Laphonza Butler: Identity Politics on Overdrive

California Governor Gavin Newsom snubs Barbara Lee and appoints Laphonza Butler to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.

ANN GARRISON

OCT 7, 2023

No one better exemplifies the Democratic Party’s overarching identity politics than California Governor Gavin Newsom. He engineered the appointment of San Francisco’s first Chinese mayor, appointed California’s first Black Secretary of State, California’s first Latino Senator, and now its second Black woman Senator, Laphonza Butler. Butler is also the first Black and LGBTQIA Senator. She is married to a Black woman, with whom she shares a daughter. Nearly all the reporting on her appointment foregrounded her race and sexuality with an abundance of hollow platitudes.

Butler’s liberal Democratic and identitarian credentials, like Gavin Newsom’s, all but glow in the dark. Throughout her career she won the honor of being the first Black, first Black woman, and/or first Black LGBTQIA woman in the positions she ascended to. They include President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) United Long Term Care Workers, a union of 400,000, then President of the California SEIU State Council.

She was the first Black woman and the first mother to become president of Emily’s List, the American political action committee (PAC) that raises funds to elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights. That is the office she is leaving to become a US Senator.  Butler also rose from humble origins to the powerful positions she has occupied. Born in Magnolia, Mississippi, she lost her father to heart disease at age 16, and her mother worked as a classroom aide, home care provider, security guard, and bookkeeper.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU).

Identity triumphs aside, what can we expect from Laphonza Butler?

The Sacramento Bee describes Butler as a Democratic Party insider, who has “worked at high levels in almost every place where Democrats are strong: a former top California labor official, president of an influential women’s political organization and adviser to Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and other party luminaries.”

In 2010, as President of the SEIU United Long-Term Care Workers, she helped secure a shared endorsement for Kamala Harris in her successful run to become California Attorney General, and she is understood to have a long-running alliance with Harris. In 2020 she worked as an advisor to Harris vice-presidential campaign.

In 2016, as president of SEIU Local 2015, she endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. Later she was one of the California electors who voted for Clinton in the 2016 election.  Some union leaders celebrated Butler’s appointment, but others expressed alarm, including many who remember her time working with tech giants Uber and Airbnb. 

In 2019, while at SCRB Strategies, a Bay Area consulting firm with strong ties to Newsom and other top Democrats, Butler helped Uber pass California Ballot Proposition 22 to override California Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), which had expanded labor protections for gig workers by defining the difference between an independent contractor and an employee and thereby compelling the companies to reclassify many drivers as employees and provide them higher pay and benefits. Uber and other gig economy tech companies like Lyft and Instacart poured $200 million into passing Prop 22, making it the most expensive ballot proposition in California history at the time.

Newsom just vetoed a bill that would have required human drivers in autonomous vehicles of over 10,000 pounds—from UPS delivery trucks to big rigs—on public roads. The California Labor Federation argued that the driverless trucks are unsafe and that removing drivers will cost a quarter of a million jobs. Butler’s critics said it’s in keeping that the governor would thus appoint someone like Butler, who used her rise to the top of a major union to catapult herself into the jobs with some of the corporations most guilty of degrading labor in the gig economy.

At Airbnb, a multibillion-dollar corporation responsible for pushing up rents and fueling the housing shortage, Butler served as director of public policy and campaigns.

In foreign policy, she has no track record, but the Sacramento Bee wrote that she “is expected to bring stability and reliability to votes confirming judges, approving more aid to Ukraine, and funding government programs.” In other words, she’ll be a “good Democrat.”

Will she run?

The most asked question about Butler’s appointment is, “Will she run in the 2024 election?” She has only nine weeks to decide because the filing deadline is December 8, but it’s hard to imagine that Democratic operatives aren’t huddling with her about this now that Kamala Harris has sworn her in. She will have the advantage of incumbency for only four months before the March 5 primary, but should she win that, she’ll have more than a year by the time of the November 5 election.

