Steve Helber/AP Photo
The aftermath of Hurricane Ida in Myrtle Grove, Louisiana
It says something about the week we’ve just had that the surging disease killing around 1,000 Americans every day is a relatively minor story.
In one of the most disingenuous rulings in litigation history, the Supreme Court, without holding a hearing, effectively ended a half-century of legal abortion in the United States. The remaining shards of a Gulf Coast hurricane reached the populous Northeast and caused unprecedented flash floods and tornadoes. The most villainous drug pushers and mass murderers in our nation’s history secured personal immunity for their crimes for a pittance of their ill-gained fortune.
That was Wednesday.
In matters still ongoing, there are blazes in the West that have been burning so long this summer it makes the “Springfield Tire Fire” joke from The Simpsons seem prescient. Evictions are spiking during an ongoing public health emergency as our inability to govern makes it difficult to deliver large outlays of rental assistance. Unemployment benefits for more than 7 million are also set to expire in a matter of days, which The Century Foundation estimates would cost the broader economy $5 billion a week, in addition to leaving these millions of long-term unemployed with practically no assistance.
Plus, the lesser Texas legislative effort in the news this week is a not-so-veiled attempt to suppress the vote in traditionally Democratic areas. And, oh yeah, Kevin McCarthy is out there threatening companies if they comply with subpoenas—a sneak preview of the Republican return to power and something called “governance.”
It’s enough to sap away at one’s optimism!
The week’s major events are almost more frightening when you consider what they portend in the future. Because fossil fuel consumption has turned the Gulf Coast into a heated swimming pool, cities 1,300 miles away from where hurricanes touch land are now routinely at risk. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and never witnessed a tornado or heard about any in the area historically. There have now been two tornado events in the past month, the latest from a deteriorating tropical storm that originated in Louisiana. I’ve never heard of the Vine Street Expressway that cuts through Center City Philadelphia flooding either; the Schuylkill River crested this week at its highest level since 1869.
The sad part is that all of these things can be fixed.
The scenes of this disaster in New York—swimming rats, submerged Grubhub drivers, and all—make perfectly clear that our physical infrastructure no longer matches the environment in which we are living. There is no indication that any sewer or water management systems failed; it’s just not possible to handle a downpour of four inches in an hour with the current equipment. These are so-called thousand-year weather events that happen with regularity (the Central Park rainfall beat the all-time record set … two weeks ago). The flash flood in Tennessee that killed a couple dozen people a week ago was similarly not the result of any catastrophic failure, just an unexpected event. That’s not our future, it’s our present.
The implications of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision are even more appalling. Like several other recent rulings, it happened late at night on the “shadow docket,” without so much as a hearing. This has been a growing practice; like others, the abortion opinion was unsigned. Like so many despots, the judges in the majority are cowards.
The ruling also signaled the uselessness of trying to apply logic in the face of ideology. The Texas law, banning abortions after 6 weeks (a point at which many women don’t know that they’re pregnant yet), was blatantly unconstitutional under current precedent. The Court’s majority has the opportunity to change that precedent, though, and as soon as next year, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, they likely will. But they know that’s unpopular, so instead they found a way to overturn Roe v. Wade while claiming they didn’t.
Texas set up an enforcement strategy where any stranger can sue a practitioner who “aids and abets” an abortion, or even if they intend to do so. That random anti-abortion vigilante can earn a $10,000 bounty from the violator if the suit is successful. The state did this deliberately, to avoid a straight-on challenge on constitutional grounds that state enforcement would trigger.
The Court, adopting a version of Saturday Night Live’s old Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer sketch, decided to act frightened and confused by this enforcement regime, saying it presented “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions.” The justices know precisely that this would allow an unconstitutional law to stand without them changing precedent. So they pretended to not be able to work out the issues of standing. They quickly added that no substantive conclusions about constitutionality have been reached in the case, but the failure to stay the law speaks volumes nonetheless.
More critically, the Court’s cowardly way out of expressing their desires on abortion now sanctions and invites intimidation laws that encourage neighbors to spy on neighbors, that can be employed in unrelated disputes and grudges, with some of the worst imaginable potential applications (think of a rapist suing over his impregnated victim’s abortion). Other states have already begun to copy Texas’ law; this is a disturbing new tool in a rule by fear that has crept across the country. All you have to do is conscript citizens into deputies of the state and you can carry out whatever policy you want, as long as it meets with conservative ideology. I’m sure that $10,000 bounties for suing those who intend to sell guns outside the law wouldn’t fly; consistency is beside the point.
Let’s not forget the Sacklers, owners of opioid peddler Purdue Pharma, who this week were granted a settlement in the company’s bankruptcy dissolution that exempts from liability for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, all for the low, low price of $4.5 billion, a fraction of the family’s personal fortune. This brings an end to thousands of lawsuits and sets a new standard for the old adage that “crime pays.” As Moe Tkacik explained at the Prospect, this personal immunity for wrongdoers through corporate bankruptcy proceedings is an old private equity trick.
It’s hard for me to come up with many rays of hope to smooth this all out. Nancy Pelosi will get a bill codifying Roe to the House floor, but because of the alarming passivity of a handful of Senate Democrats to the challenges to democracy we face, that bill will wither and die. The big infrastructure package includes some climate resiliency measures and incentives for clean energy, but the seeming inability for government to successfully function—while it took just nine months to stand up all of Medicare in the 1960s, officials are talking about five years to add dental benefits—saps at my hopes of creating anything slightly more complicated than paying a dentist, like cooling the planet. The Sacklers may be pariahs, but jets and private islands probably have a calming effect on the psyche.
The sad part is that all of these things can be fixed. We can better prepare big cities and small towns for our changed climate, and consummate the green transition to prevent more damage. We can end judicial supremacy and return the locus of power to elected representatives. We can hold people accountable for mass death. We can get everyone vaccinated and snuff out the plague hanging in the background of all of this. A few months ago we thought we couldn’t end endless war, yet that proved untrue.
But you have to actually want to solve problems, and confront the powerful forces that don’t want them solved. I can’t offer you much on that.
