LIBERTARIAN TRIUMPH?  Since the beginning of Instapundit Glenn has called for married gay couples with closets of assault weapons and we’re basically there!  Now we just need to keep hustling for marijuana and prostitution and we’re getting somewhere.  In 2010 Glenn and I made the following wager: Will marijuana be legal in all fifty states before or after January 1, 2020?  Glenn took before (optimist!) and I took after.  A Chipotle burrito bowl (or steak tacos in Glenn’s case) awaits the winner, so the stakes are high.

AND FOR TONIGHT’S INSOMNIA THEATER: “KNOWLEDGE STARTS AS OFFENDEDNESS” – Check out this video featuring Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch on “hate speech” and his book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought.

READ THIS LEARNED FOOTNOTE: Texas Supreme Court Justice Willett rejects “the Lochner bogeyman”

Writes David Bernstein:

As I pointed out earlier, Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent today ignores the last thirty years of scholarship and uses Lochner as a bogeyman to reject a due process challenge to states’ refusal to recognize same-sex marriage. Roberts’s description of Lochner is embarrassingly ahistorical.

By contrast, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett’s concurring opinion today (joined by two other Justices) in Patel v. Texas Dept. of Licensing, blogged in detail by Eugene below, explicitly rejects what he calls “the Lochner bogeyman.”

In a footnote, he proceeds to provide a scholarly, accurate account of Lochnerand economic liberty in historical context, making Roberts’s opinion look even worse by contrast–especially because Willett’s opinion refutes several of Roberts’s claims.

Read Justice Willett’s learned footnote here.

ATTENTION OUTER PARTY MEMBERS, LATEST VERSION OF NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY NOW ONLINE: Univ. of WI Releases List of Microaggressions; Saying “Everyone can Succeed” Now Racist.

IS THIS WEEK THE RIGHT’S VALLEY FORGE? From Rick Moran at the PJ Tatler:

Even the low point of the Revolutionary War turned into a reason for optimism. We all know the story of Valley Forge, the worst winter of the war, where thousands perished of the cold, disease and hunger. But in the midst of the suffering, there arrived a somewhat comical Prussian officer named Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who presented himself as a general but really held the rank equal to captain in the Prussian army.

Von Steuben set about training the American army in the European tradition — a deficiency that had prevented the Continental army from engaging in a stand up fight with the redcoats. In this, he was successful beyond anyone’s dreams — including Washington’s. The regulation drill instilled a sense of pride and professionalism in the notoriously individualistic American soldier and was evident at the next big engagement of the war, the Battle of Monmouth. After initial setbacks, the Americans rallied and nearly won the day.

Conservatives certainly don’t need a pep talk from anyone. But recognizing the situation  and dealing with the consequences rationally is far better than giving into despair.  To believe that constitutional government is lost or the rule of law overthrown isn’t logical. Our Constitution has withstood a lot more than anything that John Roberts and Barack Obama can throw at it. It may be a little tattered and frayed around the edges. It may be disrespected and ignored in some cases. But the structures that the Founders built and that have stood the test of 227 years are still sound and ready to be redeemed.

We wouldn’t be an exceptional country if we weren’t capable of reinventing ourselves as often as we have in the past. The present will become past soon enough and a reordering of history is not out of the question. It may not mean that Obamacare will go away or gay marriage declared illegal again. That is highly unlikely. But it may be more realistic to believe that we can return to the path laid out by our Founders in the Constitution that the Supreme Court has so cavalierly wandered away from.

Read the whole thing.

THE FAST WAY TO BETTER HEALTH: A Periodic Diet that Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan, from Cell.com.

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THE CLASSICIST PODCAST, WITH VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: DROUGHT AND DECLINE IN CALIFORNIA: “Tired of being depressed by Supreme Court rulings? Why not switch it up a little and get depressed by California?”

REFUTING RADAR ONLINE’S RACIST ATTACK ON NIKKI HALEY.

YEAH, SURE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?: Obama administration to release former bin Laden bodyguard from Gitmo.

Abdul Rahman Shalabi, 39, has been cleared by the Periodic Review Board to return to Saudi Arabia after a nine-year hunger strike protesting his confinement, The Associated Press reported.

The board, which was set up by the Obama administration in 2011, “acknowledges the detainee’s past terrorist-related activities,” but will send him to a Saudi rehabilitation program for Islamic radicals anyway, AP reported.

The al Qaeda associate’s lawyer said in April that his client, who was never officially charged, has been force-fed through a nasogastric tube for nine years.

Being fed through a nasogastric tube for nine years? Good thing he’s not some radical or anything. And sending a former OBL bodyguard who is so nutty that he’s refused food for nine years to a “Saudi rehabilitation program for Islamic radicals” sounds like a reasonable move by the President. I mean, it’s not like the Saudis are radical or anything–I’m sure they’ll have a terrific twelve-step rehab program — a Terrorists Anonymous or something.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

TOTAL IDENTITY POLITICS ARMAGEDDON: Jonah Goldberg warns that “The center will not hold” in his latest G-File “News”letter:

My real fear isn’t that the left will win. I still have some faith that the American people, including large portions of the Democratic base, don’t actually buy all of this nonsense, or at the very least it’s reasonable to assume they won’t continue to buy it for long. Why? Because it’s exhausting. What’s the correct word today? What are we allowed to think? How long must we discuss a world that doesn’t bear much resemblance to the one we actually live in?  Most people don’t want to be politically engaged constantly. We won’t all be assimilated by the Borg. (Though it is kind of amazing that the Swedish Chef on The Muppet Show had been warning us about this for so long and we never listened; “borg-a-borg-borg-borg!”)

No my real fear is that the center will not hold. I’ve discussed this a bit when it comes to the debate over Islam. I don’t like the practice of insulting Muslims — or anybody — just to prove a point. But what I like even less is the suggestion that Muslim fanatics have the assassin’s veto over what we can say or do. So I am forced to choose sides, and when forced, I will stand with the insulters over the beheaders. But that is not an ideal scenario. That is the Leninist thinking of “the worse, the better.”

So what I fear is something similar in our own society; that the left gets what it’s been asking for: Total Identity Politics Armageddon. Everyone to your tribe, literal or figurative.

Spending as much time as I do on the internet, it’s easy to think this world has already arrived. It’s basically how political twitter operates. But what I fear is that it spills over into real life, like when characters from The Matrix walk among us.

The Left’s identity-politics game is a bit like the welfare states of Europe, which exist solely by living off borrowed capital and unrequited generosity. Europeans can only have their lavish entitlements because they benefit from our military might and our technological innovation. Left to their own devices, they’d have to live quite differently.

Similarly, identity politics is fueled by generous subsidies from higher education, foundations, and other institutions designed to transfer resources to the Griping Industry. But if you spend enough time teaching people to think that way, guess what? They’ll think that way.

Read the whole thing.

MUST READ: FIRE Intern James Altschul responds to San Diego State student Anthony Berteaux’s condemnation of Jerry Seinfeld’s recent statement that today’s college students are too politically correct. Altschul and Seinfeld are right: many of today’s students can’t seem to take a joke. In fact, FIRE, the DKT Liberty Project, and director Ted Balaker and Korchula Productions have a forthcoming feature documentary about just this, titled Can We Take a Joke? Be sure to check out the Can We Take a Joke? website, like it on Facebook, and follow it on Twitter.

