What Happened Today: June 30, 2022
The Supreme Court rolls back power of the administrative state; Israel’s 5th election in four years; Stop Being Surprised by Germany
The Big Story
Capping off an unusually high-profile and contentious term, the Supreme Court curtailed the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, striking a major blow against a key pillar of President Biden’s climate change agenda. The court’s 6-3 decision sided in favor of West Virginia’s attorney general, who was joined by several other Republican-led states in challenging the EPA’s authority to limit power plant emissions. Under review was the EPA’s use of regulations enacted under the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which had been halted but not ruled to be unlawful by the Supreme Court in 2016. A federal appeals court struck down the Trump administration’s replacement regulations last year, paving the way for the Biden administration to complete its own rules on carbon emissions. Today’s decision found that the EPA overstepped its authority by attempting to enact a “cap and trade” carbon policy that Congress had previously rejected.
“A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the majority. The finding will have far-reaching implications beyond the EPA, as the court’s current conservative supermajority builds on recent decisions that have sought to unwind some of the expansive bureaucratic powers that have accumulated to federal agencies in recent decades.
But while reining in the power and potential political influence of federal bureaucrats this term, the court has become more aggressively political in its posture, a stark contrast to the slow, gradual changes that Chief Justice John Roberts has tried, and ultimately failed, to elevate as the hallmark of his tenure. In the recent landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his opinion concurring with the conservative majority that he would have left overturning Roe v. Wade “for another day,” a sentiment that Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, brushed off, saying of the chief’s opinion that its “most fundamental defect is its failure to offer any principled basis for its approach.”
By thrusting itself into some of the most divisive debates of the day, the Supreme Court has become a more contentious and hostile place, with public visitors no longer allowed in the courtroom, security threats made against the justices, and an internal probe launched to find who leaked the Roe v. Wade decision draft last month ahead of its publication, and how.
In the Back Pages: Stop Being Surprised by Germany
The Rest
→ Come Friday, public schools in Maryland will no longer be able to deploy “seclusion” practices, which force misbehaving students—including children as young as 5—to spend time in padded closets by themselves. The disciplinary technique was deployed almost 20,000 times in 2018-2019, the last full year of available data. Also banned will be the commonplace practice of “restraining” students by forcing them to lie on the floor with staff members holding them down. “Seclusion has no place in Maryland,” said Mohammed Choudhury, Maryland’s superintendent of state schools. It does, apparently, have a place in most every other state: Only Hawaii, Florida, Georgia, and Nevada have similar bans, and congressional bills to impose a nationwide ban have been introduced year after year for the past decade, only to die in committee.
→ Chinese leader Xi Jinping made his first trip outside of China in almost three years with a two-day visit to Hong Kong Thursday, where he’s scheduled to make a major speech to celebrate Beijing’s ongoing project of absorbing Hong Kong more fully under China’s reign. The occasion is the 25th anniversary since Hong Kong’s release from Britain’s rule as a colony, and comes as Beijing continually tightens its grip on Hong Kong’s legislative and judicial systems. Two years prior, Xi signed off on an aggressive national-security mandate for Hong Kong, one that brought out millions in protests that often turned violent and led to waves of mass arrests of dissenters. More recent security laws passed in Hong Kong by Chinese government surrogates significantly broadened the power of local officials and law enforcement to curtail efforts by pro-democracy protestors and media organizations who pushed back against China’s attempts to limit Hong Kong’s once-vibrant freedoms.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I feel I am being forced to vote. I feel I am being held hostage by small and foul-smelling politics.”
Maya Kleinman, an Israeli voter, following Thursday’s news that the country’s governing coalition voted to dissolve itself and appoint a temporary prime minister until fall elections. An exhausted electorate will now be forced to vote for the fourth time in five years, and analysts are already predicting that Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will win a plurality of votes but not enough to create a governing coalition, necessitating yet another election in 2023. Israel has held elections every 2.4 years, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, which now ranks it as the least stable parliamentary democracy in the world.
→ Consumers who have enjoyed the conveniences of Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology—which allows shoppers to peruse products at Amazon Go convenience stores, grab a few things beneath the benevolent eye of Amazon’s surveillance technology, and walk out with their chosen wares without swiping a credit card—can now also enjoy the convenience of having their shopping habits aggregated, analyzed, and sold to brands and advertisers. In a press release published on Wednesday, Amazon wrote that now that it has “transformed the in-store shopping experience,” it’s “excited to introduce a new analytics service” that will provide “brands with aggregated and anonymized insights about the performance of their products, promotions, and ad campaigns.” As Bloomberg notes, the press release insists—10 times!—that all data will be “aggregated and anonymized,” and that no videos, photography, or personal information will be shared.
→ After years of evading justice, R. Kelly was sentenced in a New York City federal court on Wednesday to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking, with several of his victims in the audience feeling that they’d finally found vindication and closure. “We reclaim our names from beneath the shadow of your inflicted trauma,” said one of his accusers. “We are no longer the preyed-upon individuals we once were. We will be able to live again.” Kelly still faces separate charges in Chicago for producing child pornography and luring minors into sex acts, making it likely that the 55-year-old will spend the rest of his life in prison.
