Новости за 05.01.2022

Most Americans escaped the clutches of 2021 with a mixture of exhaustion and relief. The Supreme Court, for its part, closed out the year with two quiet but notable moves. One of them came in the sprawling litigation over the Biden administration’s Covid-testing mandate. The other occurred in Chief Justice John Roberts’s annual year-end report on the federal judiciary. Though not obviously related, they both say something about how the high court is navigating criticism and calls for reform.

Let me start by saying that I don’t know how to write this.

I was evacuated safely from the Senate chamber on January 6, 2021; I was in harm’s way for a few moments at most. That day, there were many others who were more directly in greater danger, such as the law enforcement officers who were violently attacked, who faced verbal and physical abuse, and who suffered emotional and physical trauma with long-lasting repercussions. There were also people at the Capitol that day who had considerably more at stake... Читать дальше...

“The year: 2022. The place: New York City. The population: 40,000,000.” The 1973 dystopian eco-thriller Soylent Green opened with these words. The film followed Detective Frank Thorn (Charlton Heston) around a dark, sweaty, food-scarce world ravaged by climate disaster as he investigated a murder and uncovered an even darker mystery: The main ingredient in the Soylent corporation’s nutritious green wafers, Thorn will soon learn, is people.

On an autumn day in 2009 at the Winnebago County Courthouse in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Ron Johnson took the stage in front of a crowd of hundreds of tea partiers. Johnson, a millionaire CEO of a successful plastics company in the state, was a political unknown. He had never run for office before and wasn’t particularly prominent in Wisconsin Republican circles. Yet here he was, sounding like a candidate and speaking alongside then–Tea Party grassroots icon Joe the Plumber.

State and local governments have just kicked a major deadline in the disbursement of opioid settlement funds somewhat down the road. Following the combined $26 billion deal with opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and the “big three” distributors this summer, states had the opportunity to opt in to the agreement, and counties and individual towns had until January 2 to decide whether they would receive some of their state’s funds. But the combination of pandemic-related closures and a lack... Читать дальше...

For many purposes—notably, responding to a pandemic—a strong federal government is right handy. But for more than 200 years, some Americans, thinking that they were promoting personal liberty, have tried to persuade the Supreme Court to interpret federal law in a way that would hobble the government. It is happening again with Covid-19. And once again the argument focuses on a technical legal question about the meaning of the word necessary. The court gave the right answer in 1819. If it gets it wrong this time, thousands will die. Читать дальше...

Last year, it took two whole months for the year’s first overhyped publishing cancel culture story to break, when the estate of Dr. Seuss decided to cease the publication of several controversial but little-read books and a multi-week meltdown among culture war watchers ensued. In 2022, it took only three days for the first such story to plop into the media chum bucket.