost every agency, employees left their jobs at near-record rates. Heading into the 2023 session with a massive budget surplus, state legislators were under immense pressure to do something to stop the bleeding.

And on that front, the Lege did take a significant—albeit long overdue—step in the direction of good government. The House and Senate struck a budget deal that includes a 5 percent bump in annual pay—at least $5,000—for government workers in each of the next two years, a total investment of nearly $2 billion. The state’s retired teachers also secured a long-awaited cost-of-living adjustment to their pension checks—something they’ve gone without for nearly 20 years—along with a bonus “13th check” for this year, totaling $5 billion.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Unlike their teacher counterparts, the nearly 125,000 state employee retirees got nada in the way of increased pension benefits. Meanwhile, the Legislature failed to make good on promises for more education funding and salary increases for public school teachers, those matters having been taken hostage to the broader ideological feud over school vouchers.

On a high note, lawmakers invested $1 billion into a historic, Teddy Roosevelt-esque plan to expand the state parks system, which has been strained by overcrowding in recent years. In the coming years, the vast lands of Texas will become just a smidge more public.—Justin Miller

MOSTLY TONE-DEAF TO GUNFIRE AND TRAGEDY

For more than 12 months now, the families of those lost in last year’s Uvalde school shooting have pushed one principal policy demand: that lawmakers raise the age to purchase an assault-style rifle from 18 to 21, the same age generally required to buy handguns, cigarettes, and alcohol.

These families have advocated for their cause relentlessly, making the three-hour drive from their hometown to Austin on a seemingly constant basis during the five-month regular legislative session. Texas lawmakers did not entirely ignore their pleas: In response to the Uvalde tragedy, the Lege passed measures closing a firearm background check loophole,fixing a flaw in public information law that can shield records related to mass shootings (pending a mysterious, last-minute lack of a John Hancock from the lieutenant governor), and requiring silent panic alerts in classrooms.

To the dismay of some Democrats and gun control advocates, lawmakers also passed legislation requiring an armed officer on every school campus—increasing, rather than diminishing, the presence of guns in schools.

However, compared to recent sessions past, the GOP-dominated Legislature was relatively gun-shy about loosening gun laws. “We’ve noticed that the Legislature is a little more hesitant to pass pro-gun legislation right now,” Wesley Virdell, state director for Gun Owners of America, told the Texas Tribune.

Any reluctance to quadruple-down on Second Amendment absolutism must be credited to the Uvalde families’ activism—though another factor may be that Texas Republicans in prior years had already passed the bulk of any pro-gun extremist’s wishlist.

Before the session began, state Senator Roland Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde, told the Observer that he would use every legislative trick he could to force a gun control discussion in the beet-red Texas Senate. He stayed true to his word, and in return he was effectively shut out of lawmaking altogether.

In a last-minute surprise, House legislation to raise the assault-rifle purchase age did pass out of committee on a bipartisan vote. But House leadership almost immediately let the measure die at the next procedural step, preventing a floor vote—during which the whole body would have finally had to stake out a public position on a policy that is popular statewide but controversial in the insular world of GOP primaries.

On the very evening that the regular legislative session ended, Governor Greg Abbott initiated a follow-up special session focused on property taxes and border security—not gun control. Last year, Abbott ignored calls emanating from Uvalde for an early special session addressing their tragedy.

In response to the new special session announcement, Brett Cross, uncle and guardian to 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, who was killed in the shooting last year, tweeted on May 30: “It goes without saying that [Abbott] has shown he doesn’t care about children dying. There will be another mass shooting. Children will die. And Abbott will show everyone again that he doesn’t care as long as it’s not him or his.”—Gus Bova

WORRYING ABOUT SEXY BOOKS -- BUT NOT MONEY FOR TEACHERS OR SCHOOLS

Abbott’s big dreams for school vouchers flopped during the regular legislative session, but Republican lawmakers did manage to kill a bill that would have allocated more than $4 billion to raise teacher pay and increase school funding in the process. All this after he set up a teacher vacancy task force in 2022 to get to the bottom of why teachers were leaving Texas schools en masse. The few small victories during the session—like more allowances for students who miss testing days due to religious reasons and the banning of some discriminatory dress codes—were overshadowed by the complete lack of additional funding for public education.