California Democratic Congresspersons Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee are all campaigning for Feinstein’s seat, but there are no Republicans in the race yet. Schiff is ahead in both the polls and the fundraising, with Porter in second, and Lee a distant third.

California holds non-partisan, “top two” primaries, meaning that the top two vote getters will face off in the November 5 election. So it’s all but certain that two Democrats will face off after the March 5 primary. The state hasn’t elected a Republican Senator in 30 years.

At first Newsom said that if he had to face the decision to appoint someone to replace Feinstein, he would choose a Black woman but that he would expect her to serve as a caretaker, holding the seat for whomever wins the 2024 election because he didn’t want to “interfere” in that race by giving anyone the advantage of incumbency. However, the optics were bad and he got a lot of pushback. Why stress appointing a Black woman just to keep Feinstein’s seat warm for a year? In the end Newsom did not extract a promise from Butler not to run.

The Congressional Black Caucus urged Gavin Newsom to appoint East Bay Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents California’s 12th District, which is much of the California’s urban East Bay, and one of the bluest districts in the country.

Despite claiming not to want to hand the advantage of incumbency to Lee or any of the three candidates already in the race, he ultimately handed it to the little known Laphonza Butler, who may or may not take advantage of it.

Barbara Lee is best known for casting the lone vote against the Patriot Act after 9/11, then opposing the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and she has some distant history with Oakland’s Black Panther Party. She is now, for the most part, a “good Democrat,” but not as good as Laphonza Butler might be. Nancy Pelosi, a close ally of Newsom, has been supporting Russiagate-crazed Adam Schiff.

Newsom is all but certain to be a Democratic presidential candidate, whether in 2024 or 2028, and he has now burnished his identitarian credentials by appointing Laphonza Butler, while avoiding giving the advantage of incumbency to Barbara Lee.  

The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who publishes regularly on the Black Agenda Report. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region.

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Why are thousands of Kaiser health care workers on strike? 5 questions answered

 

Kaiser Permanente health care workers in five states and Washington, D.C., are rallying against low wages and understaffing that they say is undermining patient care. AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

Michael McQuarrie, Arizona State University

More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers began a three-day strike in Virginia, California, Colorado, Washington state, Oregon and Washington, D.C., on Oct. 4, 2023, after company executives and eight unions representing aides, techs, support staff and other employees failed to agree on the terms of new contracts. This is the largest U.S. health care strike on record. In a statement it released when the walkout started, Kaiser asserted that it wanted to reach a deal soon with the striking workers.

Although hospitals and emergency rooms are still open during the strike, and Kaiser is making use of temporary workers, many of its noncritical services are temporarily closed or operating under reduced hours. The strike does not include any nurses unions or doctors.

The Conversation asked Michael McQuarrie, an Arizona State University sociologist who directs its Center for Work and Democracy, to explain why this strike is happening now and how labor actions like this can affect patient care.

Kaiser health care workers on the picket line outside of a Kaiser Permanente facility in Sacramento, Calif. It is the largest medical care worker strike in U.S. history.

1. Why is this historic strike happening now?

The two main reasons are concerns over staffing levels and practices and dissatisfaction with pay that hasn’t kept up with inflation and was too low to begin with.

Kaiser says its options are limited due to a national shortfall in all sorts of health care workers, including home health aides and nurse practitioners. Workers counter that higher pay and better working conditions would attract more applicants.

Health care workers have long worried that inadequate staffing is undercutting the quality of care for patients – this has been a central issue in contract negotiations and strikes for years. But the COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated the problem.

At the same time, inflation has outstripped negotiated wage increases for Kaiser workers. Kaiser is currently offering some workers in Northern California and Washington state 4% annual raises for the four years covered by the new contract and lower raises for everyone else. The unions have rejected this offer, which they say would not make up for past inflation and would unnecessarily create different wage scales based on the region where workers are located.

