Joe Biden vs. Scottis: President Biden, who is no longer seeking re-election after a scandal over his cognitive decline, has decided to use his last remaining energy and presidential power to try to put term limits on Supreme Court justices.
He is expected to publicly unveil the set of proposals at an event in Texas later today. According to the report, Biden may “argue that the current system of lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court has given the president undue influence over decades.” New York Times. “He will propose a process whereby the president appoints a judge every two years for an 18-year term.”
The chances of Biden actually passing this bill are slim. Reforming the courts in this way would be controversial and would require congressional approval. Without greater Democratic control of Congress, the odds of Biden passing something like this are low. But as his work on student loan forgiveness shows, legal challenges or infeasibility doesn’t mean he won’t try. There will be more to come once the proposal is released.
“Now that I have honorably limited my government service to 51 years, I believe the appropriate limit for tenure should be 18 years. The rules start now!” https://t.co/lt5ENXgE0H
— Mary Katherine Ham (@mkhammer) July 29, 2024
What J.D. Vance Believes: “He’s just a bad guy,” J.D. Vance wrote of Donald Trump, the presidential candidate who selected Vance as his running mate a few years ago. “A morally reprehensible man.”
Text messages and emails between Vance and his transgender classmate Sophia Nelson at Yale Law School have now been published New York Times. In their private correspondence from approximately 2014 to 2017, Vance was shown to be sane and rational and, as his gender identity transitioned, treated humanely and politely by his friends. Vance Jr.’s dissatisfaction with Donald Trump isn’t news, but some of the other sentiments he expressed — like “I hate police officers” — may surprise Vance fans today.
In the wake of the protests and riots sparked by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Vance told Nelson: “I love the body camera movement and anything that gets police back to a mindset of service and protection rather than control and enforcement. I hate to think about it. With all the negative experiences I’ve had over the past few years, I can’t imagine what a black man must go through.
“There are always demagogues willing to take advantage of people who believe crazy shit,” he wrote in 2015, expressing concern about the rise in Islamophobia that would accompany Trump’s rise. And, in the wake of then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remarks, Vance wrote: “I am trying to engage with people in a way that convinces them and changes the conversation…to address racial issues. The best approach is that the more white people you try to convince, the more black people will suffer.
The two friends reportedly got into an argument in 2021, which appears to have prompted Nielsen to leak the information. According to the spokesman, Vance “has been publicly acknowledging that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a father and starting a family, and he has thoroughly explained why he has changed his mind about President Trump.”
New York scene: The city’s hotel average daily room rate of $318 is reported to be “the highest among major U.S. markets.” this Wall Street Journal. About 30% of the city’s existing hotel stock is in non-union hotels, and a new bill seeks to regulate this by making it impossible for such hotels to outsource food, room service and other services. Such regulations could drive up hotel room rates in cities where the tourist market may not be able to afford them.
Quick click
- Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of Sunday’s election, despite disputes over who actually received the most votes.
- It turns out that talking about toxic masculinity and acting like straight white men are the problem for years on end isn’t going to make those people want to vote for you.
- There’s a very interesting topic about whether voters have concerns about voting for minority women. (Spoiler: They didn’t, but the media clearly had a problem with reporting the findings.)
- Donald Trump claimed over the weekend that he would commute the sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht if re-elected as president.
- Watch Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s speech:
One effect of Joe Biden dropping out of the race is that, even though we don’t get a full mini-primary, suddenly the focus is on Democrats, who are much better at delivering brief talking points about progressive politics https:// /t.co/fjTx3kHDIG
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 28, 2024
- School choice addresses almost every toxic element of this discussion:
I’m also really annoyed by “you should send your kids to bad public schools because people like you do that to get them into good public schools.” I’m willing to sacrifice a lot for my community. Wrongfully accusing my children is not one of them.
— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) July 27, 2024
