JD Vance — signing onto Bluesky — starts a conversation about the Supreme Court's upholding of a state law banning transgender drugs and surgery for minors.

First, the site takes him down, but he's back up, and they're saying that happened because the account was flagged as a possible impersonation. I don't know what Bluesky's rules are about that, because when I searched for "JD Vance," I got various un-cancelled accounts that look like impersonations:

The one with the blue check is the real one, and maybe those others are marked clearly enough. The third account on that list, if you click through, says, in small print "(parody account lol)."

Anyway, what I'm more concerned about is whether JD Vance was able to make himself available for respectful conversation on Bluesky. Here's his set of 3 posts, which highlight Justice Thomas's expression of skepticism about "experts."

Vance says hi like this: "Hello Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you." I can see that some people are reading that as trolling. It's easy to hear sarcasm. 

Vance continues with a block of text from Thomas and the statement "I found Justice Thomas's concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating. He argues that many of our so-called 'experts' have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth." And he adds: "I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?"

Does Vance get the "common sense political discussion and analysis" he says, perhaps sarcastically, that he wants?

"In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead."

"While we have previously upheld limits on the president's removal authority in certain contexts, we decline to do so when it comes to principal officers who, acting alone, wield significant executive power."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, 5 years ago, quoted in "Trump's firings of independent agency heads put 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent in crosshairs" (CBS News).

In what is likely to be the Trump administration's first Supreme Court emergency appeal of his second term, the solicitor general is expected to ask the high court to permit Dellinger's firing, according to documents obtained Sunday.

Dellinger = Hampton Dellinger, "who oversees the office that investigates whistleblower complaints"

The 90-year-old case =  Humphrey's Executor. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, called Humphrey's Executor "a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people," and said he "would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent."

(It's Humphrey's Executor because the man, who was fired by FDR, had died, and the family was suing for back pay.)

Donging echoically.

You could go your whole life without using a word, then one day, it seems like the perfect word, and you use it for the first time. That happened to me yesterday, with "echoically": "Trump responds echoically, then darkly...."

Trump dealt with something Musk had said by echoing it, then quickly inserted what he wanted to say, which was quite different. The segue was easily accomplished. Listening to the audio, you might not notice how little he gave back to Musk and how abruptly he changed the subject, but it jumped out at me, reading the transcript.

The first commenter, Mike (MJB Wolf) said, "Dig that word 'echoically' and don't recall ever encountering it before." 

Yeah, I don't recall ever encountering it before either, so why did it strike me as the perfect word? That's odd, no? How often do you use a word and know you're using it for the first time and have no memory of anyone else using it either? 

"Could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration? And if so..."

"... would it somehow become criminal to take the professor for a steak dinner? Or to treat her to a Hoosiers game?"

Wrote Justice Kavanaugh, quoted in "Corruption Law Allows Gifts to State and Local Officials, Supreme Court Rules/The court, which has limited the sweep of several anti-corruption laws, distinguished after-the-fact rewards from before-the-fact bribes" (NYT).

The alleged gratuity in the actual case was money — $13,000. The federal statute, §666 — to quote the opinion — "makes it a crime for state or  to 'corruptly' solicit, accept, accept, or agree to accept 'anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded' for an official act." Importantly, federal law subjects federal officials to 2 different provisions, one for bribes and the other for gratuities, with a much lower sentence for corrupt gratuities. As for the non-corrupt gratuities, where is the line drawn?

The NYT reminds us that Clarence Thomas has received "luxury travel and gifts from the Texas billionaire and conservative donor Harlan Crow."

"The Supreme Court seemed wary... of letting prosecutors use a federal obstruction law to charge hundreds of rioters involved in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021...."

"Mr. Trump’s case did not come up at the argument, which was largely focused on trying to make sense of a statute that all concerned agreed was not a model of clarity. But the justices’ questions also considered the gravity of the assault and whether prosecutors have been stretching the law to reach members of the mob responsible for the attack. Justice Clarence Thomas, who returned to the bench after an unexplained absence on Monday, asked whether the government was engaging in a kind of selective prosecution. 'There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings,' he said. 'Has the government applied this provision to other protests?'..."

Adam Liptak reports in the NYT.

"I can attest that to speak as a black man often at odds with the stated consensus of his fellow blacks can be liberating."

"Just as often, however, race becomes a burdensome constraint on how one’s statements are received. For some, I will always be speaking, thinking, and acting 'as a black man.' The specter of race always threatens to impart an undue exemplarity to whatever I—or whatever any black people—say or do, as though the firing of every synapse in our brains could be traced back to a racial origin. In that sense, race is both qualifying and disqualifying—a reason to believe a speaker’s account of himself (for, of course, blacks are always 'authentic') and, at the same time, a reason to disbelieve it (for, of course, a black person would say that)...."