WE WON’T BE FOOLED AGAIN? GOP Hopefuls Must Have Plan to Avoid Another Roberts/Kennedy

The key is a demonstrated commitment to following the original meaning of the Constitution, whether that leads to upholding or invalidating a “popularly-enacted” law. Avoid those who advocate “judicial deference,” “judicial restraint,” “judicial minimalism” or who condemn “judicial activism” or “legislating from the bench.” None of those catch phrases concern how to interpret the Constitution, and those who utter these largely empty homilies about judicial role are very likely to disappoint. And don’t let your nominees use “precedent” as an out either. By now, much precedent is pretty bad, and is itself merely living justices deferring to dead justices (when they care to). The confirmation hearing will be tougher, but no pain, no gain.

And you better have a Republican Senate that is will not restore the filibuster.

TO RECAP: Insist on a demonstrated commitment to follow the “original meaning” of the text wherever it may lead.

BONUS TIP: Don’t let a Bush nominate any justices.

HERE’S WHAT TO EXPECT NEXT, AMERICA: Canada legalized gay marriage ten years ago.

(H/T: Kathy Shaidle.)

A REAL ENVIRONMENTAL THREAT: The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science. Matt Ridley, the brilliant science writer, is losing faith in science’s ability to test hypotheses and correct mistakes. That would interfere with the agenda of activist scientists and their protectors in the media.

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely.

I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change.

They keep saying the science is settled, but consider Ridley’s summary of findings from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees [Celsius, or about 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.

What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).

But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.

Read the whole thing.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Confederate Flag Purge Goes Nuts Almost Immediately, Hits Harmless Strategy Games.

MUMMERIES, PUTSCH, AND HUBRIS. The 3 words of the day, in my view, reading Justice Scalia’s dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges. Scalia accuses the majority of engaging in “mummeries,” and a “mummery” is a “Ridiculous ceremony (formerly used esp. of religious ritual regarded as pretentious or hypocritical).” That’s from the Oxford English Dictionary. “Putsch” and “hubris” come up in a single phrase: “the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch.” A “putsch” is “An attempt to overthrow a government, esp. by violent means; an insurrection or coup d’état.” That’s the OED again. “Hubris” Scalia himself defines. It’s “o’erweening pride.” To which he adds that “pride, we know, goeth before a fall.” I don’t see how Scalia comes across as any less hubristic for taking the dissenting side. There’s “hubris” in the mummery of humility. You see that all the time in judges. As for “putsch”… that’s one of these silly extravagances. (“Silly extravagances” — I got that phrase from the Scalia opinion: “It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so.”)

HIGHER ED BUBBLE LAW SCHOOL EDITION – Taxprof reports that Cardozo Law School in New York has created a one year jobs program offering their unemployed graduates to small firms at the low, low, price of just $38,000 a year.  In an unrelated story, full tuition is $53,570, not including living expenses for New York City.

HILLARY FLASHBACK: ‘No,’ New York Should Not Recognize Same-Sex Marriages (Video).

Let’s face it, not everyone in the political sphere can be as forward thinking as Dick Cheney and the Koch Brothers.

Speaking of whom, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward Koch.”

THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Politico Mag Writer Says ‘It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy.’

RELATED:

If the Internet seems slow today, it's because every blog post denouncing slippery-slope warnings about polygamy is being quietly deleted.

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) June 26, 2015

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Chief Justice Roberts: same-sex marriage not constitutionally protected because Lochner

Chief Justice Roberts invokes Lochner v. New York by name no less than 16 times in his [Obergefell] dissent.

Not the real Lochner v. New York mind you, a relatively modest opinion, grounded in precedents holding that the Fourteenth Amendment protects liberty of contract in the absence of a valid police power rationale for the infringement.

The real Lochner held that a criminal law imposing maximum hours on bakers was not a justified infringement of liberty of contract under the police power because though it was defended as a health law, the government presented no evidence that the baking was especially unhealthful, while the plaintiff presented strong evidence to the contrary.

The real Lochner did not even inhibit governments from imposing maximum hours laws in other circumstances–the Supreme Court upheld the next dozen or so maximum hours cases to come before it.

Instead, Roberts invokes the Lochner of historical myth.

And this:

It’s at least slightly embarrassing that Roberts is either unaware of or chose to ignore the last thirty years of Lochner-related scholarship in favor of invoking hoary myths that are useful for rhetorical purposes, and that Thomas and Scalia joined the opinion.

As I wrote at the end of my book, when the Justices use Lochner “as shorthand for what they consider the activist sins of their opponents, they are substituting empty rhetoric for meaningful constitutional argument.” And their understanding of Lochner is always inaccurate to boot.

The real Lochner was about identifying and applying the proper extent of the state police power, not identifying fundamental rights, whose invocation then did all the work. There is none of this in Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the majority in Obergefell.

KNOWN WOLF: Suspect in French Decapitation Attack Today Yet Another Case of ‘Known Wolf’ Terrorism.

And as John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “Multiple Terrorist Attacks Raise Questions of Coordination.”

BORED IN LONDON NEXT WEEK? Catch me across the pond at the Index on Censorship’s debate on academic freedom and summer magazine launch party on Wednesday, and fellow Instapundit guest blogger Virginia Postrel at her talk at the London School of Economics on Thursday.

AT AMAZON: Outfit your dream garage.

ROBERT SPENCER: Michigan Professor Juan Cole Thinks the Charleston Race Murders Are My Fault.

Huh. Well, not everyone can blame CBS and Time-Warner-CNN for seven seasons of the Dukes of Hazzard.

UPDATE: Or was it Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller? “The more foolish and naive among you might fall into the obvious trap and say that it was Dylann Roof, but of course you’d be wrong. Conservatives are to blame.”

But of course — why would the left update their playbook from the leather helmet and single-wing formation era?

VIDEO: TIME TO IMPEACH THE IRS COMMISSIONER? “What happens when an administration refuses to hold its officials accountable for deceiving Congress? Eventually Congress starts looking for ways to hold them accountable directly.”

Faster, please. Though as Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen “isn’t exactly small potatoes, but if Congress wants to flex its muscle, let’s start where the most damage has been done — and send a message that will ring louder and longer.”

THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 778: “Now it turns out that 422 backup tapes from the crucial period were routinely erased by IRS workers. The tapes were destroyed in March 2014, according to the Treasury inspector general for the IRS, J. Russell George. That is long after lawmakers started trying to obtain all of Ms. Lerner’s emails, and long after the IRS issued instructions for employees to cease routine destruction of documents that might relate to the probes.”

Unexpectedly.

THOUGHTS ON SATIRE, from Roger Kimball: “We might not like some of the things that Juvenal tells us. But then we in the West pride ourselves on having finally achieved enlightenment about— oh, so many things! We are unburdened by many benighted prejudices that crimped the souls of our ancestors. And how much better we think of ourselves on account of our liberations. If nothing else, Juvenal may help temper that self-satisfaction.”

Read the whole thing. A half century ago, Malcolm Muggeridge observed that there is no way for any satirist can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. And as Roger notes, our Beltway and DNC-MSM elites have gotten exponentially more absurd in the decades since.

EHUD BARAK: ‘WE COULD DEFEAT ISIS IN TWO DAYS:’ “So could Barack Obama, if he wanted to,” Michael Walsh writes.

Nahh, he’d much rather fight Congress that ISIS.

RELATED: Dozens Dead in Hotel Terror Attack in Tunisia.

