Originally published by Esquire
(PermanentMusical Accompanimentto the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
Here is the current state of play on John Roberts’s extended Day of Jubilee. In Tennessee, the legislature debating a redistricting map that would eliminate the only majority-minority district in the state devolved into angry chaos while, in the hushed halls of the Virginia state supreme court,the justices threw outa redistricting plan that had been approved by referendum.
Commonwealth voters last month approved—by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin—a constitutional amendment to allow redistricting. But responding to a lawsuit brought by Republicans, the Virginia high court found that the Democratic-led legislature made procedural errors in how it placed the question on the ballot. The majority opinion of the state Supreme Court found that the legislature violated the multistep process for putting constitutional amendments on the ballot and that the “constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy. … This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” the majority wrote. It ordered that the state must use the same congressional district map in the upcoming election as it used in 2022 and 2024.
This is some splendid legal flummery right there. New Jim Crow with the same constitutional cosplay that used to justify literacy tests and the poll tax.
Florida Republicans redistricted in that state in April. Then, after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened voting rights for minority communities last week, Republicans in Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana began redistricting in their states. Tennessee approved a new map aimed at flipping one Democratic seat Thursday. … To place an amendment on the ballot in Virginia, the legislature is required to vote on it twice in separate special sessions with an election in between. Lawyers for the Republicans argued that the first vote was in a special session that had been called for other topics long before. They also argued that lawmakers didn’t hold the legislative vote in time to post notification of the amendment on courthouse doors, as required by a 1902 law, 90 days before the next election.
(Down in Alabama,where the state is under an injunctionnot to change maps before the 2030 census, the state is trying to get the Supreme Court to allow it to do so immediately. I like its odds.)
Gee, a 1902 law. I wonder what the political climate in Virginia was like then. There were only four lynchings there in 1902. And, as a matter of fact, that was the year that Virginia adopted a new constitution that embedded Jim Crow into the state’s laws for the next 50-odd years.From the Library of Virginia:
The elected representatives to the Convention included just eleven Republicans and no Black men, and they made clear their intent to disfranchise Black voters. So as not to violate the Fifteenth Amendment, which authorized (male) citizens to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the delegates agreed on two methods: an “understanding clause” and a poll tax. The understanding clause would enable registrars to “test” any potential voter on their knowledge of the Constitution, and would threaten to disfranchise not only illiterate citizens, but also anyone the registrar deemed incapable of understanding any questions he may have posed. The poll tax was set at $1.50 (approximately $58 in today’s currency), and had to be paid up for three years at a time.
The most influential voice for Jim Crow was Carter Glass, a Democratic politician who would become famous as the “Glass” in the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass was racist to the bone. (Southern Democrats were a blight in those days.) Glass cinched the adoption of the Jim Crow constitution with the following oration that sounds a great deal like the Virginia supreme court this week, and that echoes through the entirety of John Roberts’s judicial career. FromEncyclopedia Virginia:
Carter Glass, of Lynchburg, who took charge of the drafting and passage of the suffrage article, explained to the Virginia state convention that it would “not necessarily deprive a single white man of the ballot, but will inevitably cut from the existing electorate four-fifths of the negro voters. That was the purpose of this Convention.” When Glass was asked whether the result would be achieved by fraud or discrimination, he indignantly replied, “By fraud, no: by discrimination, yes. But it will be a discrimination within the letter of the law, and not in violation of the law. Discrimination!” he continued even more insistently, as if suddenly realizing that the question implied that discrimination was a bad thing. “Why, that is precisely what we propose; that, exactly, is what the Convention was elected for—to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
Everything foul is new again.
The most entertaining thing on the Intertoobz this past week was Paul Campos’s multi-post exegesis over on LGM on cannibalism and the law, and the “cannibalism” part is not a metaphor. Campos highlights the work of one of his law professors, Brian Simpson, who had written a book on the British case ofR.v.Dudley and Stephens,the famous case of two survivors in a lifeboat who killed and ate a deceased colleague who’d lapsed into a coma. The pair was ultimately convicted of murder but granted clemency by Queen Victoria. (They must have caught the old gal on a good day.) Simpson wrote a book on the case, which I fully intend to track down because … wow. Campos also reminds us that universities used to compete to hire professors with unique enthusiasms. Them was the days.
Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click:“John the Revelator”(Dirty Dozen Brass Band)—Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives:Here, from 1926,is an assortment of films from the General Strike in Great Britain. The General Strike arose from a labor dispute between coal miners and the companies for which they worked. The industry was finding its feet again after World War I, and in doing so it attempted to cut the miners’ wages and extend their workweek. Government bungling, and its terror of subversives in the labor movement, prevented any kind of settlement, even when King George V told one coal baron, “Try living on their wages before you judge them,” You go, king. History is so cool.