“Why are we here? Patient care! How do we get it? Higher staffing. Why are we here? Patient care! How do we get it? Living wages.” Video by Amanda Mascarelli.

2. Has Kaiser’s financial management played a role too?

Kaiser, which provides health care for 12.7 million Americans, took in US$95.4 billion in revenue in 2022 but ran a $1.2 billion operating loss that it attributed to “strong economic headwinds in the financial markets” – suggesting that its investments were to blame rather than its health care operations.

For 2021, Kaiser reported that it had about $56 billion in unrestricted cash and investments, excluding assets tied to employee and retiree pensions.

Kaiser’s profits in the first half of 2023 totaled about $3.4 billion, however. And with the exception of its losses in 2022, Kaiser has been consistently profitable for years.

Concerns over low worker pay are growing while Kaiser’s executive compensation is increasing. As of 2021, its CEO Gregory Adams was making more than $15.5 million a year in pay and “other” compensation.

3. But isn’t Kaiser a nonprofit – and does that mean it has any special obligations?

Like many health care systems, Kaiser is a nonprofit. This means it pays very little in taxes. In exchange for their special tax status, nonprofits are supposed to provide public benefits.

Nonprofits may make more money than they spend, but they can’t distribute profits to its shareholders. Nonprofit executive compensation must be “reasonable,” according to the Internal Revenue Service – although it can be hard to determine how much is too much.

4. Are there any precedents for this strike?

Health care strikes are not unusual, with more than 40 occurring in the past two years. However, the industry and the workforce are heavily fragmented, which means that these strikes tend to be relatively small.

In September 2022, the Minnesota Nurses Association took 15,000 members on strike over many of the same issues, such as staffing and inflation. That strike, which lasted three days, was the largest health care strike in U.S. history by that point in terms the number of workers involved.

Prior to that, the largest was probably another Minnesota strike in 2010, in which about 12,000 nurses walked off the job for 24 hours.

Kaiser has experienced much smaller strikes in the past, such as a walkout in 2015 of about 75 mental health clinicians.

5. How much are patients harmed during health care strikes?

It depends on the strike, but usually not much.

Critical care Kaiser facilities will remain open, though the strike will likely cause some delays in care due to short staffing and long lines.

Some appointments and elective procedures at the affected hospitals are being postponed, and nonessential functions like labs and radiology departments are temporarily closed or their hours are being reduced.

Nurses, who are very important bedside caregivers, are part of a different coalition of Kaiser unions. While they won’t be on strike, they may have to help cover work not being done by aides and other support staff who are on the picket lines.

Michael McQuarrie, Director of the Center for Work and Democracy, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Palestinian resistance in Gaza launches historic surprise attack against Israel

The surprise attack, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” is the biggest attack launched by a Palestinian resistance force in years, and broke through a nearly two-decades blockade of Gaza

October 07, 2023 by Peoples Dispatch

In a major turn of events, Hamas fighters in the early morning of October 7 launched a surprise offensive called “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” against Israel from Gaza.  The operation involves land, sea and air attacks across Israel, breaking through a nearly 17-year long blockade.

As per reports, Hamas claims to have launched over 5,000 rockets across Israeli territory from Gaza. The rockets were reported to have hit as far north as Tel Aviv. The attack also included Hamas fighters pushing through the land and sea routes and penetrating into Israeli territory.

The offensive is viewed as the biggest escalation since 2021 in the ongoing violence between Israel and the Gaza Strip, which has been under a total Israeli land, air, and sea blockade since 2005. It is also reported to be the first time ever that Gazan fighters were able to conduct an armed operation into Israel on such a massive scale.

Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades has also declared that it has taken several Israeli soldiers and civilians hostage from southern Israel, with local reports estimating around 50 hostages.

According to Israeli authorities, at least 40 people are reported to have been killed in the attack and over 500 injured during the attack.

The multi-fronted attack prompted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare that Israel is “at war”. Israel has responded with airstrikes against Gaza and close to 200 Palestinians have already been killed.