School vouchers weren’t the only controversial topic on the docket. Lawmakers started the session with dozens of proposed bills aimed at limiting what ideas students are exposed to, but the one that found footing was House Bill 900. The bill requires vendors to create rating systems to flag “sexually explicit” material in books—which critics say is a dog-whistle for LGBTQ+ themes.

The new law that requires each campus to have at least one armed security guard, even though hundreds of armed officers failed to prevent a gunman from killing 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, drew plenty of criticism.

“We firmly believe that school safety and preventing violence in schools is of the utmost importance,” wrote advocacy group Texas Appleseed in response to the bill. “However, decades of research and experience have shown that increased police presence in schools does not prevent school violence or shootings or stop them when they occur.”

Critics also want to know where districts are expected to get the funding for the personnel.—Michelle Pitcher

PUNCHING BAGS FOR REPUBLICANS

Although Republicans floated dozens of anti-LGBTQ+ bills during the regular session, just a handful of them made it to the governor’s desk. Still, each one whittles away at the rights of queer folks in Texas in different and distinctly harmful ways. These include: banning medically-necessary gender-affirming care for transgender young people, banning transgender athletes from participating in sports at public colleges and universities, a broadly written bill targeting “sexually explicit” performances (meant to criminalize drag performers), and a bill to ban or restrict public library books that Republicans deem to be “sexually explicit” or “educationally unsuitable.”

The most immediately harmful bill of the bunch looks to be Senate Bill 14, which prohibits evidence-based, frequently life-saving care for transgender young people under 18, including treatments like hormones and puberty-blockers, a reversible treatment to slow the onset of adolescence. Doctors caught providing these forms of healthcare to trans kids would be stripped of their medical licenses, even though essentially all of the same treatments can legally be used on cisgender individuals (and most controversially, intersex people) under other circumstances. For example, some cis kids who enter puberty too early may be prescribed the same blockers now banned for trans kids.

A coalition of groups including Lambda Legal, the Transgender Law Center, and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas have pledged to sue to block the bill’s enforcement on the grounds that it creates an illegal double standard. Thanks to Abbott’s signature on Monday, the new law goes into effect September 1, and it’s already becoming harder to access trans healthcare in the state as doctors and clinics move or close.


“In the last two weeks, we have probably gotten somewhere between 40 and 50 phone calls from panicked parents,” a leading New Mexico pediatric physician told the Observer. “What I’m hearing from families is that appointments that they had already scheduled are now gone,” said Dr. Michele Hutchison, chief of pediatric endocrinology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. That leaves families scrambling to secure care in neighboring states to avoid disastrous interruptions in treatment.

Senate Bill 12, the so-called “drag ban” bill, underwent significant changes in its journey through the two chambers. Explicit references to drag performers were removed but the bill’s scope was broadened to ban so-called “sexually explicit” performances anywhere minors are present. A last-minute addition targets the usage of certain prosthetic body parts, such as the silicone breasts or artificial phalluses sometimes worn by drag performers—and by some transgender people, too.

“There is no good version of this bill,” said Ash Hall, a policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas who focuses on queer rights. “Because it’s not limited to business premises anymore, a major concern I have is how this is going to play out in Pride parades,” they said.

However, Hall suggested Abbott might veto the bill because, as written, it could even affect performances by groups like the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Of course, if this one is vetoed, the next step could be passage of a new version of the bill in special session. Already, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has called for a special session bill to ban drag queen story hours at public libraries.

Despite the record-breaking attacks on LGBTQ+ rights this year, Hall said they find hope in the queer community, which came out by the thousands to oppose the bills.

“They want us all to go back in the closet and be miserable or shut up, but we won’t,” Hall said. “Trans people have always been here and always will be. They can’t legislate us away.”—Kit O’Connell

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GOP crooks

Yes, it's no longer just a conspiracy theory: Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 and Reagan sabotaged the release of the American hostages in Iran in 1980. Both used underhanded, most-likely illegal tactics to win the White House. And there is nothing we can do about it?

French on Hawley

Something so rich (?) about Josh Hawley writing a book about masculinity when we saw him running for his life during the January 6, 2021 attack on our Capitol. He could have stood up to the liars about the election. He was afraid to. 

The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity

By David French

Opinion Columnist - New York Times

There is a certain irony in discussions of masculinity. The group that is most convinced of a crisis of masculinity, the American right, is also busy emasculating itself before our eyes. It correctly perceives that young men are facing an identity crisis, yet it is modeling precisely the wrong response.