Writes Glenn Loury in "Clarence Thomas and Me/To speak as a black man at odds with the consensus of other blacks can be burdensome—and liberating." (City Journal)

The loyalty trap does not spring unexpectedly and maim you; it welcomes you in and fills you with the warmth of comradeship. That is what makes it so deadly: it feels good to be trapped....

Dianne Feinstein has died.

"Senator Dianne Feinstein Dies at 90/The California Democrat, the oldest member of the Senate, had been declining in health for months" (NYT).

ADDED: The NYT story is just a squib with the notation "This is a developing story. Please check back for updates." I can't understand why they wouldn't have a long and complete obituary ready to publish at the push of a button.

AND: From the WaPo obituary:

Mrs. Feinstein won her Senate seat in what became known as the Year of the Woman, an election that sent 24 new women to the House of Representatives and brought the total number of female senators to six.

"They reject any question of his ethics! And they somehow believe that their position as clerks, whose careers benefit from Thomas’s prestige and influence..."

"... somehow makes them more rather than less suited to make this judgment. Taken at their word, they believe a factual allegation of ethical misconduct can be adjudicated entirely on a combination of Thomas’s identity as a once-poor Black man and their say-so as judges of character. This doesn’t tell us anything about Thomas’s compliance with ethics rules."

Writes Jonathan Chait in "Even Clarence Thomas’s Law Clerks Can’t Defend His Misconduct/A truly pathetic letter vouches for the disgraced Justice’s character" (NY Magazine).

Chait is reacting to an open letter in which 112 ex-clerks of Justice Thomas assert that "His integrity is unimpeachable" and "unequivocally reject attacks on his integrity, his character, or his ethics."

Pay attention to what Joy Reid actually says here: It's not that she got into Harvard on lesser credentials!

I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding):

Like me, @JoyAnnReid is a kid of immigrants from a former European colony who went to Harvard. Unlike me, she benefited from affirmative action because she counts as “black” & in her own words wouldn’t have gotten in without it. She complains that her peers looked at her… pic.twitter.com/zCMbXNHwEZ

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 2, 2023

She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn't have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn't come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn't changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn't have been enough if she were not black.

Watching the Supreme Court. [ADDED: Supreme Court makes a moderate, minimalist change to affirmative action doctrine.]

 At SCOTUSblog.

"We have the university cases."

"The court holds that Harvard and UNC's admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment."

The Chief Justice wrote the opinion. The question is how moderate/extreme is it. 

I'm just hanging on the SCOTUSblog feed.

Ah.. no... wait: Here's the opinion.

Excerpt from syllabus:

Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice. Pp. 39–40.

The decision must be somewhat moderate, I'm inferring, because there are concurring opinions from Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. 

The Chief quotes Grutter — "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today" — and adds:

The Supreme Court issues its "true threats" case.

"The state must show, Kagan writes, that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence. The state need not prove any more demanding subjective intent to threaten another."

Summarizes SCOTUSblog.

Opinion here: Counterman v. Colorado.

ADDED: From the majority opinion by Justice Kagan:

A strange but intriguing grammatical error in a Supreme Court opinion.

From yesterday's unanimous opinion, Twitter v. Taamneh, written by Justice Thomas:

The plaintiffs (who are respondents) contend that they have stated a claim for relief under §2333(d)(2). They were allegedly injured by a terrorist attack carried out by ISIS. But plaintiffs are not suing ISIS. Instead, they have brought suit against three of the largest social-media companies in the world—Facebook, Twitter (who is petitioner), and Google (which owns YouTube)—for allegedly aiding and abetting ISIS.

You'd think the proximity of "Twitter (who...)" to "Google (which...)" would set off somebody's grammar alarm. They're both corporations and — though it's sometimes said jocosely or not that "corporations are people" — they're not human beings and they don't get "who."

It's an outright error, but I'm interested in why something worked on by so many industrious writers and editors would fail to catch it. I came up with 2 ideas:

I can't remember ever seeing the term "judicial activist" to refer to anyone other than a judge supposedly engaging in "judicial activism."

But here's The Washington Post using the term to refer to a political activist who concerns himself with the judiciary: "Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’/Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice."*

Who's Leonard Leo? The first sentence of the piece calls him "Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo," and the third paragraph calls him "a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges." He's not a judge, and he's not, at least not openly, a proponent of judicial activism.

In the 18-year archive of this blog, Leo's name has come up exactly once, back in 2006, when the NYT invited various legal writers to offer questions that could be asked of Samuel Alito at his confirmation hearing. I wrote:

Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, asks the one that Robert Bork gave his most damaging answer to: "why do you want to be on the Supreme Court?" (Bork said he thought it would be "an intellectual feast.")