Hamas leaders have stated that the attacks were in response to an escalation of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in both the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“We want the international community to stop atrocities in Gaza, against Palestinian people, our holy sites like Al-Aqsa. All these things are the reason behind starting this battle,” said Hamas spokesperson Khaled Qadomi.

“This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation on earth,” said Mohammed Deif, the Hamas military commander. Deif has also called on the resistance movement in the West Bank, as well as “Arab and Islamic nations” to join the struggle against Israel.

Deif’s statement is widely seen as a message to the leaders of the Arab and Islamic world against forming normalization deals at the expense of Palestinians.

The Hamas offensive is possibly the first of its kind in decades wherein resistance fighters were able to launch on Israeli territory, sending shockwaves across the world.

As outlined by Hamas commanders, the operation is directly in response to the intensification of violence against Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces, especially under the new right-wing coalition government led by Netanyahu.

Israeli violence and oppression against Palestinians has increased substantially with deadly raids becoming increasingly regular. Prior to the attacks, Israeli forces had already killed over 224 Palestinians, including 38 children, already this year. Of the total, 187 were killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and 37 in Gaza. This figure had already surpassed the record high of 178 killings in the whole of 2022.

The widespread occupation violence can also be seen in the 1,264 Palestinians currently being held in administrative detention without charge or trial, a two-decade high, as well as the 170 children that are currently being held in Israeli prisons.

This year has also witnessed an increase in Palestinian armed resistance, with both the formation of new groups and the strengthening of historic formations.

This article originally appeared at PeoplesDispatch.org on October 7th, 2023.  

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2023 sets new high for midyear lobbying

• By Maia Cook

Midyear lobbying reports at the federal level have consistently set spending records since 2019, and 2023 was no exception. Spending across industries for the first two federal lobbying quarters came in around $2.1 billion, surpassing 2022’s record by a whopping $86.6 million.

A total of 12,112 lobbyists registered with the federal government lobbied during the first half of 2023. The most lobbied piece of legislation in the first half of the year was the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2024 with an estimated total of 449 clients paying lobbyists to weigh in on the bill. 

The NDAA usually passes with bipartisan support. But this year, it faced scrutiny over provisions dealing with a range of subjects including Pentagon policies on abortion access, combatting Russian aggression in Ukraine, countering Chinese influence and supplying medical care to transgender troops.

The top lobbying industry for the first half of 2023 was pharmaceuticals/health products, which spent $192.7 million. The pharmaceutical industry was followed by electronic manufacturing and equipment, insurance, securities and investment, and air transportation. 

The top federal lobbying spender for the first half of 2023 was the US Chamber of Commerce, which spent around $35.9 million. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) also continued to be a big player, spending $14.5 million.

The oil and gas industry has been among the top federal lobbying spenders in the first half of each year since the US shale revolution in 2008. The oil and gas industry spent over $65 million on federal lobbying in the first six months of 2023, about $103,000 less than what was reported during the same period in 2022.    

The air transportation industry – which includes aircraft manufacturers, public and private airlines, and air freight services – had an unusually large uptick in 2023 midyear spending, setting an industry record at roughly $69 million. This record is a massive departure from previous midyear spending for the air transportation industry, which spent approximately $59 million in 2022. 

The top-spending air transportation lobbying clients at the federal level were Boeing Co, FedEx Corp, United Parcel Service and United Airlines Holdings. The increase in federal lobbying spending from these companies might be explained by the introduction of the Securing Growth and Robust Leadership in American Aviation Act, also known as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act of 2023.

As of midyear reports, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2023 is the sixth most lobbied federal bill in 2023, with 211 clients spending on lobbying for or against it. The FAA Reauthorization Act included provisions to increase air traffic controller hiring targets, establish a program to support the retention of aviation professionals, prohibit the FAA from requiring mask-wearing or COVID-19 vaccines and raise the commercial airline pilot retirement age to sixty-seven.