The release of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s new book on manhood is the latest peg for a national conversation about men, but the necessity of such a conversation has been apparent for some time. If there’s anything that’s well established in American social science, it’s that men are falling behind women in higher education, suffer disproportionately from drug overdoses and are far more likely to commit suicide.

Indeed, the very definition of “masculinity” is up for grabs. In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” — declaring it to be, “on the whole, harmful.”

I strongly disagreed. Aside from “dominance,” a concept with precious few virtuous uses, the other aspects of traditional masculinity the A.P.A. cited have important roles to play. Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they also can be indispensable in the right contexts. Thus, part of the challenge isn’t so much rejecting those characteristics as it is channeling and shaping them for virtuous purposes.

I should note here that traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us. On my recent visit to Kyiv, I was struck by the restraint and courage of the men and women I met. In the face of the greatest of challenges, they exhibited a degree of calm conviction that’s all too foreign to our domestic politics.

If you doubt the need for such stoicism in our own country, I’d point you, ironically enough, to the side of our political divide that is most critical of the A.P.A.’s conclusions: the American right. In its words, the right claims to uphold traditional masculinity; in its deeds, the story is very different.

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage. Do not allow yourself to become too high or too low. (“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.”) Persevere.

It’s a compelling vision — although one that can become an emotional trap, to be sure. Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the patience and perseverance that mark stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun those values. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

Instead, the new right chooses to shriek about “groomers” on Twitter.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

In 2016, for example, the single most important intellectual work of the new right was an essay by Michael Anton entitled “The Flight 93 Election.” It began like this: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.”

That’s right: The argument was that electing Hillary Clinton, a thoroughly establishment Democrat, would mean the end of America. It’s an argument that people never stopped making. In 2020, I debated the Christian author Eric Metaxas about whether Christians should support Donald Trump against Joe Biden. What did he argue? That Joe Biden could “genuinely destroy America forever.”

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.” Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he’s “pro-pedophile.” Did you disagree with Florida’s H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then “you are probably a groomer.”

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Twitter, even in its pre-Elon Musk state, seemed as if it had been constructed in a lab to contribute to a constant state of hysteria. Every single perceived left-wing outrage or excess is shared far and wide. “How can you be calm?” right-wing activists demand to know. “Didn’t you see that the North Face is using drag queens in its ads?”

Last month, my friend Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

No one should think that this hysteria is confined to online spaces or that it ultimately remains merely petty or cruel. Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

If the right is going to claim it defends traditional masculinity — through its books, its viral Jordan Peterson videos and its Tucker Carlson documentaries — should it not at least attempt to exhibit the best virtues of traditional masculinity? Yet rather than model the traits of Kipling’s “If—,” the right mimics the attitudes of the countercultural 1968 film “If…,” which offered a sardonic inversion of Kipling’s virtues in its tale of a violent, schoolboy-led insurrection at a British boarding school.

I share many of the right’s concerns about young men. As I argued in one of my first pieces for The Times, American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose. I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Outrage is cheap, he told me. And he doubted that I, as a young lawyer, had even begun to understand what true legal outrage looked like. Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

I worry for the young right. As Jonah wrote, all too many of them “have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era, they think being shabby is normal and smart.” But there is a better way. It includes paying close attention to the very masculine values they claim to uphold, and it can start with remembering a singular admonition: “Keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs.” It’s a step toward reason, a step away from the emotional brink and a key to understanding what it truly takes to be a good man.

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Biden & Freedom

Good column from Anand Giridharadas. It's from this past April, but is still quite current. He's on Substack, where a lot of good writing is taking place these days. Elon Musk will probably try to buy it and kill it.

Biden's "freedom" pitch and the coming political realignment

As the right retreats from the theme of "freedom," the left sees an opening

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

APR 25, 2023

In the final days of the 1964 presidential campaign, a professional pitch man and public speaker named Ronald Reagan recorded a video on behalf of the Republican nominee for president of the United States, Barry Goldwater. In the pitch, conventionally known as the “A Time for Choosing” speech, Reagan fixated on one word and theme above all else.

Freedom.

The Cold War, in his telling, was about whether we “lose this way of freedom of ours.” He wondered if Americans “still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.” For Reagan, America was apparently the only place with liberty on the entire surface of the Earth: “If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” Maybe he hadn’t traveled much. He extolled “individual freedom consistent with law and order” and bemoaned “the assault on freedom” and worried that “freedom has never been so fragile.” He derided “those who would trade our freedom for security.”