THE HIGH PRICE OF ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS:

Consider Tesla. The purchaser of each Tesla Model S that costs $70,000 or more receives a $7,500 federal tax credit, plus state credits. Within California, for example, purchasers can get a tax rebate of up to $2,500 and opportunity to access special freeway lanes, an important benefit in traffic-clogged California. Few inhabitants of South Central Los Angeles, one of the poorest parts of the city, know about Teslas, its alleged environmental benefits, or what each vehicle costs them. On the other hand, those in wealthier Brentwood and Beverly Hills have a far better sense of what they gain from a Tesla purchase. It is clear that low-income citizens are subsidizing the wealthy in this case, and as more and more state resources are devoted to such policies, the overall economy becomes less vibrant, generating fewer blue collar jobs and other opportunities for those who are struggling the most in the society.

AKA, “The Drawbridge Effect,” as James Delingpole dubbed it: “You’ve made your money. Now the very last thing you want is for all those trashy middle class people below you to have a fair shot at getting as rich as you are. That’s why you want to make energy more expensive by opposing Keystone XL; why you’re all for environmental land sequestration (because you already own your exclusive country property); and Agenda 21 – which will make all Americans poorer, but you not so much, because you’ve enough cash to cushion you from the higher taxes and regulation with which the greenies want to hamstring the economy.”

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? “Weak Sun Could Offset Some Global Warming In Europe And US.”

(Headline via one of Glenn Reynolds’ recurring Insta-leitmotifs.)

“MARRIAGE RESPONDS TO THE UNIVERSAL FEAR THAT A LONELY PERSON MIGHT CALL OUT ONLY TO FIND NO ONE THERE.” That, to my eye, is the most memorable line in Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the majority in the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges — the reading of which I just “live-blogged” over at my home blog, if you’re interested.

THE WORLD OF THE CONFUSED: Some were, of course, the usual “gay” or “lesbian,” but in addition to these were “demisexuals,” “androsexuals,” and “therians” (which, she explained, are people who are only attracted to individuals who commune with the same spirit animal). One identified as a “panromantic polyamorous asexual non-binary space god.” Even as the mother of twenty somethings AND a member of the science fiction community, therians is new to me!

WHY CAN’T YOU BE MORE LIKE GLENN? Sign on to the Index on Censorship’s open letter on why academic freedom is under threat and needs urgent protection worldwide. Next week I will be traveling to the UK to talk about these global threats to free speech, but it’s important to remember that academic freedom is in trouble here at home in the USA too. Read more here.

IN THE MAIL: From Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, Dragon in Exile.

JAMES LILEKS: “The only reason Apple pulled the Civil War apps from the store was fear of the Internet:”

Specifically, fear of the worst part of the internet, where lack of reason is balanced by an excess of enthusiasm. No rational person would complain that there were Civil War sims. No sensible person would believe that society would be improved by demanding their removal. No emotionally stable person could think that they were safer now because someone, somewhere, would not get updates to a game they purchased that allowed them to fight as the Union Army but contained the sight of the Confederate flag. Anyone who would believe these things is tethered to reality by a frayed strand of dental floss, and while they may live in a comfy bubble where everyone believes the same things and has at least two friends who are doing very important work in the field of instructional graffiti, most people are stable enough to resist the siren call of the Stars and Bars, even in the form of a picture on a phone.

But. The loud people may complain. The company would have to explain. An explanation would be seen as a justification.

Read the whole thing.

CULTURAL TYRANTS: “This isn’t stopping at the Confederate flag. It accelerates with each victory the cultural Left achieves. And never, ever is there a price paid for its aggression,” Scott McKay writes at the American Spectator. “A price must be exacted. The Left cannot be allowed its double standards and guilty pleasures on the way to unquestioned cultural dominance. If traditional America must perish under Alinsky’s Rule #4 (‘Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules’), then so must the Left.”

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE WINS. 5-4. 

ADDED: The Chief Justice ends his dissenting opinion (PDF):

If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.

That’s flashy and will get attention and lots of commentary, including this from me: Celebrate weddings, not court opinions. Peruse court opinions and decide if the reasoning and the precedents fit together well. Don’t let judicial rhetoric push you around. This outcome was thoroughly predictable because it followed so clearly from the precedent. That was obvious at the oral argument. I haven’t read the decision yet, but I’m going to, and I’m not going to let The Chief Justice tell me what I should or should not celebrate.

AND: “Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there,” wrote Justice Kennedy, explaining the second of 4 reasons why the due process right to marry applies to same-sex couples even though the precedents all assumed marriage was between a man and a woman.

PLUS: A poll: What do you think of the Court’s opinion in the same-sex marriage case?

GLASS HALF FULL FINALE – So that’s the book in a nutshell.  I lay out a pretty comprehensive overview of the American market for legal services and law schools, and at the end it seems like times are grim indeed.  And yet, every time the American legal profession has appeared down for the count, it has come roaring back.  During the 19^th Century era of Jacksonian democracy every effort was made to break the hold of courts and lawyers.  The practice was virtually unregulated in a majority of states, state judicial elections became the norm, and legislatures passed new codes of civil procedure to further erode lawyer hegemony.   Times looked grim for the profession.

But lawyers responded by becoming irreplaceable partners with all levels of businesses, working hand in hand with the makers of the industrial revolution.  The great legal historian Lawrence Friedman describes the rebirth in the post-Civil War era thusly:

Nevertheless, the lawyers prospered.  The truth was that the profession was exceedingly nimble at finding new kinds of work and new ways to do it.  Its nimbleness was no doubt due to the character of the bar: open-ended, unrestricted, uninhibited, attractive to sharp, ambitious men.”

Lawyers again faced an existential threat during the Depression, when the economy crumbled and earnings collapsed.  Lawyers did even worse in the 1930s than the economy as a whole.  When World War II ended, however, lawyers started on a historic run that lasted until the 1980s, partially assisted depression-era restrictions on entry like the bar examination and the law school requirement.

Don’t forget that – for better or worse (and from the comments I know many of y’all think that it is worse) – America’s legal profession is utterly unique in the world.  It is bigger, richer, and more intertwined in civic life than anywhere else.  Lawyers founded this country.  Thirty-two of the fifty-five framers of the constitution and twenty-five of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were trained or practicing lawyers.  Twenty-five out of forty-four American Presidents have been lawyers, including three of the first four, six of the first eight, ten of the first thirteen.  Lawyers have always been a dominant force in Congress and state legislatures.

America and its legal profession have been intertwined from the beginning, and lawyers – sharp-elbowed and ambitious – will find a new purchase in these changed times.  They have before and they will again.  Whether that is good news or bad news I will leave to you.

COLLEGE DECLARES HAYMARKET RIOT REFERENCE A VIOLENT THREAT TO COLLEGE PRESIDENT: Oakton Community College in Illinois is insisting that a one-sentence “May Day” email referencing the Haymarket Riot sent by a faculty member to several colleagues constituted a “true threat” to the college president. Why?  Because the famous workers’ rally in Chicago “resulted in 11 deaths and more than 70 people injured.” As FIRE’s Ari Cohn noted, “The United States Department of the Interior has designated the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument a National Historic Landmark. If remembering the Haymarket Riot is a ‘true threat,’ the monument itself would be illegal.”

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WAS SUPREME COURT JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS BLACKMAILED? “It’s time to start asking the question. It’s time to be cynical. It’s time to assume the worst of this government,” Wayne Root writes at The Blaze.

On the other, as Stephen Kruiser notes at the PJ Tatler, “Love Her Or Hate Her, Ann Coulter Warned Us About John Roberts 10 Years Ago.”