Commercial banks also set an industry record for midyear spending in 2023 with over $34.7 million – about $4.2 million more than what was reported for the 2022 midyear. The previous midyear record was held in 2013, when commercial banks spent roughly $34.6 million in lobbying. The top three commercial bank groups that lobbied in the first half of 2023 were the American Bankers Association, Independent Community Bankers of America and CitiGroup Inc. 

The influx of lobbying from commercial banks is likely a product of the Credit Card Competition Act of 2023, a contentious bill introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). This bill targeted competition in the credit card processing industry, seeking to lower processing fees for small businesses. 

Durbin’s office released a statement saying, “American consumers are worried about inflation and rising prices, and credit card swipe fees are part of the problem. The Visa-Mastercard duopoly controls over 80 percent of the U.S. credit card network market…Market competition helps keep fees in check, but Visa and Mastercard have structured their networks to avoid competitive market pressures on their fees.” However, others believe the Credit Card Competition Act will hurt businesses and consumers.

Midyear lobbying totals also surged for anti-abortion rights groups, which set a new midyear spending record of $750,000. Susan B Anthony List and Right to Life were the top spenders, dominating spending among groups lobbying against abortion rights at the federal level. Around the time the U.S. Supreme Court’s  Dobbs v. Jackson overturning abortion rights was released in 2022, anti-abortion rights groups had spent $690,000 during the first two federal lobbying quarters. 

Pro-abortion rights groups, including Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights, spent $1.2 million by the 2023 midyear deadlines, down from around $1.5 million during the first six months of 2022.

Senior Researcher Dan Auble and Editorial and Investigations Manager Anna Massoglia contributed to this report. 

Originally published on October 5th, 2023, in Open Secrets.org

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The Billionaires Who Have Purchased the US Supreme Court May Soon Have Their Dreams Come True

By Thom Hartmann

It's time to raise some serious hell if we want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and the planet itself from these corrupt right-wing jurists. 

Republicans are “this close” — just a matter of months away — from ending Social Security, a goal they’ve worked toward ever since 1935. They’re hoping to use six Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court to get there.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse points out, in his book The Scheme and his YouTube series about same, that American oligarchs launched a campaign to seize control of the Supreme Court — and, thus, the American government — over 40 years ago and they’re now close to their goal of turning America back to the 1920s.

Recently we learned from ProPublica reporting that Clarence Thomas has been the featured attraction at several multi-million-dollar fundraising events put on by the Koch brothers to marshal resources that could apparently be used, in part, to bring cases before the Supreme Court. In previous years, the late Antonin Scalia often joined him at these events.

Now that the billionaires have succeeded in packing the Court with six hard-right justices who are perfectly willing to ignore federal law about ethics on federal courts and enthusiastic to dance to their benefactors’ tunes, we’re getting close to the point that David Koch envisioned in 1980 when he ran for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket.

His platform was clear, calling for the end of the EPA and other regulatory agencies, and the privatization of the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, libraries, and all the nation’s roads and rivers, among other things.

Now, with two cases that the six corrupt Republicans on the Court will be hearing this fall, David could be getting his wish.

The first is Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association (CFPB v CFSA), which could lead to a shutdown of not just the CFPB but Social Security and Medicare as well. All three of those programs are funded on an “open ended” basis without specific annual appropriations that mention how long they may exist or exactly how much money they can or must spend.

This is called “nondiscretionary spending” because these programs were designed by Congress as a permanent part of the American governmental landscape. Their funding legislation sets up perpetual and specific funds with specific funding mechanisms — the Social Security and Medicare funds are paid for by the FICA tax, and the Federal Reserve funds the CFPB — so they won’t be political footballs when it comes time for annual appropriations.

There’s also the problem that Medicare and Social Security have no way of knowing the exact dollar amounts they’ll spend each year; they can’t predict who’s going to get sick when, or who’s going to die or become disabled. (This is true for most federal agencies, which is why this lawsuit could also shut down everything from the USDA to the FDA to the EPA.)