The pitch for Goldwater didn’t work, but the pitch man outperformed his own product. A decade and a half later, Reagan would be elected president on a similar rhetorical platform of freedom, freedom, freedom, and freedom. And the frame of freedom that he insisted on would become the mantle of the right. Every strand of the right’s project — from deregulating the economy to busting unions to lowering taxes on the rich and corporations to imperially adventuring in foreign countries — all of it could be justified by the “freedom” pose.

And in those years, the left committed a blunder, largely accepting the right’s dubious claim to ownership of the concept of freedom. The left pursued other themes. It pursued justice, equality, solidarity, coming together, hope, change, the future. But it somewhat accepted, often unconsciously, that freedom was the right’s thing.

So it was significant that on January 20, 2017, as Donald Trump, in many ways an heir to the Reagan Revolution and in other ways a departure from it, delivered the darkest inaugural address in American history, he used the word “freedom” once. Even that was boilerplate, not substantive: “We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same, great American flag.”

That was it.

If Reagan had conjured the image of thriving, effervescent Americans bursting to do things, build things, raise families, chase dreams, but for the threat of government encroachment, Trump told a different story. Americans in this new story were victims of entropy: "trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” surrounded by “rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation,” “deprived of all knowledge” by a broken education system, threatened by “the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.”

The kind of freedom the right had traditionally emphasized — negative freedom, the freedom to be left alone — wasn’t really the solution if this was the problem. If Reagan had emphasized the moral imperative of leaving free and vigorous people alone, Trump spoke of people who needed a powerful protector — a.k.a. him.

Of course, many of the actual, underlying policies Trump proposed would be quite similar to those proposed by Reagan, but the departure of the 2017 pitch from the long-reigning orthodoxy of the 1964 pitch was revealing: the party that once saw people as full of agency, threatened by government constraint, now saw people as naturally weak and vulnerable, threatened by forces beyond their control which only strong leaders could defeat. The libertarian Republican Party was now the authoritarian one.

The Republican retreat from the frame of freedom is a tectonic, under-appreciated shift in American politics. And it may be the start of a profound political realignment. For the first time in a generation, the idea of freedom is not an especially important animating principle for the right. They use the word still, but they are fundamentally about something else now, fundamentally about protecting people from supposedly menacing forces like demographic change and changes to M&Ms and children’s books and “woke” corporations. This is the pitch not of freedom but of the strongman.

To quote Miley Cyrus, the libertarian right of previous generations conceived of citizens as having the attitude “We run things, things don’t run we.” Today’s Republicans tell their adherents that they live in a world of forces that do run them, and only a powerful ruler can interrupt that.

The right’s desertion of freedom creates a historic opportunity for the left to reclaim what should never have been conceded. In reporting my book “The Persuaders,” I saw research showing that freedom is the most highly ranked value by people on the far right, far left, center right, and center left. There aren’t a lot of values like that left.

And it’s not just rhetoric: the actual program of the diverse camps of the political left is consonant with a freedom-centered pitch. What is the fight for reproductive rights but a fight for the freedom to control one’s body — and to have sex without fear that you are making a lifelong commitment some Friday night? What is the fight against book bans but a fight for the freedom to read and think? What is the effort to pursue justice for the January 6, 2021, insurrection but a fight to enshrine and defend the freedom to vote? What is the fight against climate change but a fight for the freedom of our children and grandchildren (and us) to drink clean water and breathe clean air and live in the mental peace of not constantly dreading floods and fires? What is the fight for truly universal healthcare but a fight for the freedom from illness — and for the freedom to pursue your business ideas and not have to cling to your awful job? What is the quest for free daycare and college but a fight for the freedom to learn and pursue your dreams regardless of whether you happened to be born into wealth?

Today, as President Biden announced his re-election campaign, his choice of approach struck me as a sign that this great political realignment may be upon us. As Politico summed up the campaign’s opening pitch: “Biden's 2024 choice: ‘More freedom or less freedom.’” In the campaign’s three-minute opening ad, Biden uses the word “freedom” six times. That is approximately five times the frequency of Reagan’s 11 uses of the word in his 27-minute speech in 1964. The ad frames all kinds of present-day issues as battles for freedom: protecting Social Security, beating back insurrection, defending democracy, safeguarding the vote, preserving abortion rights, preserving marriage equality, resisting book bans, shoring up civil rights, and more.