A public-service announcement from the management of the shebeen: Keep an eye on this guy, Representative Brandon Gill, a young nuisance from the Texas 26th. Gill began his public career as a clickbait pioneer by marrying the daughter of noted Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza. This helped Gill found the D.C. Enquirer, because the country didn’t have enough wing-nut news sources. Gill was particularly proud of a “story” in his shopper that praised the president’s golf game, which by every honest account is like watching a goat throw a curveball. Gill also helped his father-in-law market the spurious “voter fraud” propaganda vehicle2000 Mules.Gill had the proper MAGA cred so that it didn’t matter that other Texas Republicans found him to be an ambitious punk. He got himself elected to Congress and swiftly slid into some plum committee assignments.
Lately, he has been all over the media, social and otherwise, dealing in anti-choice hysteria (dude, take the W that Sam Alito handed you) anduncut xenophobia.He’s a comer, folks. Be aware.
I long have had two favorite historical events, judged by their pure wackiness.The first is the Cadaver Synod. The second is the Defenestration of Prague. (Things I did not know until this week: The three guys tossed out the window all survived the fall, perhaps because they landed on a dunghill. Also, there were several defenestrations of Prague, and this wasn’t even the first one.) I recently added another one—the Great Emu War of 1932. From BBC Wildlife:
After raising their broods in the Australian interior, many emus routinely migrate to the west coast in search of food and water. But after World War I, this started causing problems. Australian veterans had been given land in Western Australia, where they were encouraged to produce wheat. The land wasn’t great for agriculture and post-war economic recession was driving down wheat prices. So when 20,000 emus turned up in the towns of Chandler and Walgoolan and started destroying crops and damaging the fences designed to keep rabbits off agricultural land, drastic measures were called for.
Farmers’ appeals to the authorities for assistance resulted in the government sending in the Royal Australian Artillery armed with two Lewis light machine guns. The plan was a simple one—simplistic, as it turned out, because it had failed to take the birds’ behaviour into account.
All due respect to the Aussie military, but the emus kicked its ass.
When the guns were finally trained on the flocks after a long delay due to heavy rains, the emus responded by breaking up into small groups at the first sign of trouble and scattering in all directions, which made it impossible to mow them down en masse as intended. Two days into the operation, the soldiers changed tack and tried to ambush a thousand-strong flock, holding fire until the birds were too close to miss. This time, though, one of the guns jammed and only a handful were killed. Efforts to shoot them from the backs of moving trucks also failed. The army major leading the operation was impressed by the emus’ ability to survive bullet wounds: “They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks,” he said.
The emus forced a surrender, but now, instead of frontal assaults, the human population has taken to fencing in the areas where the emus used to gather. The emus come to the fence, and many of them starve to death in front of it.Sic transit gloria Emu.
Discovery Corner:Hey, look what we found!FromSmithsonian:
Aerial drone images over Loch Bhorgastail, one of the lakes that dot Scotland’s Isle of Lewis, show a small island long believed to be composed almost entirely of stone. But when archaeologists began excavating beneath the water’s surface, they made an unexpected discovery: The island has a foundation, and it’s a platform of timber. … [Stephanie] Blankshein is among the archaeologists studying the Loch Bhorgastail island as part of the “Islands of Stone” project analyzing the artificial islets, called crannogs, that occupy the lakes of Scotland and Ireland. Humans used clever engineering techniques to construct these little landmasses, which required “monumental effort” to create, said Fraser Sturt, a maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton, to BBC News’ Norman Miller in 2021. Sturt is a researcher for the Loch Bhorgastail study. Scotland’s hundreds of crannogs, largely concentrated in the Outer Hebrides, were long believed to originate no earlier than the Iron Age. But studies in the last decade began to suggest that some of them are much older, dating as early as the Neolithic era some 5,000 years ago, before Stonehenge was fully erected in England.
All due respect to our Iron Age ancestors, but standing up a bunch of huge stones in a circle seems like an easy job compared withbuilding a freaking island.And there are hundreds of them. And not one of them is a ballroom.
Hey,Independent.Is it a good day for dinosaur news?It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
Xiangyunloong fengming was 9-10m long, making it one of the largest-known plant-eating dinosaurs found in China. It lived during the Early Jurassic epoch, between 201 and 174 million years ago, which was a pivotal evolutionary period witnessing the rise and diversification of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs. … They noticed that Xiangyunloong was distinguished from fellow long-necked sauropod dinosaurs by a unique combination of features. “Xiangyunloong exhibits significant morphological distinctions from Xingxiulong and other early-diverging sauropodomorphs, supporting its designation as a new genus,” they wrote. It had a larger body size, a shorter neck, and an elongated tail compared to similar dinosaurs, indicating an initial stage of gigantism characteristic of such species, as well as the potential ability to walk on two legs.
The greatest thing about the opening scenes ofJurassic Parkis the shot of the brontosaurus (I think) standing up on two legs to get the tasty leaves on the top of the tree. I didn’t know there was science behind it. I am happy now.
I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people, and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and Eric Swalwell’s victims, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the brilliant journalists ofThe Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and for all the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and for the people affected by the tornadoes in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on theHondius,the outbreaks of measles, a particularly brutal flu, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.
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