The plaintiffs in CFPB v CFSA argue that the provision of the Constitution that lets Congress set up agencies and fund them requires that Congress also set specific lifetimes and exact specific annual funding levels for all agencies. This is based on Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which says:

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

Nowhere, of course, does the Constitution say that agencies that don’t have specific lifetimes or specific annual budgets are outlawed. The idea is, on its face, bizarre. But the Fifth Circuit of Appeals has already ruled — in the CFPB v CFSA case which the Supreme Court will hear this fall — that that’s exactly what the Constitution says.

As legal scholar and author Ian Millhiser notes over at Vox:

“If taken seriously, moreover, this argument would invalidate most federal spending, and it would make it impossible for benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare to even exist.”

If the six Republican justices rule the way the oligarchs who support their extravagant lifestyles want, America could be a very, very different place in just a few years.

Similarly, the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, could end most of the regulatory agencies that big polluters like the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s made hate.

As Senators Whitehouse, Hirono, Feinstein, and Warren noted:

“This case is the product of a decades-long effort by pro-corporate interests to eviscerate the federal government's regulatory apparatus, to the detriment of the American people.”

So, how could the Supreme Court put the EPA and other regulatory agencies out of business?

It has to do with something called the Chevron deference, a policy established by the Court decades ago to protect just such agencies.

Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA and CO2 — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):

1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.

2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit atmospheric CO2, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak CO2 or methane (which degrades into CO2), etc.

3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.

4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the CO2 emissions begin to drop.

This is how it worked with regard to CO2 until June of last year, a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established the Chevron deference to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.

That doctrine — articulated by the Supreme Court and reflecting a century of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence — says that once a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior, they then have the legal authority to regulate and the courts should defer to the agency.

Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.

Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision, taking the first big bite out of the Chevron deference.

Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2,” the agency lacks that power. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision last year.

The coal-, oil-, and natural-gas industries have been popping champagne corks for over a year now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet and the violence of our weather.

In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others) that brought that case and are now bringing Loper v Raimondo.

And, of course, there’s Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but, since being wined and dined by rightwing billionaires, in 2020 wrote:

“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”

Giving us a clue to how this will probably go down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2; all 3 Democratic appointees opposed the decision.

Elena Kagan wrote that the Court:

“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change...yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency...the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must be done by Congress rather than administrative regulatory agencies.

As if Congress had the time and staff. As if Congress was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings. As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action even if it did.

Republicans on the Supreme Court succeeded in dancing to the tune of the billionaire’s fossil fuel network in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.

In the upcoming Loper v Raimondo case they’ll hear this fall, however, the Court is explicitly preparing to expand that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every regulatory agency established since the first decades of the 20th century.

They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress itself.

A Congress where arcane rules and gerrymandering have given Republicans the ability to block pretty much any legislation their billionaire patrons pay them to block.

All of this adds to the urgency of removing Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito — corrupt members who have benefited to the tune of millions from their billionaire patrons — from the Court as soon as possible. Or at least diluting their influence.

Democrats were happy to speak out when Al Franken was accused of a tasteless joke, being photographed with his hands a half-foot above the breasts of a faux-sleeping colleague, but seem paralyzed by the naked corruption going on with this Court.

It’s time to raise some serious hell, and Dick Durbin’s Senate Judiciary Committee is the logical place to start with subpoenas of the three mentioned above to bare their corruption to the American people. If you agree, you can find Durbin’s phone numbers and addresses here and a list of the Committee’s members here.

Every day that goes by without these corrupt judges resigning or at least recusing themselves from these vital cases — because of public outrage and congressional pressure — is another day closer to the end of the functional America we’ve all grown to know and love.

And that includes Social Security, Medicare, and the other programs Republicans are gleefully expecting the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional with these cases in the upcoming months…

Originally published on October 4th, 2023, in Common Dreams

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