Kevin Drum

Two Democratic members of the Tennessee legislature, Justin Pearson of Memphis and Justin Jones of Nashville, have been expelled by Republicans who control a supermajority in the state House of Representatives. The given reason was "lack of decorum."

So now Memphis and Nashville have two empty seats to fill. Who are they going to pick? First up is Nashville:

At least 29 members of Nashville’s 40-seat Metro Council said they plan to reappoint expelled former Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, and send him back to the Tennessee House of Representatives. That would give him more than the simple majority he would need to reclaim his seat.

Okey dokey. Now for Memphis:

The Shelby County Commission could consider reappointing Justin Pearson to his seat in the Tennessee statehouse, Chairman Mickell Lowery said Thursday....In Shelby County, the commission has a nine-member Democratic supermajority.

Jones is a lock to be reappointed, and Pearson has five public supporters out of the seven he needs. He's probably a lock too. So how are Republicans responding?

FOX13 also learned that Memphis could lose funding for some major projects if Pearson is re-appointed. According to Shelby County Commissioner Erika Sugarmon, leaders in Nashville threatened to withhold millions of dollars in state funding for projects in the Memphis area if commissioners were to reappoint Pearson.

"We are also being threatened by the state to take away funding, needed funding to run our schools, to run our municipalities," Sugarmon told FOX13. "You know, and so, for example, FedExForum, the promised $350 million, they're talking about snatching that away. So, again, you know this about bullying people into submission."

Our story so far: Tennessee Republicans expel a couple of Black Democrats for obviously specious reasons. They are likely to be reappointed quickly by outraged constituents. In response, Republicans are threatening to pull funding for local projects.

That's today's Trumpified Republican Party for you. It's all about governing by revenge.

We have recently run an excellent natural experiment about the rule of law:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump was indicted on 34 counts of business fraud. Response was partisan, of course. Republicans unanimously blasted the legal basis for the case as both trivial and wrongheaded. Democrats . . . were split. Some defended the legal reasoning but others agreed the case was iffy.

On Friday, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the FDA had wrongly approved the abortion pill mifepristone two decades ago and ordered it taken off the market. Again, response was partisan. Democrats unanimously blasted the judge's legal reasoning as specious and biased. Republicans . . . unanimously supported the judge.

By any sensible standard, the mifepristone ruling was farcical. The judge plainly struggled to invent a plausible argument that would allow him to make abortion pills illegal, and in the end he failed. So he just went with what he had.

And so far, Republicans are 100% behind him. He accomplished the right goal, and nothing else matters.

Well, the idiot judge in Texas did it:

A federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary ruling invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, an unprecedented order that — if it stands through court challenges — could make it harder for patients to get abortions in states where abortion is legal, not just in those trying to restrict it.

But wait!

Less than an hour after Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, another federal judge, in Washington State, issued a ruling that directly contradicted the Texas decision, ordering the F.D.A. to make no changes to the availability of mifepristone.

This should be fun. Both rulings will be appealed, so perhaps we'll have a standoff between the 5th and 9th Circuits, duking it out over whose judge gets to make temporary national policy.

In the meantime, has the FDA started up a re-approval process for mifepristone just in case it eventually loses in the Supreme Court? I haven't seen any reports of this, but it sure seems like a good idea.

UPDATE: The Washington ruling is not nationwide. It affects only the 17 states that are parties to the lawsuit in front of the judge.

What are they staring at? A bird? A dog? An Amazon delivery driver? My recollection is that I looked out the window and, as usual, saw nothing. But then, I don't have five-dimensional cat eyes, do I?

New York City mayor Eric Adams announced a new contract with the police union yesterday. There hasn't been one for many years, so it was retroactive to 2017. Here's how they did:

I estimated inflation of 4% in 2023 and 3% in 2024. Bottom line: in real terms, the NYPD will be making less by the end of the contract than they did at the start of 2017.

This is just base pay. There may be perks and benefits that bulk it up a bit.

