We’re back for today’s BradCast after a week off during which many things happened. Some good. Many more less so. It’ll take us about a month to get caught up. So, we better get started. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
FIRST… A bit of news from over the weekend and into today…
- In Colorado on Sunday, in what authorities are describing as a “targeted act of violence”, at least 8 people were burned by an attacker in Boulder with a make-shift flamethrower and Molotov cocktail device. The victims were demonstrating in support of the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since the October 2023 attack on Israel. The alleged assailant, quickly taken into custody, was said to have shouted “Free Palestine” and “End Zionists” during the rampage. On Monday, law enforcement officials said he would be charged with federal hate crimes and 16 state charges related to attempted murder.
- News of Sunday’s attack in Boulder came just moments after news reports from Gaza that more than 20 Palestinians had been killed and more than 100 wounded near a food distribution site recently set up by the Israeli government amid desperate conditions in the war torn enclave. The deadly attack, attributed by news reports to the Israeli military, comes amid continuing, if failed, third-party talks between Israel and representatives of Hamas seeking a temporary truce, the return of hostages, and increased distribution of aid among a desperate populace in Gaza.
- Ukraine on Sunday acknowledged what appears to have been a pretty massive — and clever — explosive-laden sneak drone attack deep inside of Russia, reportedly damaging some $7 billion worth of strategic bomber aircraft at several air bases. The Ukrainian-made drones were apparently snuck into the air bases via the roofs of wooden sheds and released by remote control. The Ukrainian offensive comes on the heels of deadly, long-range attacks by Russia, reportedly against both the civilian population and critical infrastructure, deep inside of Ukraine. On-again off-again peace talks continue nonetheless in the more than three-year old war following Russia’s full scale assault on its sovereign neighbor in early 2022.
- Here at home, some encouraging (for the moment) news out of the corrupted rightwing U.S. Supreme Court. On Monday, the Court rejected petitions to hear appeals of two Second Amendment-related rulings upholding state restrictions on semiautomatic assault-style rifles and large-capacity ammo magazines out of Maryland and Rhode Island. The usual far-right suspects — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch — dissented the decision to allow the lower appeals court rulings to stand.
THEN… But speaking of the corrupted, extremist, rightwing activist Supreme Court, two emergency rulings issued on its so-called “shadow docket” last week remind us, yet again, that this Court has little interest in upholding precedent, whether it’s decades-old precedent or even their own from just one year ago.
On Friday, in what dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson referred to as a “plainly botched” ruling by the majority, the Court allowed the Trump Administration to end legal protected status for about half a million migrants in this country from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The Court does so even as litigation continues in the lower court, challenging the Dept. of Homeland Security’s lifting of lawful protected status in the U.S. granted by the Biden Administration. On Thursday, half a million migrants were here perfectly legally. On Friday, they suddenly became subject to Trump’s mass deportation goon squad, allowing them to be removed from the country — even though they may eventually win their case! So much for the irreparable harms that are supposed to be considered amid ongoing litigation in such “emergency” rulings.
That ruling came the day after the Court’s rightwingers undercut their very own ruling from just last year that, itself, had overturned decades of Court precedent known as “Chevron deference”. In last year’s case, the Court majority ruled that judges, not federal agency experts, are better equipped to decide whether various regulations suit the intentions of Congressionally-adopted statutes. The landmark ruling last year overturning Chevron had long been sought by corporations seeking to undermine environmental and other regulations. But on Thursday, after a lower court used its newly gained deference to decide a federal agency’s regulations weren’t strict enough, the High Court decided the experts at the agency in question should once again be granted deference.
As our guest today, veteran legal journalist CHRIS GEIDNER explained in his Law Dork newsletter late last week, now the Court can pull one lever “when the conservative majority believes an agency has gone too far” but when it believes “a lower court goes too far” it can pull last week’s newly invented lever “and explain that the lower court did not provide sufficient deference to the agency.” As Geidner tells me today, “It is truly a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ situation.”
In short, it the activist rightwingers on SCOTUS continue to simply make it up as they go along, overturning any precedent, old or new, in order to achieve their desired political outcome.
Geidner joins us to make sense of all of that; share his thoughts on why last week’s Trump nomination of his former defense attorney, Emil Bove, to a U.S. Appeals Court is “a line that cannot be crossed”; and for a summary of the big cases that will be receiving full opinions from SCOTUS this month as their latest term wraps up before July…
The Gaza Heritage Foundation has released a video showing calm, orderly distribution of supplies. The only reported incident took place 2 kilometers from the gate and involved men approaching and ignoring warning shots.
https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-856186