Kindle Notes & Highlights
People who defend the morally decrepit, wealthy, white founding generation will justify the exclusion of a right to vote from the Constitution as an example of “federalism”—the American idea that rights flow up from the disparate states instead of down from a centralized federal government. In this view, voting rights are conferred by state governments, not the federal one. Defenders of federalism believe that the states—which they sometimes call the “incubators of democracy”—are best positioned to decide who gets to vote.
Voter registration laws are not about keeping ineligible voters from voting. They’ve always been about discouraging eligible voters from participating.
My entire theory of the case is that in a democracy the onus is on the government to make sure it knows who is eligible to vote, not on the citizens to prove their eligibility to the government. If I show up to vote and the government doesn’t know who I am, that should be their problem, not mine.
The airline industry is proof positive of the axiom “It can always get worse.”
Neoliberalism can sound benign. After all, it’s a theory of government predicated on the government getting out of the way and doing no harm. But the force that replaces the government when it abdicates its collective responsibilities is “the market,” and that is a force that is inherently amoral and ungenerous. The market values profits over people and commodification over children.
When neoliberals cede government functions to market forces, what they’re really doing is giving away the power of the people to affect and change the society they live in. From prisons to pollution, neoliberals have let the profit motive decide what kind of world we live in, instead of the will of the people as expressed through representative democracy.
I place the birthdate of neoliberalism on October 24, 1978, because that is the day that President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law.1
Bork’s theory is that the entire point of laws is to bring about these market efficiencies and lower prices. Not to build a better, more fair society or, you know, stop evildoers, but to increase profits while lowering costs. Bork belonged to a school of thought called “law and economics” (sometimes scholars will shorthand this to the “Chicago School” because a lot of these people were incubated at the University of Chicago School of Law), which holds that just about every law can and should be understood through an economic cost-benefit analysis, and the government should pick the most
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Mandatory minimums, especially in the context of drug crimes or low-level infractions, should be understood as coercion, no different from threatening somebody with torture. By detaching the severity of the sentence from the severity of the crime, what the system is doing is threatening criminal defendants with pain. People are encouraged to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit to make that pain stop. It is not justice to send people away for fifteen years for low-level crimes, and it is not a deterrent. It does not keep us safe. It is just cruelty dreamed up by politicians who were
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Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005.6 The PLCAA protects gun manufacturers and gun sellers from lawsuits when their products are used in a crime. It short circuits the entire tort system and gifts arms dealers a get-out-of-liability-free card. It is quite simply one of the worst laws ever passed, and we know that because when it was passed, Wayne LaPierre—then the head of the NRA—thought it was one of the best. “As of Oct. 20, the Second Amendment is probably in the best shape in this country that it’s been in decades,” he said.
The 2005 PLCAA states simply, “A qualified civil liability action may not be brought in any Federal or State court” against gun manufacturers or sellers. A “qualified civil liability action” is basically any products liability case or tort action, such as a wrongful death lawsuit. The gun industry is protected from these lawsuits, whether they’re brought by individual victims or even by state or federal governments.
unholy trinity for bad state laws to get passed and then ported around the country: right-wing interest group + ALEC + evil Republican motherfucker = the worst legislation you can possibly imagine. The immunity principle that Baxley and the NRA put into the law says that once a shooter claims Stand Your Ground, the burden is on the state to prove that the shooter was not eligible for the defense, before any prosecution can take place. Otherwise, the shooter is immune from criminal prosecution and civil liability. That means if someone shoots you and claims Stand Your Ground, you can’t even sue
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Stand Your Ground is there for gun owners who weren’t defending themselves, who cannot prove that their actions were reasonable, but who nonetheless felt scared or intimidated. Scared or intimidated by Black people, of course. Stand Your Ground is here, most of all, to justify white men who kill Black people. The law makes no sense, as a legal concept, unless you appreciate how frightened white guys are of Black people and how justified they feel they are when they kill us for daring to exist in the same country as they do.
To recap: Scalia takes one word—“militia”—out of the amendment and adds another word—“confrontation”—to the thing, and now we’re all supposed to pretend that the Second Amendment has always and forever conferred an individual right to bear arms for self-defense. Please sit with that and remember that this is the logic the NRA has convinced people to actually believe.
First of all, people really need to stop conflating sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and fucking into the same category. Sex is your bits and pieces, gender is how the world perceives your bits and pieces, orientation is where you’d like to put your bits and pieces, and fucking is the procedural interaction of your bits with someone else’s pieces. They are four different things.
Involved parents are the backbone of any successful educational community. Any school administrator will tell you that. Litigious parents are a necessary weapon against the state. These are the parents who are supposed to stand up for the children and the community when the state makes rules and regulations based on dwindling budgets and one-size-fits-all educational priorities. Turning these parents into weapons for the state and setting those parents against individual teachers the state refuses to pay properly is a perversion.
A group of high school students, led by Steven Pico— who was only seventeen at the time—challenged the school board and eventually got the case heard by the Supreme Court. Pico won. Kind of. Writing for a 5–4 plurality, Justice William Brennan reaffirmed that children do not “shed their constitutional rights . . . at the school house gate” and said that the First Amendment included the right not just to express ideas but also to receive them, validating Pico’s First Amendment concerns.