WHAT DOES JURASSIC WORLD’S BOX OFFICE DOMINATION MEAN?  Lots and lots more sequels and event blockbusters, that’s what.  That’s not necessarily bad news though.  I loved Fast and Furious 7. I saw the movie on opening night at a multiplex in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  One of my proudest moments as an American was when they dropped multiple cars out of a plane and then opened their parachutes.  The entire crowd gasped and then applauded and laughed.  Same deal when they jumped a sports car through  three different skyscrapers.  America baby!  This is what we do.

I’D LIKE TO SEE MISSISSIPPI DERIVE ITS NEW FLAG from its excellent state quarter. Flowers have been traditional elements on flags, and Mississippi can rightly take pride in its excellent performance in the state quarter competition. To my eye, Mississippi was second only to Connecticut. I know I’m an outsider, but that magnolia image comes from inside the state.

GEORGE WILL: “Thursday’s decision demonstrates how easily, indeed inevitably, judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences:

Conservatives are dismayed about the Supreme Court’s complicity in rewriting the Affordable Care Act — its ratification of the IRS’s disregard of the statute’s plain and purposeful language. But they have contributed to this outcome. Their decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches has borne this sour fruit….

Read the whole thing

YUVAL LEVIN: King v. Burwell and the Law:

Replacing this law with a market-based reform remains as crucial as ever, and should be (and very likely will be) a very high priority for the next Republican presidential nominee. This case accelerated some of the relevant work and internal debates on that front on the Right, but, given how it has been decided, it doesn’t seem likely to change the basic dynamics of the health-care debate looking toward 2016.

But this decision will be more significant than I would have expected a decision for the government to be because of the argument offered up by the Chief Justice. Roberts could have tried to limit the effects of this decision by sticking to a set of fundamentally textual arguments about the meaning of the term “established by the state” in the context of the statute as a whole. The decision does offer such arguments, and Justice Roberts does what he can to minimize their incoherence, to contend with the fact that the words in question seem to have a fairly straightforward meaning, and to offer some responses to Justice Scalia’s devastating critique of the majority’s textual reasoning in his dissent.

But the Chief Justice didn’t leave it at that. He makes a much broader argument about the relationship between the vague, broadly stated aims and purposes of legislators and the role of judges interpreting the meaning of the particular laws those legislators then write. Roberts presses this point most firmly at the end of his decision, writing: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

In effect, this is a version of the president’s argument: Obamacare is not so much a particular law as an overarching desire “to improve health insurance markets” and so if at all possible it should be taken to mean whatever one believes would be involved in doing so. From the beginning of its implementation of this statute, that Obama administration has treated the words of the statute as far less relevant than the general aim of doing what it thinks would improve health insurance markets, and today the Supreme Court essentially endorsed this way of understanding the law and suggested it is how judges should think about laws more generally too.

This understanding of the role of the judge threatens to undermine the rule of law in the American system of government, because it undermines the central place assigned to written law, and to the legislator, in that system. Ironically, I think the Chief Justice intends his decision to be deferential to the Congress—to keep the Court’s footprint small in this arena by not reading laws in ways that require large transformations in the forms of their administration. But in effect, this is more contempt than deference. While it would seem to suggest that the will of the legislator should guide the system, in fact it means that the word of the legislator does not govern the other branches. It implies that Congress should have just passed a law that said “health insurance markets shall be improved,” and then left it to the executive agencies to decide how they wish to do that while judges nod in approval.

Thus does a commitment to “judicial restraint” and “deference” in practice morph into “activism” and “legislating from the bench.” Instead, justices should be selected because of their demonstrated commitment to enforcing both the Constitution and statutes as they are written, whether this leads to upholding or invalidating a law or regulation.

HOW TWITTER UPENDED THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMEDIANS AND AUDIENCES. “Twitter’s outrage mobs have always reminded me a bit of puritanical scolds: They sniff out heresies and denounce the heterodox, rejecting the defense that artists must have license to transgress the sensibilities of those claiming offense,” Sonny Bunch writes at the Washington Post: 

“If it doesn’t get laughs, you’re not gonna get work, and you’re not gonna be a comedian,” Seinfeld replies. “So the audience ultimately decides. It’s a very democratic system.”

Seinfeld’s point is an interesting one in this context. The scolds will often claim that their censoriousness is simply an artifact of the marketplace at work. But this is misdirection. The aggrieved don’t leverage their power by unfollowing an offensive person or refusing to watch their routine. When Metzger defended a fellow comic whose routine was reviled by the social justice set, his newfound foes did not say they’d skip his stand-up act and force clubs to choose between a guy who could fill a room and a guy who can’t. Rather, they combed through his Facebook history before calling for him to be fired from “Inside Amy Schumer.”

As Metzger tells Maron, Schumer and Comedy Central ignored such pleas. Similarly, Comedy Central and Jon Stewart dismissed the denunciations of Trevor Noah when it was revealed he made a few questionable jokes about Jews and girls with tattoos. And here’s where we can see how to balance the rights of comedians to crack jokes with the rights of the perpetually outraged to vent their anger. You are allowed to participate with a comedian and his employer on Twitter in ways that you aren’t allowed to at the Improv. But the employers of these comedians are, similarly, allowed to ignore you.

Speaking as a fan of comedy? I hope they do.

But CEOs and bakery owners will always be fair game for the “burn the heretic” outrage mobs.

BILL DE BLASIO’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEEK.

WHITEWASHING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S RACIST HISTORY.

AS A WISE MAN ONCE SAID, PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: “Donald Trump’s Neil Young Counterpunch Personifies His Appeal.”

40-YEAR-OLD MEAT, sold to consumers in China.

NEXT UP: CARLY VS. HILLARY ON PAY PER VIEW?  “Forget Mayweather vs. Pacquiao. I’d pay big money to see Carly go mano-a-mano with the Great Email Eraser,” Roger Simon writes.

YOUR NIGHTLY DOSE OF “INSOMNIA THEATER”: ‘MY COLLEGE HAD A PROBLEM WITH A FUNNY SHIRT’– Check out this video about Ohio University student Isaac Smith’s successful lawsuit against OU after the university banned his organization’s t-shirts. Isaac’s lawsuit was another successful installment of FIRE’s ongoing Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project.

JOSH BLACKMAN IN USA TODAY: Roberts rewrites Obamacare, again

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

No matter how low your opinion of Washington DC, it's nothing compared to Washington DC's low opinion of you.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 25, 2015

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Britain Realizing Full Extent of Muslim Rape-Gang Problem.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED ON THE GOLAN HEIGHTS? The Background of a lynching.

AT AMAZON: Wine for under $25.00.

BYPASSING SEPARATION OF POWERS TO “FIX” SLOPPY LAWS:  My SCOTUSblog take (with co-author David Rivkin) on the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell decision.

In King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court surprised many Court watchers, ruling six to three that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permits individuals who buy health insurance on the federal exchange to receive taxpayer subsidies. The decision represents a decisive victory for ACA supporters, and an equally decisive loss for the rule of law.  With King, the Supreme Court has signaled (again) that it is willing to “save” important laws by rewriting them, thus behaving as an all-powerful, unelected, politically insulated, unconstitutional Council of Revision. . . .

[B]y departing from the “natural reading” of a law that is patently poorly drafted, the Court has short-circuited the entire political process.  When judges take it upon themselves to “fix” broken legislation like the ACA, they diminish political accountability by encouraging Congress to be sloppy when drafting legislation. And when it comes to the quality of legislating, judicially drafted “legislation” is always worse than even hastily drafted congressional statutes.

Moreover, when faced with a poorly drafted law, the executive branch has every incentive to amend laws unilaterally, rather than working with Congress to amend them.  It may be expedient for presidents to issue regulations pretending legislation says whatever the president wants it to say, but such de facto executive-lawmaking inherently lacks the deliberation and compromise that permeates the legislative process.