As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the progressive messaging guru whom I write about in “The Persuaders” says, the thing about freedom is that you can feel it. It’s corporeal. It’s not abstract. People know what it feels like to be free. And not to be free. This is a theme, a concept, a frame, a word that the left can no longer afford to hand to the right, and the good news is it seems like it no longer is.

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Maureen Dowd

I have not checked in with Maureen Dowd in quite a while. She is often so caustic and cynical that it turns me off. But, as they say, even a clock...

Supreme Arrogance

by Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist for the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is still great.

It’s the greatest gathering of grievances we’ve ever seen on the high court. The woe-is-me bloc of conservative male justices is obsessed with who has wronged them.

It might be an opportune time to hire a Supreme shrink so these resentful men can get some much-needed therapy and stop working out their issues from the bench.

Neil Gorsuch is settling a score for his mother.

In her memoir, Anne Gorsuch Burford wrote that when she was forced out as Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator in 1983, her 15-year-old son, Neil, “was really upset.” He told her: “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

The scar from that trauma flared as he prepared a moot court brief with classmates at Harvard Law School and “tried to add material concerning the E.P.A. that did not fit,” according to a classmate who talked to The New York Times.

Burford was attacked during her tempestuous tenure as an enemy of the environment who slashed rules and spending to gut the E.P.A. The last straw, even for Republican lawmakers and Reagan officials, was when she rejected calls to turn over documents about a toxic-waste cleanup program that her agency had corrupted. She received a contempt citation from Congress.

The Times wrote in an editorial back then: “On becoming the head of the E.P.A., Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies of government. She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.”

Last year, her son moved to complete her toxic mission. He enthusiastically joined the 6-to-3 vote to severely curtail the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The activists who pushed for Gorsuch to be nominated to the court are finally getting to their real goal: the dismantling of their despised administrative state.

On Monday, the court agreed to review its unanimous decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council from 1984. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times: “If the court overturns or sharply limits the Chevron precedent, it would become easier for business owners to challenge regulations across the economy. Those include rules aimed at ensuring that the air and water are clean; that food, drugs, cars and consumer products are safe; and that financial firms do not take on too much risk.”

The Chevron ruling arose from a challenge to a decision by Gorsuch’s mother to lower power emission standards. By overturning the ruling, he would be approving his mother’s lax stance on regulations.

Samuel Alito also feels maltreated. In writing the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, this brazenly political justice who doesn’t distinguish between his legal and religious views mercilessly stripped women of the right to make decisions about their bodies. But somehow, he whines that he is the victim.

Last month Alito told The Wall Street Journal that he did not like the way the court’s legitimacy was being questioned. “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

Funny. That’s how many women feel about this Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas, who is still bitter over being outed as a porn-loving harasser of women who worked for him — even though Joe Biden did his best to sweep the corroborating evidence under the Senate rug — was slapped with more revelations of ethics derelictions this past week.

ProPublica broke the news that Thomas’s billionaire benefactor for luxury trips and family property, Harlan Crow, had also secretly paid the private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew.

The Washington Post revealed that Leonard Leo, an executive vice president at the Federalist Society — the cult that has transformed the courts in its own right-wing image — surreptitiously funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, for “consulting work” a decade ago.

The Post reported that Leo told the G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Mrs. Thomas, but stipulated that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

“The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case,” the paper said.

John Roberts cannot accept that these justices are incapable of policing themselves. Despite all the slime around him, he refusedto testify before Congress about a court that blithely disdains ethics.

One reason may be, as The Times reported, that the chief justice’s own wife, Jane, has made millions of dollars as a legal recruiter, placing lawyers at firms with business before the Supreme Court.

Even though I’ve been writing since Bush v. Gore that the court is full of hacks and the bloom is off the robes, it is still disorienting to see the murk of this Supreme Court.

A correction was made on 

May 8, 2023

: 

An earlier version of this column referred inaccurately to the origin of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. It arose from a challenge to a decision by Anne Gorsuch to lower power emission standards, not automobile emission standards. The column also referred imprecisely to a possible Supreme Court reversal of the ruling in relation to her stance on government. Overturning the ruling would support her lax stance on regulation; it would not vindicate her position in the Chevron case, which she won.

Original. Hey, what about Kavanaugh? Who paid off all those loans of Kavanaugh's, for instance? Harlan Crow?