Government

414- The Address Book

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414- The Address Book

9/22/20 by Roman Mars

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/112831093
Episode: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/99percentinvisible/dovetail.prxu.org/96/2c99e896-6ced-4d4c-93bc-2c39c8242132/414_The_Address_Book_pt01.mp3

An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on great political importance. Deirdre Mask is the author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, which looks at all the ways the world has changed since the popularization of street addresses during the Enlightenment. The book examines how addresses impact wealth and poverty, and how they serve as proxies for our most contentious debates. Mask also explores a digital future where we aren’t reliant on the numbers on our homes to tell us where we are or where we’re going. The Address Book Order The 99% Invisible City

Wading Through the Sludge

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Wading Through the Sludge

The Office of Management and Budget is required by law to produce a widely neglected annual report, the Information Collection Budget of the United States Government (ICB), which quantifies the annual paperwork burden that the government imposes on its citizens. The most recent ICB finds that in 2015, Americans spent 9.78 billion hours on federal paperwork.1

The Treasury Department, including the Internal Revenue Service, accounted for the vast majority of the total: 7.36 billion hours. The Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for 696 million hours imposed on (among others) doctors, hospitals, and the beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. The Department of Transportation accounted for no less than 214 million hours, including elaborate requirements imposed on truck drivers, automobile companies, railroads, and airlines. Comparatively speaking, the 91 million annual hours that came from the Department of Education might not seem like much, but for administrators, teachers, and students, they were pretty burdensome.

The ICB does not make for riveting reading, but it is worth pausing over those 9.78 billion hours. Suppose we insisted that for the entirety of 2019 all 2.7 million citizens of Chicago must work forty hours a week at a single task: filling out federal forms. By the end of 2019, they would not have come within four billion hours of the 2015 total. The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) was enacted in 1980 in an effort to reduce this burden, but it doesn’t appear to be living up to its name. (Disclosure, or perhaps confession: from 2009 to 2012, I served as the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [OIRA], and in that capacity I oversaw administration of the PRA.)

Federal Agents Tapped Cellphones of Portland Protesters | Democracy Now!

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Federal Agents Tapped Cellphones of Portland Protesters | Democracy Now!

The Nation magazine is reporting federal officials with the Justice Department and Homeland Security have intercepted the phone communications of protesters in Portland. The Nation reports the surveillance involved cellphone cloning, where the government steals a phone’s unique identifiers and copies them to another device in order to intercept the communications received by the original device. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has called for a full investigation. He wrote on Twitter, “The Trump admin has treated the people of Portland like enemy combatants. These tactics—like cell phone cloning to spy on protestors—are unacceptable in America.”

I think it makes sense to not appoint a Supreme Court Justice until next year

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I think it makes sense to not appoint a Supreme Court Justice until next year …  ⚖

Much like the argument was in 2016, it makes no sense to appoint a Supreme Court Justice during an Election year. This year it’s much too political and being the end of a term, the person appointed by President Trump would likely be a third-rate back bencher, unlike the first justice appointed by a President during the start of their term.

Merrick Garland, was a third-rate backbencher appointed who sat on the US Court of Appeals but didn’t have a lot going for him besides his job on US Court of Appeals – and that he was a Democrat. He certainly didn’t strike me as man of intellect or offering much to the the court. I was much more impressed by Neil Gorsuch then Garland.

That said, I fully expect Donald Trump to appoint somebody much more of Garland then Gorsuch in his rush to get somebody appointed before the end of the year when Congress may flip Democratic, and before his term may end on January 20. But that’s not a very good excuse for appointing an immature, poorly thought out justice in an expedited reform process.

Assuming that President Trump is re-elected, then he will have plenty of time next year to appoint a competent, well thought out pick for Supreme Court Justice through a carefully-planned and reviewed confirmation process in US Senate. And if Trump isn’t re-elected, then the American people will have a chance to set the Supreme Court in a new direction.

Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg : NPR

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Will Democrats Pack The Supreme Court In Response To A Trump Appointment? : Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg : NPR

Other academics agree that Democratic court packing is likely. "If the GOP goes forward with trying to fill the seat this year regardless of the election result, I think there is a substantial likelihood (at least 50% or more) that the Democrats will respond with court-packing, the next time they get a chance to do so," George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin said via e-mail.

But court packing would be a "terrible idea," Somin warned, "as it would lead to a spiral that undermines the institution of judicial review." It would also open the door for Republicans to respond in kind. "I don't see any likely way of avoiding the spiral, once one party has passed a court-packing bill once," he said.

Expanding the court isn't the only way to respond to what Democrats would perceive as an illegitimate election-year appointment, however. In a paper authored this year by Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn and University of Chicago law professor Ryan Doerfler, the two suggest several options to overhaul the court by reducing its power.

The authors said lawmakers could require a Supreme Court supermajority for some decisions, so that major federal statutes aren't invalidated by a simple 5-4 ruling. Congress could also insulate specific legislation from judicial review — known in legal circles as "jurisdiction stripping."

These changes "would shift important policy disputes from the judicial arena to the small-d democratic one, thereby substantially reducing the importance of which party has effective control of the courts," Doerfler told NPR.

William O. Douglas – Wikipedia

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William O. Douglas – Wikipedia

"Wild Bill" Douglas is my favorite Supreme Court Justice. He wrote many good books even if he fell off a horse breaking several of his ribs in 1949 and then was severely injured when he was kicked by another horse in 1950.

America would have been a better place had he prevailed in Sierra Club vs Morton, indeed I think it's a good idea many people are once again about giving Lake Erie the right to sue polluters. They should natural resources standing to sue.