Since today is jobs day, it's worth pointing out that we've reached a milestone. The prime-age labor force participation rate for both men and women has now caught up to its pre-pandemic peak:

This is unusual. In the past two recessions (2000 and 2008), the LFPR declined and never caught back up to its past level. It's yet another indication that the pandemic recession was entirely artificial. Here's another:

In the past two recessions, older workers increased their participation rate both during and after the turndown. This time, participation dropped sharply and has stayed low for the past three years.

The American economy gained 236,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 146,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down slightly to 3.5%.

Overall this is a decent but not great report: labor participation is up, the number of unemployed workers is down, and 320,000 new people entered the labor force. On the other hand, there's also this:

The number of new jobs has been steadily decreasing for more than two years now. The economy is still OK, but hardly booming.

Average weekly earnings for blue-collar workers were up 3.9% on an annualized basis. Adjusted for inflation, this is a drop of 1.0%.

You already know about Clarence Thomas and his lavish vacations. But check out this addition to the story from LA Times reporter David Savage, who wrote about all this stuff 20 years ago:

Thomas refused to comment on the article, but it had an impact: Thomas appears to have continued accepting free trips from his wealthy friend. But he stopped disclosing them.

That's our Clarence! When you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don't pull out your hand and apologize. Instead, do a better job of making sure the plebs can't catch you.

Supreme Court justices sure do live in a weird, lawless netherworld where they can do anything they want. That's sort of ironic since they're folks who make up the law for the rest of us.

Today I read this story in the Guardian:

In 2018, almost 30 cities across New York state received federal money to carry out a specific, urgent task: removing lead service lines that poison drinking water. The city of Troy — which sits across the Hudson River and just north of Albany — was among them, receiving $500,000. But five years later, city leaders have failed to spend a single dollar of that money, and have yet to remove a single lead pipe.

This got me curious about how bad the lead situation was in Troy. I'll have more to say about this in a minute, but first let's review the data. Here is the prevalence of childhood lead poisoning in Troy:

This is for two of Troy's three ZIP codes (the third one has never been tested for some reason). The numbers are straight out of a spreadsheet from the New York Department of Health.

And although it's good to see the numbers going down steadily, they are still astronomical.¹ The average for the entire country in 2020 was less than 1%. Is water the cause of this?

Up through 2020, Troy's drinking water was fine, and its lead contamination had gone neither up nor down. That doesn't make it a likely culprit for either the generally high levels of lead poisoning or the steady decline in lead poisoning.

Then, in 2021, Troy's water suddenly went nuts. Lead contamination rose more than 500% and then went up some more in 2022. What on earth could have caused that?

And did it affect the level of lead poisoning among Troy's children? We don't know because we don't yet have testing figures for 2021 and 2022.

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And that finally gets me to the point I want to make about all this. Troy should unquestionably examine why the lead level in its water suddenly spiked in 2021. That's weird as hell.

That said, the data doesn't seem to suggest that water is really the problem. It just doesn't fit the lead poisoning data. More likely, I think, is that Troy's lead poisoning comes primarily from exhaust pipe lead suspended in the soil. Little kids play outside, pick up lead on their fingers, and then lick it off.

Water is always the first culprit whenever an area has high lead levels and wants to know why. But it's not the only possibility, or even the most likely one. It will take further testing to figure out what's going on in Troy, but just in general I wish we used a lot more lead remediation funding to fix soil instead of lead pipes.²

¹It's worth noting that although Troy has a lot of toddlers with test levels above 5 μg/dL, they haven't reported a single test level above 10 μg/dL since 2018. There are too many kids with lead levels that are too high, but they aren't apocalyptically high.

²Another reason to focus more on lead in soil is that there's nothing parents can do to protect their children from it. Lead in drinking water, by contrast, can be fixed via filtration. This isn't a good solution if the problem is widespread, but if it's limited to a small percentage of homes it's probably a better use of money than digging up every water service line in a city.

In 1968 Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but the nomination failed because Republicans, along with some Southern Democrats, filibustered it. The Southerners didn't like the fact that Fortas was Jewish. Republicans, however, pointed to Fortas's receipt of $15,000 in private funds to give nine speeches at a local law school.

Today, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted millions of dollars worth of vacations and yacht voyages from a billionaire friend over the past few decades. He has reported none of this. As near as I can tell, not a single serving Republican has said anything about this.

As usual these days, IOKIYAR.