July 1

Welcome to July and the first day of the last half of 2023. That will be interesting if it follows the patterns of the first half. Right now it is raining. Another day I won't have to water my plants. I already have the dinner in the oven so I can relax. My get-up-and-go can go where ever it wants. At least we won't have any more bombs from the Supreme Court. I will say several of the "conservative" justices have a very selective reading of history. They twisted themselves into irrational pretzels trying to say that while affirmative action was necessary fifty or sixty years ago we are so beyond racial prejudice we can dispense with measures to cure it. And two have decided that it it is perfectly alright for them to accept gifts worth more than the generous salary the United States gives them while hobnobbing with billionaires while also deciding that all of us "little people" have to drown under student loans. It is perfectly good for the PPP loans to be forgiven for the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene but not those of us saddled with a level of debt we will die before it is paid off. And how many of the cases involved parties who would have been thrown out of court for lack of standing--like the web designer who never had a same-sex couple of wanting a wedding page but wanted preemptive decision that she could discriminate against such a couple because she is a CHRISTIAN. Sort of. Or the Secretary of State of Missouri who insisted he was protecting the interests of the state's student loan agency against those student loan deadbeats even though that agency never joined the case.

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern has a good take on the "judicial pretzeling" the current court has engaged in. If Chief Justice Roberts is really worried about the reputation of the court and the low esteem it is currently held in he should look at his fellow "conservative" justices.