Kevin Drum

This is the interior of the Pantheon, everyone's favorite building in Rome. It's a panoramic shot, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to stitch together properly after I got home. In part this was because the roof should look symmetrical, but for some reason I didn't center myself when I took the picture. That's just sloppiness, and I paid for my sin with a great deal of time in Photoshop.

As we all know, the Republican leader in the House has warned telecom companies not to comply with Democratic subpoenas of phone records related to the January 6 insurrection:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who opposed creation of the Jan. 6 committee, warned those companies that they would be violating federal law if they handed over those phone records. To which two experts who served as House lawyers say: What federal law? No one really knows what McCarthy is talking about, said Stanley Brand, a former lawyer for the House of Representatives.

Oh come on. Can we please ditch the faux naivete? There is no such law and McCarthy knows it. The only thing that matters is the threat itself. McCarthy is making it plain to these companies that if they cause trouble for Republicans, then Republicans will make their lives miserable if they ever regain power.

That's it. Don't get suckered into wasting time on a rabbit hole that has no bottom.

Great. This is just what we needed:

Rogan will almost certainly recover just fine from his bout with COVID-19, as nearly everyone does. This means that the country's most popular podcaster will be able to go around saying that he took ivermectin and he recovered in a few days. Everyone should try it!

Just great.

The Supreme Court has finally bestirred itself to issue a ruling on the Texas anti-abortion law that went into effect last night, and long story short, they allowed it to take effect. The vote was 5-4, with John Roberts plus the three liberals dissenting.

A bit of background: The intent of the Texas law is to prohibit abortions after six weeks. However, it's obviously contrary to law for a state to do this, so instead the legislature delegated enforcement of the law to private citizens, who can file lawsuits against anyone who performs or "abets" an abortion after six weeks. In a way, this is not a new approach: many laws have "citizen attorney general" provisions that allow private attorneys to sue for enforcement. However, these laws are constitutional in the first place and the state can enforce them whenever it wishes to; allowing citizen lawsuits is merely a convenient way of expanding enforcement activities. By contrast, delegating this power entirely to citizens solely because the state is forbidden to enforce the law itself is a playground level gambit: "Ha ha, you can't sue us because we're not the ones enforcing the law." As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her blistering dissent, this is little more than half-witted game playing by the state of Texas:

The Act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents....The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law. The Texas Legislature was well aware of this binding precedent. To circumvent it, the Legislature took the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the State could not.

....Today, the Court finally tells the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked. The structure of the State’s scheme, the Court reasons, raises “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that counsel against granting the application, just as the State intended. This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.

In essence, the Texas legislature threw up a bunch of chaff that made the law complex and novel for no real reason, and the Supreme Court then rewarded them by saying that it had to withhold judgment because there were so many complex and novel provisions to consider.

All of this was done on the Court's infamous "shadow docket," which permits brief, unsigned rulings without normal hearings. Justice Elena Kagan had this to say:

Today’s ruling illustrates just how far the Court’s “shadow-docket” decisions may depart from the usual principles of appellate process. That ruling, as everyone must agree, is of great consequence. Yet the majority has acted without any guidance from the Court of Appeals—which is right now considering the same issues. It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail. In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow-docket decisionmaking—which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend. I respectfully dissent.

Needless to say, this law will eventually wend its way through the court system and end up in the Supreme Court for a traditional hearing, possibly joined with other similar laws. At that point, the Court will have an opportunity to reconsider Roe v. Wade and either confirm or overturn it. In the meantime, no one is performing abortions in Texas and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The state of Texas has passed a law that, in practical terms, outlaws abortion, and the Supreme Court has so far not responded to a request to block it. This makes Texas yet another state where it's either impossible or nearly impossible to procure an abortion.

There's nothing unexpected about this. Ever since last year, when Republicans got a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, abortion activists have been eager to find test cases that will give the Court an excuse to overturn Roe v. Wade. Maybe it will be the Texas law or maybe it will be some other abortion law. But sometime in the next year or two this is going to happen, and there's every reason to think that Roe will then be either completely or largely overturned. At that point, every state will have the authority to pass its own abortion laws, including ones that outright ban abortion.

This prompts me to propose something that's been niggling away at me for a long time. It might be completely stupid, but here it is.

Even if Roe is overturned, there will still be states in which abortion is fully legal. For the sake of conversation, let's pick California, Illinois, and New York as our examples.

So here's my idea. Someone rich sets up an organization, probably in partnership with Planned Parenthood, that arranges for abortions in any state where it's illegal. Basically, you call an 800 number and arrange a date. Maybe there's phone counseling required too. On the date, a car comes to your house and drives you to the nearest airport. You get on a plane to the closest state with liberal abortion laws, where a car is waiting for you when you land. You head off to the clinic and get your abortion. Then a car takes you back and you're home by nightfall. All of this is free of charge—or perhaps on a sliding scale depending on income.

My super rough horseback guess is that this would cost a billion dollars a year. Maybe two or three. This is really not much for a Bezos/Gates/Zuckerberg class of zillionaire for whom reproductive rights are something of a crusade.