The Court’s decision in King is a disaster for the rule of law, particularly the separation of powers. One can only hope its sloppy reasoning is a “one off,” designed specifically to save (again) the ACA, that won’t be extended to other situations. Otherwise, the current Roberts Court is signaling that it thinks it has free constitutional reign to use inchoate “contextual” reasoning to bypass plain statutory text.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE: Apple Removes History Games with Confederate Flags.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: “Police withheld bombshell report revealing how gangs of Muslim men were grooming more than 100 schoolgirls as young as 13 in case it inflamed racial tensions ahead of General Election,” according to the London Daily Mail today.

REPORT: “Darin LaHood Campaign Uses Literal Strong-arm Tactics: Manager Assaults Debate Moderator, Charges Filed,” David Steinberg writes at PJM.

FOX NEWS DROPS BOB BECKEL:

Fox News has officially dropped “The Five” co-host Bob Beckel from the network, saying the show could no longer be held “hostage” to his personal issues.

“We tried to work with Bob for months, but we couldn’t hold The Five hostage to one man’s personal issues,” Bill Shine, executive vice president of programming, said in a statement. “He took tremendous advantage of our generosity, empathy and goodwill and we simply came to the end of the road with him.”

Shine said Fox News personalities Juan Williams and Geraldo Rivera will be “among those rotating on the show for the near future.”

Beckel, who joined the network in 2000, had entered rehab therapy for his addiction to prescription pain medication in April. His last appearance on the network was Feb. 16, more than four months ago.

According to Zev Chafets 2013 biography, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, Beckel was still with CNN in 2000:

In 2002, Beckel was caught up in an extortion attempt by a prostitute. He says that he wasn’t involved with her, and he had been part of a police sting. In any case, he gave her a check with his signature on it, a surpassingly naïve thing for a celebrity to do, even as a favor to the cops. The incident made headlines and CNN dropped him. “I went from making $ 750,000 a year to working at the Government Printing Office for thirteen bucks an hour, that’s how screwed I was,” he says.

Ailes saved him with a job offer.

Ailes knew of Beckel since 1984, when Beckel repurposed Wendy’s “Where the Beef” ad as a campaign slogan for Democrat Walter Mondale, and Ailes was a campaign consultant for first Reagan’s reelection, then George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. “But managing the Democratic catastrophe of 1984 wasn’t really much of a credential,” Chafets noted. “Beckel, who is funny and brash, was a better television performer than a political operator; he was scooped up as a talking head by various shows and caught on as a full-time commentator at CNN.” When Beckel eventually joined Fox, first as a guest-contributor in 2004, he told Chafets:

“You have to go pretty far to the left to be farther than I am,” says Beckel. “I got shit from all my liberal friends. At one point, some of them actually staged an intervention.”

It didn’t snap him out of it. Beckel stayed at Fox, but he continued to be active in the Democratic Party. One night he was sitting in the bar of the Capital Hilton Hotel when two young men, delegates to the Young Democrats convention, came over and began berating him. “Roger Ailes is worse than fucking Hitler,” one of them said.

“I lost it and put them both on the floor,” says Beckel. “I was embarrassed about this. Shit, I did it sober.”

The story got around Washington and made it to New York. Ailes sent Beckel a giant gift basket with a note: “Thank you for being loyal.”

Which helps to explain how the crude, explosive arch-leftist, a recovering alcoholic and cocaine user lasted as long as he did on Fox.

UPDATE: Only one man can replace Beckel: Anthony Weiner is that man — and he wants the gig.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Let’s recall why the Affordable Care Act is so messed up.

PREFERENCE CASCADE: Republican Nikki Haley’s decision to call on the the South Carolina legislature “to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Capitol grounds in Columbia,” James Taranto writes, “appears to have set off a ‘preference cascade,’ a concept the Tennessee legal scholar Glenn Reynolds discussed in a 2002 essay about the post-9/11 outpouring of patriotism, including displays of the American flag.”

In his latest “Best of the Web Today” column in the Wall Street Journal, Taranto quotes the following passage from our Insta-Host. (Registration at the Journal may be required, if my Google pass-through link doesn’t work):

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. . . . Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it—but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers—or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

Taranto adds:

After Tucson, the left tried to incite a moral panic over incendiary conservative speech. Even President Obama didn’t go along with that. After Newtown, they made a push for gun control. They won some victories in states where Democrats held legislative power—Colorado, Connecticut, New York—but lost elsewhere, including in Washington. The anti-Confederate preference cascade results not from the power of the left but from the newly revealed powerlessness of those in the South with an attachment to Confederate symbolism.

And it’s not clear that the politics here redound to the advantage of the left, or the Democratic Party. Southern states’ abandonment of Confederate symbolism seems likely to ease racial polarization, and a less polarized political climate may pose a challenge to Democratic efforts to encourage black voter turnout and keep Republicans on the moral defensive.

Read the whole thing.

‘WE SHOULD START CALLING THIS LAW SCOTUSCARE,’ and 20 Other Epic Scalia Burns. Now with extra helpings of “pure applesauce” and “interpretive jiggery-pokery!”

MAX BOOT: Rightfully Reversing Decades of Secessionist Rehabilitation:

But there is a big distinction to be made between remembering the past — something that, as a historian, I’m all in favor of — and honoring those who did bad things in the past. Remembrance does not require public displays of the Confederate flag, nor streets with names such as Jefferson Davis Highway — a road that always rankles me to drive down in Northern Virginia. Such gestures are designed to honor leaders of the Confederacy, who were responsible for the costliest war in American history — men who were traitors to this country, inveterate racists, and champions of slavery.

In this regard, honoring Jefferson Davis is particularly egregious, or, for that matter, Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. But I believe even honoring the nobler Robert E. Lee is inappropriate. True, he was a brave and skilled soldier, but he fought in a bad cause. Modern Germany does not have statues to Erwin Rommel even though he — unlike Lee — turned at the end of the day against the monstrous regime in whose cause he fought so skillfully. Thus, I don’t believe it is appropriate to have statues of Lee, or schools named after him, although I admit in his case it’s a closer call than with Jefferson Davis.

This is not “rewriting” history; it’s getting history right. The rewriting was done by Lost Cause mythologists who created pro-Confederate propaganda (such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind) to convince their countrymen that the South was actually in the right even as it imposed slavery and then segregation. This required impugning those Northerners who went south after the Civil War to try to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. They were labeled “carpetbaggers,” and their memory was tarnished while the actions of the white supremacists they opposed were glorified.

Boot is exactly right. I wasn’t kidding when I said before that I am glad to see Nikki Haley get the Stars and Bars removed from government buildings. Eric Foner and other historians like James Oakes and Richard Sewell are to be credited with correcting the historical record from the pro-Confederate revisionism that is still accepted by all-too-many on the right. Where the “Lost Cause” fable might once have been justified as a useful fiction to unify the country, lying about the Civil War and Reconstruction now only serves those who wish to sully the reputation of those who opposed slavery and promoted the civil rights of blacks when doing so took real courage (as it did for the civil rights activists of the ’50s and ’60s). In this way, like the Southerners of old, they can claim that there is a moral equivalence between North and South, between the USA and the CSA.

MORE HERE: I highly recommend the books I link to above about the men who opposed the pro-slavery reading of the Constitution before the Civil War, and who established the Republican Party to see their vision of the Constitution affirmed in its text. You can also read my articles on antislavery constitutionalism here and here. The more I learn about the history that has been concealed by pro-Confederate revisionism, the more I find to admire in our past.