→ In the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting earlier this month, which claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, most of whom were Latino, the Latino American community has become far more concerned with gun violence and crime, according to a new Axios/Ipsos poll. Since March, when 27% of Latino respondents were concerned about violence in the country, the latest poll found a 17% increase, making violence the foremost concern in the community, followed by inflation and supply chain breakdowns. A huge majority of Latinos also support red-flag laws (82%) and requiring background checks to purchase a gun (93%). And while surveyed Latinos generally prefer Democrats to Republicans (29% vs. 17%), respondents believe that Republicans slightly outperform Democrats on the issues of crime and the economy.
→ Eli Rosenbaum, America’s “top Nazi hunter,” as Jewish Insider put it, has been tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to go after Russian war criminals. Rosenbaum joined the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations some 40 years ago, where he pursued cases against Nazis and European war criminals. He has been at the center of innumerable investigations, including the famous World Jewish Congress inquiry in 1986 that discovered that Kurt Waldheim, then the secretary general of the United Nations, had committed Nazi war crimes as well as an elaborate cover-up. Garland announced Rosenbaum’s appointment during a surprise visit to Ukraine last week: “There is no hiding place for war criminals. The U.S. Justice Department will pursue every avenue of accountability for those who commit war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.” Days later, Russian jets carpeted Ukrainian cities with missiles, hitting a shopping mall crowded with more than 1,000 civilians.
→ The costly political controversies instigated by Ben & Jerry’s independent board of directors has led its parent company, Unilever, to peel off the ice cream maker’s business in Israel following Ben & Jerry’s decision last year to stop selling its products in Israel’s West Bank and East Jerusalem. The move to sell off the Israeli business comes after activist investor Nelson Peltz joined Unilever’s board earlier this year in an attempt to rein in some of the social causes that investors say have become too much of a priority for its brands. The ice cream will remain the same, but will be sold under different names in the occupied territories.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Stop Being Surprised by Germany
This week, Tablet News Editor Jeremy Stern makes sense of Germany Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s seemingly incoherent approach to the Ukraine crisis, and of the “national solipsism and wishful self-contradiction” that has become the house style for German officials. With a sober survey of 20th-century European history and the current “strategic realities” facing Eastern Europe, Stern decodes Germany’s ongoing “policy gyrations” and finds they are not all that confusing, actually, and certainly not the sudden break with German’s post-Cold War foreign policy that’s been popularized by American pundits.
Rather, Germany’s muddled rhetoric and contorted posture toward Ukraine is grounded in Germany's own economic stability and ongoing “preference for serving as a ‘bridge’ between Russia and the West—rather than as a bridgehead of the West in the East.” All of which points to the larger issue of the country’s standing, taken for granted in elite U.S. circles, as a reliable, long-term ally in the Western alliance, which itself reveals the cracks and fissures of the United States’ “own self-serving, tutelary mythology.”
By the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded, 55 years of mythologizing about the U.S. role in Germany and Europe had provided a ready-made explanation for what Americans saw on television: Communism collapsed because the United States had defeated it. The spirit of near-delirious triumphalism likewise applied to the U.S. interpretation of the significance of German reunification. Americans’ incomplete understanding of the Germans and postwar German history was perhaps never more vivid than when they rapturously applauded the return of a unitary German state—the wealthiest and most populous in Europe, stretching from Belgium to the Baltic Sea—before quickly moving on to more immediate problems, like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Yet it was not for nothing that Lech Walesa, founder of the anti-communist Solidarity trade union and the first-ever Polish president elected in a popular vote, commented as he watched the wall come down that Poland would “pay the price” for that happy event. Walesa couldn’t have known at the time that a reunified Germany would be anchored in NATO, the European Union, and a common European currency, or that a future Polish foreign minister would eventually come to “fear Germany’s power less than her inactivity.” He didn’t need to. What Walesa understood was that a reunified Germany would once again see itself as a “bridge” between East and West at just the moment the liberated peoples of the former Warsaw Pact were reaching for the long-awaited prize of self-determination: namely, membership in the West itself.
Today, the United States is once again putting itself at the center of someone else’s story—invoking Lend Lease and the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift to conjure the happy ending we’ve already determined is required of the Ukrainian nightmare. Rather than aim for a “dirty, contemptible compromise,” Washington has—rightly or wrongly—made support for an unconditional Ukrainian victory a litmus test for the American democratic ethos, even as American voters have started to lose whatever interest they had in helping the heroic Ukrainians. Convinced of their own centrality to the drama, U.S. leaders can’t or won’t understand that many U.S. allies can’t and won’t stake their futures on whatever the American position happens to be at any particular moment—because according to the internal logic of American partisan warfare, that position will be reversed every few years.
No one fears and loathes this toxic U.S. political dynamic more than our allies in Berlin. For them, Donetsk and Luhansk are simply not worth a Lehman-style contagion in Germany’s energy sector. Neither, for that matter, is Odessa, or Kyiv, or Transnistria, or the Suwalki Gap. And why, they ask, should it be otherwise? There is “our relationship with Russia [in the] future” to consider, as Scholz’s foreign policy adviser reminded Germans last week after the chancellor’s trip to Kyiv. “That is at least as exciting and relevant an issue.”
Americans are entitled to wonder what all this means for Germany’s status as a member of the Western alliance. What we’re no longer entitled to is surprise.
Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/stop-being-surprised-by-germany
Calling E Jerusalem an occupied territory makes me want to stop using Tablet. As a news source. I can get that nonsense on CNN.