I know that I'm being cavalier about a billion dollars, but honestly, I'd be willing to vote for an initiative in California that would fund something like this entirely out of taxpayer pockets and make California the abortion capital of the country.

Is there something I'm missing here? There's a whole lot of us, billionaires and thousandaires alike, who would be willing to fund something like this. Would there be something illegal about soliciting across state lines? Am I miscalculating the cost by a factor of a hundred? Is there some other obvious thing I'm overlooking?

None of this is meant to minimize the preferred solution of simply keeping Roe alive across the country. But given the fact that this might not be possible, is there anything wrong with making plans for what to do if and when it falls? If we can truly guarantee reproductive rights for a few billion dollars a year, surely that's not a very high price to pay?

This is a rare photo of a bee taken from above. It's rare for me, anyway, since I mostly capture them from the side. The shutter speed was 1/8000th of a second, which still wasn't quite enough to freeze the wing movement.

That well known socialist rag, the Wall Street Journal, has done its own analysis of job growth in states that ended expanded UI benefits early:

Nonfarm payrolls rose 1.33% in July from April in the 25 states that ended the benefits and 1.37% in the other 25 states and the District of Columbia, the Journal analysis of Labor Department data showed. The payroll figures are taken from a government survey of employers. The analysis compared July totals with April, before governors in May started announcing plans to end or reduce the benefits during the summer.

I'll admit that this is a surprising result. I never expected the early end of UI benefits to have a huge effect, but it ought to have some effect on whether people start looking for jobs. So far, though, it sure seems like the effect is either zero or minuscule.

I've mentioned before that the labor market seems a little wonky in some way that I can't quite put my finger on, and this is yet another piece of evidence for that. I'm still not quite sure what's going on, though, or even what I really mean by "wonky." Something just seems a little off. Whatever it is, it's why I don't think we're truly missing 10 million jobs. I suspect that it's more 5-6 million, and that's all we're ever going to get before job growth returns to its normal growth rate. We'll see.

From Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, responding to potential Democratic subpoenas of phone records from January 6:

If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States. If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.

The Washington Post notes dryly that "it is not clear" what law McCarthy is talking about, since warrants and subpoenas for phone records are issued tens of thousands of times every year. McCarthy himself, of course, remained silent on the matter since he knows perfectly well that he's just blowing smoke. This is why he resorted to simply telling telecom companies that if they obey lawful subpoenas Republicans will take revenge on them as soon as they can.

Republicans must truly be scared shitless of what we'll find if we investigate phone and text records of their communications during the insurrection of January 6. This is, once again, banana republic territory that Republicans are threatening to lead us into.

This is the the fabulous Victor Emmanuel II National Monument at the Piazza Venezia, built (mostly) in the first decade of the 20th century to honor the first king of unified Italy. Opinion varies about the artistic merit of the monument, ranging from "ugh" to "hideous POS."

But I say: a pox on all your houses. If you're going to build a monument in Rome to your first king, then it ought to at least match the popes and the Caesars in grandiose pretentiousness. That's tough competition!

So count me a fan. It wouldn't work in every city—though you can find stuff just as gaudy in a whole lot of them—but it works in Rome. This picture was taken at 3 in the morning on one of my late night/early morning strolls, the only time it was cool enough that I could manage to walk around outside for more than about half an hour.

The magazine article of the day—on Twitter, anyway—is Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic about "mob justice" in America. It's a worthy enough subject, but unfortunately the piece itself just isn't very good.

The proximate issue is "cancel culture," and the fact that one false move in lefty America—something you say, something dug up from your distant past, sometimes simply holding unpopular opinions—can get you fired and/or banned from polite company forever. Partly this is due to kangaroo court "investigations" and partly due to fear of Twitter mobs and all they represent.

And sure, fine enough. This is hardly the first treatment this subject has gotten, but a fresh look is always welcome. The problem is that Applebaum's look is tooth-crunchingly stale. It's basically what I think of as a Google piece: round up all the cancel culture stories of the past year or two and then devote a few thousand words to summarizing them. All the greatest hits are here: Amy Chua, Donald McNeil, Ian Buruma, Laura Kipnis, Nicholas Christakis, Howard Bauchner, and the usual cast of anonymous victims who didn't want to be quoted publicly.

And that's it. The problem here should be obvious: This represents only about a dozen cases over two years—plus the alleged thousands of others who are now afraid to speak their minds because of the toxic PC atmosphere that young people have brought to contemporary discourse.

If this were the first piece ever written on the subject, that would be fine. But it's more like the hundredth. To make it worthwhile we need to learn something new. And in this case the something new is obvious: Aside from the usual roll call, just how widespread is cancel culture? Does it pop up here and there on occasion, or are there hundreds of lower-profile cases that have genuinely created a climate of fear all across the country?

You won't learn this from Applebaum. You won't learn this from anyone. But it's the nut of the whole thing. I'm sympathetic to the argument that lefty PC has become harmful and faintly ridiculous in recent years, but I'd still like to see a broader look that's a little more convincing on that score. I understand that I'm asking for something pretty difficult to measure, but someone ought to be giving it a try. Otherwise it's just the same dozen or so cases swirling around forever with no real broader conclusion aside from the personal views of the people writing about it.