Cross posted on The Volokh Conspiracy.  h/t Eugene Volokh

WAIT UNTIL 2017? OBAMACARE LIKELY TO LIVE FOREVER NOW, Jonathan Tobin writes at Commentary. “Any attempt to overturn a law that would have already been in operation for years will be a perilous undertaking fraught with political danger for Republicans. Their presidential candidates will all pledge to throw it out in the coming campaign, but that will be easier said than done. The odds are that John Roberts has ensured that this legal monstrosity will live forever:”

By twisting itself into a pretzel in order to let the law stand, the court has allowed the Democrats to massively expand the power and the reach of government in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. The ObamaCare mandates create a dynamic that does more than offer cheap insurance to more people than would have otherwise been covered. It also allows the federal government to embark on a path in which it will be making far-reaching decisions about the future of American health care. It has already created rules that infringe on religious liberty and create distortions in the marketplace that will lead to massive increases in premiums while also losing jobs. While many, especially among the poor, are net winners, it has also created a large number of net losers who will never be compensated for the president’s broken promises about keeping their insurance and doctors if they liked them.

President Obama’s legacy as the man who pushed a health care law through Congress that few understood is now secure. Some Americans will benefit from this, but many others will be paying dearly for this unwieldy law. Most of all, future generations will recognize the court’s decisions as a crucial moment when our liberties were diminished. That is something for which all those involved in passing and preserving this disaster should be held accountable by history, if not the ballot box.

See also, postwar England. You remember England, right?

RELATED: “All of this was perfectly predictable, so much so that Ted Cruz made this very point in trying to justify the 2013 shutdown. Stop it before it starts, Cruz warned, or else you’ll never have the political will to stop it again. And he was right,” Allahpundit writes at Hot Air. “The only real chance we had to stop it was SCOTUS’s 2012 decision. Once Roberts voted with the liberals on that, the die was cast. Today’s ruling by comparison is a fart in the wind.”

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG, CITIZENS: Number of Islamic Terror-Related Arrests in 2015 Surpass Previous Two Years Combined.

TAX ANALYSTS SUES IRS FOR REFUSING TO RELEASE INFORMATION ON BONUSES PAID TO TOP EMPLOYEES: “It’s déjà vu all over again,” said Tax Analysts President and Publisher Christopher Bergin. “We’ve been at this game a long time. They’ve delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed, and they will continue to delay. And we think this is important information to keep them transparent and to keep them accountable.”

INTO THE PANTHEON OF MEMORABLE SUPREME COURT SAYINGS: “WE SHOULD START CALLING THIS LAW SCOTUSCare.” — Justice Antonin Scalia.

JONATHAN ADLER: In King v. Burwell, Chief Justice Roberts rewrites the PPACA in order to save it (again)

Today’s decision in King v. Burwell is notable in many respects.  It is a significant legal victory for the Obama Administration, a victory for purposivist statutory interpretation, a loss for textualism, and a loss for an expansive Chevron doctrine.  In these latter respects, the decision is something of a double-loss for Justice Scalia (which may explain the last line of his opinion).  King also means that, in many respects, the PPACA is now the law that Chief Justice Roberts wrote as here, as in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Chief Justice has decided it is the Court’s job to determine what the statute means — even if this requires ignoring or rewriting text — if such is necessary in order to save it.  The umpire has decided it’s okay to pinch hit to ensure the right team wins. . . .

Just as the Chief Justice rewrote the individual mandate into a tax, and rewrote the Medicaid expansion to sever it from traditional Medicaid, the Chief Justice has rewritten Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code to excise the repeated reference to exchanges “established by the State.”  Justice Scalia, in dissent, said Obamacare should now be known SCOTUSCare. Whatever we call it, the PPACA is now, in many respects, the law that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

I know what Jonathan is going through today having to write about this case he did so much to design and advocate for the past couple years. I well remember what a kick-in-the-gut this feels like.

GLASS HALF FULL PART 3 – I’ve previously covered how the revolution in American law will benefit consumers and the legal profession.  Today I argue it will even help law schools.

The challenges law schools face are very real, but when we reach the other side of the tunnel the law school experience itself will be cheaper and better.  As fewer students apply to law school, there will be increased competition for students in terms of tuition and scholarships.  Today’s more clear-eyed students haggle over tuition and try to borrow less.

As some law schools focus less on U.S. News rankings and more on the serious business of staying open, the student experience may also improve.  There will be pressure to spend less on faculty scholarship and more on teaching practical skills.  Competition has already created some small innovations, like Northwestern’s two year program or Washington and Lee’s experiential third year of law school.  Any changes that break up the current, monolithic approach to law school will be a positive overall, even if some of the innovations are less successful or simply cost saving measures.

Happier law students should make for happier faculty.  But even if it does not, a correction in the salaries and perks for law school professors has been a long time coming.  Brian Tamanaha’s recent book Failing Law Schools is at its most powerful in its chapter on a law professor’s job (“Teaching Load Down, Salary Up”), precisely because legal academics have been so slow to recognize their own role in the trends of the last thirty years.  Law professors work less and are paid more than they used to be, and law school administration has grown exponentially, and yet we seem mystified over why tuition and debt loads have risen so precipitously.

Some law professors have a “let them eat cake” response to the suffering of recent law grads, noting that law has always been a competitive market and these graduates are just poorly suited to it.  Others think that the cost of law school is fair enough in a free market, conveniently forgetting that much of the “demand” for law school comes from the government requirement of graduation from an ABA accredited law school in order to take the bar.

These attitudes should fade somewhat as the pain in the legal market is shared by legal academia.  If it is true that the worst part about living a lie is wondering when everyone will find out, the hardest part is over for legal academia.  The law faculty that survives the retrenchment should, like the students who are happy to be employed, experience gratitude for what they have, rather than jealousy for what they do not.

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS: Glenn loves to welcome them.  I prefer to mock them: here is a minute and thirteen second video compilation of robots falling over from the 2015 DARPA Robotics Competition.

CAMPUS SEXUAL ASSAULT AND THE “PROVE YOURSELF INNOCENT” APPROACH: FIRE’s Joe Cohn examines the problems with New York’s “affirmative consent” bill. Supporters call it the “yes means yes” bill, but maybe it’s more accurately called the “prove you are not a rapist” bill. Joe concludes:

In sum, this legislation is an unwelcome development for people who believe in fundamental fairness—one that doubles down on the failed policy of steering sexual assault complaints away from law enforcement and into amateur campus tribunals that are ill-equipped to handle such serious matters. New York’s approach will probably not reduce the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, but it will likely lead to more unjust punishments.

Scott Greenfield ​also blasted the new NY bill over at Simple Justice. His title makes no bones about what he thinks of the law: “Sex At New York’s Colleges Is Screwed.”

COVERING THE IMPORTANT ISSUES: The 20 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media For 2015.

THE PRESSURE NOW SHIFTS FROM REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS TO THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TO SAVE US FROM OBAMACARE:  My take on King v. Burwell: However King was decided, the future of American health care was going to come down to 2016:

One consolation is that, were President Obama to have vetoed whatever the Republicans would have proposed, nothing good would happen until after the next election, which is where things now stand. Now Congressional Republicans cannot be bull-rushed into simply extending the subsidies to federal exchanges, while implicitly accepting the rest of the ACA, which is how things were shaping up. Now the voters will truly get at least one more crack at saving American health care from Obamacare. (And, with the health care cases in mind, candidates can debate the sort of justices they will nominate to the Court.)