"As far as I’m concerned, I sat next to [Clarence Thomas] on the bench for 28 years. I like him. He’s a friend of mine."

"I’ve never seen him do anything underhanded or say anything underhanded.... My personal point of view is he’s a man of integrity."

Said Stephen Breyer, quoted in "Justice Thomas Is ‘Man of Integrity’ Says Ex-Colleague Breyer" (Bloomberg).

Breyer... pushed back on the criticism that the Supreme Court does nothing on ethics... He said the difficulty with a code of ethics in the Supreme Court is that the justices can’t be replaced if they disqualify themselves like lower court judges.

"I think it’s a political hit job... this ProPublica group in particular, funded by leftists, has an agenda to destabilize the [Supreme] Court."

"What they’ve done is not truthful. It lacks integrity. They’ve done a pretty good job in the last week or two of unfairly slamming me and more importantly than that, unfairly slamming Justice Thomas."

Said  Harlan Crow, quoted in "Harlan Crow: There’s nothing wrong with my friendship with Clarence Thomas/The 73-year-old real estate magnate, who is widely known as a pillar of Dallas business, finds himself in a maelstrom that was unimaginable to him two weeks ago" (Dallas Morning News).

"Clarence Thomas’s Billionaire Friend Is No Nazi/He has a signed copy of Mein Kampf. That doesn’t mean he admires Hitler."

Writes Graeme Wood in The Atlantic.

[O]ne can make out statues [Harlan] Crow has collected from countries ravaged by political violence: Nicolae Ceaușescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party; Lenin and Stalin; Enver Hoxha of Albania; the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun. These authentic specimens were harvested from the wreckage of collapsed tyranny, and they are kept in the condition in which they were found....

"The hospitality we have extended to the Thomases over the years is no different from the hospitality we have extended to our many other dear friends."

"We have been most fortunate to have a great life of many friends and financial success, and we have always placed a priority on spending time with our family and friends."

Said Harlan Crow, quoted in "Lawmakers Call for Tighter Ethics Code After Revelations About Justice Thomas/An investigation by ProPublica revealed that Clarence Thomas accompanied Harlan Crow, a conservative donor and real estate billionaire, on a series of luxury vacations without disclosing them" (NYT).

Could ProPublica — or some other organization (the NYT?) — do the same investigation into the hospitality accepted by the other Supreme Court Justices? Was Clarence Thomas focused on because he was known to be way outside the norm or for political reasons? Anyone who at all likes Clarence Thomas is going to be highly suspicious — if not already convinced — that they're going after him because they already hate him. 

What is the usual experience of visiting wealthy friends and at what point should we object? Do we want monkish judges? I intensely admire the Justice Souter lifestyle. As Sandra Day O'Connor described it:

"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury trips around the globe for more than two decades... funded by Harlan Crow, a Dallas businessman."

"The publication [ProPublica] said Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. It said the justice also has vacationed at Crow’s ranch in East Texas and has joined Crow at the Bohemian Grove, an exclusive all-male retreat in California. ProPublica cited a nine-day trip that Thomas and his wife, Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas, took to Indonesia in 2019... which included flights on Crow’s jet and island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht, would have cost the couple more than $500,000 if they had paid for it themselves...."

 
From "Justice Thomas has accepted luxury travel for years from GOP donor, report says" (WaPo).

"Sorry, Harvard, but 'visual diversity'—having a campus that looks like a Benetton ad—isn't a compelling state interest."

Writes David Lat (at Substack).

In the UNC argument, Justice Thomas said this to Ryan Park: “I've heard the word ‘diversity’ quite a few times, and I don't have a clue what it means.”

Justice Thomas, I can explain to you exactly what “diversity” means to Harvard and UNC. Allow me to share a story....

Is there really much expression of "fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others" these days?

I'm reading John McWhorter, in the NYT:

In our moment, we talk a lot about the dismaying degree of partisanship in our nation. We declare fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others. Yet [Mitchell] Jackson exemplifies a sense that when it comes to [Clarence] Thomas, none of this interest in comity applies and that it qualifies as insight to discuss him as a horrid, pathetic figure. 

McWhorter is addressing an Esquire article by Mitchell Jackson, "Looking for Clarence Thomas/He grew up speaking a language of the enslaved on the shores of Pin Point, Georgia. He would become the most powerful Black man in America, using the astonishing power vested in a Supreme Court justice to hold back his own people. Now he sits atop an activist right-wing court poised to undo the progressivism of the past century. What happened?"

McWhorter continues: 

Once again, apparently, there is a single Black way to think, with Black conservatism valuable only as a demonstration of what Black opinion is not supposed to be. It’s worthwhile, one would think, to assume first that people’s intentions are good ones. Writing someone off as monstrous should be a matter of last resort. To go with that immediately makes for good theater, but it’s also a kind of ritualistic hostility.