Supporters of the law have already telegraphed that their next move is to end the political debate by urging a Pax Obamacare to which all Americans must acquiesce. Last week the president said, after “five years in, what we are talking about it is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. This isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare . . . This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another.”

While the ACA is certainly the “law of the land,” as it has been since its enactment, nothing in the Court’s decision today imparts any additional legitimacy on this law as a public policy meriting political acquiescence. To borrow from the president’s words, it is still “just a law.” So nothing in this decision should deter Republican presidential and congressional candidates in the 2016 election from continuing to press their campaign to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

RELATED: 2016 GOP Presidential Hopefuls: Now It’s Up To Us To Repeal Obamacare. The candidates are impressively united on this issue.

Cross posted on The Volokh Conspiracy.

RIP, PATRICK MACNEE: “His son Rupert said in a statement that Patrick Macnee died Thursday at his home in Rancho Mirage. The British-born actor was best known as dapper secret agent John Steed in the long-running television series” The Avengers, AP reports. “His son says Macnee died of natural causes with his family at his bedside,” at age 93.

Classic Patrick Macnee (RIP)/Diana Rigg Avengers intro from '60s with champagne, umbrella sword, gunshot, carnation https://t.co/WAdBjLjBLc

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) June 25, 2015

Introducing Amazon Echo.

PBS YANKS BEN AFFLECK’S ROOTS: “Non-leftist Americans can be forgiven for thinking that the media has become one giant progressive racket for people who all share exactly the same social and political attitudes. So good for PBS for yanking, at least temporarily, Finding Your Roots after it was learned that Harvard professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates deliberated excised Ben Affleck’s slave-owning ancestors from the genealogy program.”

RELATED:

.@BenAffleck finally makes up for Gigli by killing a PBS show. We're good now, Ben.

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) June 25, 2015

Heh.™

ON THE NET’S LOST ISLAND, THE INTERNET COMES ON A THUMB DRIVE: Backchannel’s Susan Crawford has a fascinating report from Cuba.

By way of an informal but extraordinarily lucrative distribution chain — one guy told me the system generates $5 million in payments a month — anyone in Cuba who can pay can watch telenovelas, first-run Hollywood movies, brand-new episodes of Game of Thrones, and even search for a romantic partner. It’s called El Packete, and it arrives weekly in the form of thumb drives loaded with enormous digital files. Those drives make their way across the island from hand to hand, by bus, and by 1957 Chevy, their contents copied and the drive handed on.

In a sense, El Packete is a very slow high-capacity Internet access connection; someone (no one knows who) loads up those drives with online glitz and gets them to Cuban shores….

 The real riddle is why this rogue system can operate under the tight governing regime. The Cuban government has to know that this underground operation impinges on its monopoly on information. The secret police calls people in all the time to find out what’s going on. But for some reason El Packete isn’t a problem, while actual Internet access is.

Why?

Read the whole thing. (How long before Hollywood starts campaigning for a crackdown on this blatant piracy?) Here’s the documentary she mentions at the end.

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND’S ASSAULT ON REALITY: “Curse those long, thorough investigations with facts and evidence! We demand mob justice NOW!”

“FEELING ISOLATED AND CAST ADRIFT IN THE HOME OF THE FREE”: In the Daily Beast, Nick Gillespie explains the Reason.com subpoena case and why it matters. Then Ken at Popehat schools Daily Beast commenters on how subpoenas actually work. (Hint: the citizens on the grand jury aren’t particularly involved.)

UPDATE: Scott Greenfield has some choice words, including ”Niketh Velamoor brought humiliation down on the office.”

THE DNC-MSM’S DESPICABLE, RACIST ATTACK ON BOBBY JINDAL: “As a fun test, let’s take these quotes from the Post and TNR about Jindal, D’Souza, and Haley [and] replace their names with Obama’s (along with “left-wing” instead of “right-wing,” etc.). I’ll invite my liberal friends to tell me if any of these sentiments are remotely okay to voice.”

UPDATE: Question asked and answered:

Why US Presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal’s speech sparked a #BobbyJindalsSoWhite mockery http://t.co/j5138sAUDV pic.twitter.com/TDgYu0Va49

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) June 25, 2015

Because racism is okay if your target is a Republican. https://t.co/8MV5coPYa8

— Kevin D. Williamson (@KevinNR) June 25, 2015

TWO LaHOODS In ONE! Darin LaHood, Campaigning: ‘I’ve Been Very Critical of D.C. GOP.’ Darin LaHood, Fundraising: ‘Come Hear Boehner, Scalise Endorse Me For $1000s a Plate.’

“The GOP establishment wannabe shows he’s learned the First Rule of Fight (Conservatives) Club,” David Steinberg writes at PJM. Via LaHood’s opponent Mike Flynn, voters have got two weeks “to make this race a national strike on party leadership, just as Dave Brat was.”

THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 777:  IRS Erased Computer Backups After Officials Realized Tea Party Emails Were Lost.

BRANDEIS BETRAYS STUDENT RIGHTS: Minding the Campus’s KC Johnson has a great piece about a student’s due process lawsuit against Brandeis; the student charges that he was disciplined under a procedure different from the one that existed when he arrived on campus, while Brandeis defends the procedure as a mere “tweak” to its rules.

WE’LL JUST HAVE TO PASS THIS NEW BILL TO FIND OUT HOW IT WORKS. A 1947 “Grin and Bear It” cartoon that seems eerily like Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The cartoon was described and misquoted a bit in today’s Obamacare case, but The Chief Justice can blame Felix Frankfurter for the misquote, and Felix can blame the Columbia Law Review editors. Didn’t they check the quotes meticulously back in 1947? Anyway, big thanks to Ben Zimmer at Language Log for putting that up today and to Tobias A. Dorsey at The Periwig Squiggle for digging that all up 5 years ago, when Pelosi uttered her most famous quote.

ADDED: “Grin and Bear It” — it brings on a flood of memories of reading the funny pages when I was a kid. I read everything on the page — “Nancy,” “Blondie,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Li’l Abner,” all of it, including “Grin and Bear It.” I didn’t want “Grin and Bear It” to be there, because it had no panels. It was just one picture, like a political cartoon, so why was it there in the company of Nancy and the rest, demanding that a little kid read it to complete the page? Complicated drawings of adults standing around, someone with a mouth open, indicating talking, but emitting no word bubble. There was just a caption, a caption full of words that meant something, but nothing that was funny from the perspective of kid eyes.

STUDENT SUES COLLEGE FOR VIOLATING HER FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO ADVOCATE FOR HER SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS: In Texas, of all places! Last month Blinn College student Nicole Sanders filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the public college after being told by an administrator that she would need “special permission” to display a gun rights sign and collect signatures for her student group on campus. The lawsuit, part of FIRE’s Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project, also challenges Blinn’s policy of restricting speech to this absurdly tiny “Free Speech Area.” Learn more about the case here.

IN THE MAIL: From Donald J. Boudreaux, The Essential Hayek.

FOR PITA’S SAKE, LEAVE THE FOOD TRUCKS ALONE:  An oped in the Wall Street Journal argues for loosening of the ridiculous regulations on food trucks imposed by various municipalities:

Philadelphia’s vendors must carefully read a 20-page list of prohibited streets, including the entirety of customer-rich Center City. Other locales prohibit trucks from operating within a certain distance of traditional restaurants. Las Vegas once had a 1,320-foot restriction but has since lowered it to a still-high 150 feet.

Chicago’s ban is slightly worse, at 200 feet. But food trucks there must also install GPS trackers so regulators can monitor them for infractions—the definition of bureaucratic micromanagement. That’s still better than Palm Springs, Calif., where food trucks are banned outright.

The list goes on. Yet customers want more access to food trucks, not less. . . .

True. Food trucks are fun and often have very creative, delicious food. The regulations are too often driven by the paranoia of brick and mortar restaurants, who view food trucks as competition. Basic health inspection makes sense, but much of the rest of regulations seem more directed at squelching economic opportunity.

ICYMI: ‘Supreme Court to Government: No, ‘Good Intentions’ Don’t Give You a License to Censor Speech’. Good piece by the Institute for Justice’s Evan Bernick.

GLASS HALF FULL PART 2 – Yesterday I made the easy case for optimism: Americans of all income levels will have more access to law and legal services in the twenty-first century.  Today I tackle the harder case: after a wrenching period of change the legal profession and law schools will be improved.

The profession will benefit greatly from smaller law classes filled with students with a realistic idea of what lawyers actually do and earn.  Current law students come in spite of a headwind, rather than because they are history majors with no other plans, and as such are much likelier to enjoy law school and law practice.  One of the hidden causes of rampant lawyer unhappiness is that too many lawyers were not thoughtful about coming to law school and are later disappointed with their choice.  The college graduates who do not go to law school will also be better off, pursuing careers for which they are better suited.  Fewer law graduates means less competition for the remaining jobs.

The actual job of being a lawyer will also improve.  The best of times for Big Law profits has been the worst of times for the lawyers themselves.  Big Law has led a boom in both remuneration and misery.  The changes ahead will force “alternative billing” for many projects, encouraging creativity and efficiency rather than the grind of maximizing hourly billing.  Much of the less interesting work will be computerized or outsourced, leaving only the most challenging and interesting work.

Competition from Axiom and other virtual law firms will allow creative lawyers flexibility in the terms and conditions of their employment, allowing some lawyers to do Big Law type work on their own schedules.  Surveys have regularly shown that Big Law lawyers would take less money in return for more free time and autonomy.

The same trends will make the small firm and solo practitioners who survive better off.  First, some portion of Big Law will separate from the most profitable firms and fall back to the pack, possibly rejoining what now resembles two separate professions (Big Law and everyone else).

Second, while much legal work will be lost, the work that remains will be more challenging and interesting.  At every level of the profession, entrepreneurialism and creativity will be required.  Lawyers will not be able to count on hanging a shingle and serving clients who have to see them.  Instead, the lawyers that survive will be the lawyers that can demonstrate the value of their insight and services.  This will be hard, but satisfying for the lawyers who make it.

It will be a galvanizing time for the profession and that will draw all lawyers together, putting other concerns into perspective.  It seems likely that in ten years the managing partners of large law firms and the deans of American law schools will gather over drinks to discuss with bemusement the rankings and other silliness that obsessed the profession during the 1990s and 2000s.

THE SUPREME COURT SAVES THE OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES. Here’s the PDF. The Chief Justice writes the opinion.

ADDED: I haven’t read the opinion yet (of course), but I’d just like to console Republicans with the observation that they are better off. If it had gone the other way, they’d have to scramble and do something legislatively — probably save the subsidies themselves. This way, they can stand on whatever principle they like. Also, in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, they’ll fare much better on the old question of who do you want appointing the next Supreme Court justice.

AND:  The Chief alludes to Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” He quotes an old Frankfurter article — “Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, “47 Colum. L. Rev. 527, 545 (1947) — that described a cartoon “in which a senator tells his colleagues ‘I admit this new bill is too complicated to understand. We’ll just have to pass it to find out what it means.’”

That’s at the end of a paragraph where he blames Congress for “inartful drafting,” for writing “key parts of the Act behind closed doors, rather than through ‘the traditional legislative process,’” and for using the “reconcilation” process instead of leaving the bill open to debate and amendment.

MASSACRES AND MAGICAL THINKING: The urge to ‘do something’ after the Charleston church attack inspires the latest round of half-baked proposals, Jacob Sullum writes at Reason.

Yesterday on Twitter*, the hashtag #liberalsnextban started trending; naturally the left’s response, as anticipated last year by this all-purpose Photoshop by Jon Gabriel of Ricochet was:

But then, they’ve already banned humor — just ask Jerry Seinfeld. But what will be the left’s next ban? Leave your thoughts in the comments – at least until they’re banned, too!

* Follow me there – while there’s still time…

CONGRATULATIONS TO TODD ZYWICKI: The new Executive Director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University School of Law.

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HOUSE GOP REVOLT GROWS: House rebels warn of blowback for Boehner. Matt Fuller over at Roll Call reports on the intensifying revolt by House Freedom Caucus members against Speaker John Boehner:

The House Freedom Caucus has a secret it wants to share with Democrats.

“If the Democrats were to file a motion to vacate the chair and were to vote for that motion unanimously, there probably are 218 votes for it to succeed,” one member of the House Freedom Caucus told CQ Roll Call Tuesday night, as he exited an meeting in the basement of Tortilla Coast.

If that’s true, Democrats could certainly use a vote to remove SpeakerJohn A. Boehner as leverage in any number of upcoming battles: the Export-Import Bank, a highway bill, all sorts of spending measures. But absent any real talk from Democrats, the official response from Boehner’s communications director, Kevin Smith, was simply to dismiss CQ Roll Call’s reporter. . . .

The HFC looks ready for war, as does GOP leadership and more moderate Republicans who are sick and tired of conservatives voting against the team — and that could signal more retaliation to come from both sides.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the HFC chairman, and Raúl R. Labrador, one of the founding members of the secretive conservative group, had plenty to say to CQ Roll Call Wednesday about leadership’s recent moves against members who voted against the rule for Trade Promotion Authority.

“The reason this is happening is pretty clear,” Labrador said of Meadows’ demotion and the dismissal of other HFC members from the whip team. “The leadership is afraid.”

Labrador said GOP leaders sense their influence slipping, as 34 Republicans defied Boehner and others on the TPA rule. “And they know that that 34 is really not 34,” Labrador said. “They know that that number is really much larger.”

I admire these Freedom Caucus members for standing on their principles. It would be in the best interests of Speaker Boehner to find a way to welcome and work with these GOP members rather than treating them like the enemy. His inability to do this evinces a failure of leadership. Boehner seems more interested in working with President Obama these days than his own party.

RELATED: Boehner doles out new GOP punishment. According to The Hill, The latest victim of Boehner retribution is Ken Buck (R-CO), who “could be stripped of his title as GOP freshman class president on Thursday morning.”

Buck told reporters a freshman colleague approached him on Tuesday night and gave him a choice: Resign or get ousted by his peers. When Buck refused to step down, his colleague issued a threat: “Well, then we’re going to call a meeting.”

Later that evening, the chief of staff to Rep. Mimi Walters (R-Calif.), the freshman liaison to leadership, sent out an email asking for freshman members to gather at 8:30 a.m. Thursday.

In a brief interview, Walters declined to disclose exactly what the meeting would be about. But in a statement, she said, “a majority of the freshman class has expressed concerns I share regarding the leadership of our class president.”

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) joked that he’s “still got the record for being kicked off two committees.” House GOP leaders removed him from the Budget and Agriculture panels in 2012 as payback for repeatedly bucking the party line.

He accused the GOP leadership of having misplaced priorities.

“Leaders unite, they don’t divide. That’s been the Republican concern about President Barack Obama, that he’s a divider. And we have our leadership doing the same thing,” he said.

Exactly.

ONE STEP CLOSER TO AN INVISIBILITY CLOAK