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a day ago
- Politics
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The Supreme Court's Super-Neutral Principle That Applies Only to Democratic Presidents
This week's Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus is a mailbag special in which co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern answer listeners' burning questions about the law under the joint reign of Donald Trump's monarchical presidency and our imperial Supreme Court. Amicus listeners have a lot of smart questions, so we're continuing our occasional 'Dear (Juris)Prudence' series, in which we share your questions, as well as Dahlia's and Mark's answers. Write to amicus@ to pose a question to Dahlia and Mark. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. Dear (Juris)Prudence, Can you explain why the major-questions doctrine wasn't invoked when deciding the Trump v. CASA birthright citizenship case but was used in overturning student loan relief under President Joe Biden? Is it because the justices didn't decide the merits of CASA but did decide the merits of student loan relief? And if so, why can the court seemingly then choose to decide procedure rather than merits? —Paul Michael Davis Mark Joseph Stern: I'll start with the procedural question vs. the merits. That is totally at the Supreme Court's discretion. The court could have asked the parties in Trump v. CASA to talk about birthright citizenship and tee up a ruling on Trump's executive order because it obviously violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. And it shouldn't have been difficult for the court to say so. But instead, it manipulated the docket, manipulated the case, to make it an attack on the universal injunctions that had been holding this executive order back from being implemented, and ignored the merits altogether. The converse happened in the student loan case. That was really a case about standing, because no one was clearly injured by the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court, as Justice Elena Kagan wrote persuasively in her dissent, should have started and ended by saying that nobody had standing in that case. Instead, the court manipulated its standing doctrine to pretend that there was standing by some party, and then the court swiftly reached the merits and invoked the so-called major-questions doctrine, saying that the policy was unlawful. In doing so, Kagan expressly said, the majority violated the Constitution by exceeding its power—a pretty rare charge for a justice to levy at the majority. So that choice—whether to decide a procedural issue or reach for the merits—is all totally discretionary. But we should always pay attention to how the court is tweaking its docket and the questions that it takes up to reach the outcome that it wants to. The first part of your question was about the major-questions doctrine, however. Dahlia and I always put this 'doctrine' in air quotes. It's not a real thing. It's totally malleable. It's total BS, resting on what five or six justices see as a major question, and when they think they've spotted a major question, then they apply super close scrutiny to what the executive branch has tried to do, and will usually strike it down. They did this with the student loan relief program under Biden. They did it with climate regulation under Biden. I doubt that they will do this to anything that Donald Trump tries to enact. I still think it's likely they'll strike down the birthright citizenship order on the merits, though I'm less certain of that than I was a couple of weeks ago. I still think it's more likely than not, but I doubt they'll invoke the major-questions doctrine. I think that that doctrine will lie dormant throughout four years of Trump, and if you had any doubt about that, I'll note that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence at the end of June in which he strongly implied that the major-questions doctrine wouldn't apply to Trump's tariffs. Remember, one of the grounds that the lower court used to strike down the tariffs was essentially invoking the major-questions doctrine to say that Congress hadn't given Trump this power clearly enough. So it was a major question about a power that Trump couldn't exercise, and here is Kavanaugh, one of the key creators of the doctrine, who wielded it so ferociously under Biden, giving up in advance and strongly suggesting that his pet doctrine just doesn't apply to tariffs, because that's foreign trade and that's beyond the remit of the federal judiciary. This is why I fundamentally object to this doctrine in the first place. It is so malleable that all it really does is help courts pick the outcome that they want to reach, then guide themselves along the way, acting as though they have an actual legal basis for doing so.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
It Was One of the Most Shameful Episodes in U.S. History. Federal Workers Are Watching Trump Try It Again Before Their Eyes.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Slate is offering 6 months of Slate Plus to current and recently laid off federal government employees. If you, or someone you know, has been impacted, click here to get 6 months of Slate Plus free. Lily has spent much of the past two months wondering whether she is going to get fired. As a transgender federal employee, she's also spent time training her body to suppress the urge to pee. She's cut down her intake of water and stopped eating lunch so she won't have to visit the office restroom as often, given the attention she might attract. Lily has worked for the Department of Defense for the past decade and a half. (Like nearly everyone quoted in this piece, she asked for a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation.) Her agency hasn't announced an explicit bathroom ban yet, but she has no doubt that it's coming. On his very first day in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order on gender that formally rejected the validity of transgender identity. Among other things, it directed agencies to begin segregating 'intimate spaces' by biological sex. It seems inevitable that at some point in the near future, Lily will be ordered, as a condition of her employment, to use the men's bathroom. And she won't be able to bring herself to do it. 'I am a woman,' she told me. 'I look like a woman. I feel that I would be sexually harassed or assaulted in the men's restroom.' All this physical and mental preparation has taken a toll. Lily has had to miss more than a week of work already, and she's upped her dosage of anti-anxiety medication. She dreads what the coming months will bring. As the Trump administration wages a large-scale assault on the civil service and seeks far-reaching restrictions on the ability of trans people to participate in public life, transgender federal employees find themselves in a uniquely vulnerable position. Their internal networks for social and professional support were disbanded by the executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Bathroom bans are looming. At some agencies, higher-ups have prohibited the means by which trans employees have identified themselves, like posting their pronouns in Microsoft Teams. Some worry that Trump's executive order on biological sex is written so broadly that simply calling oneself transgender could violate it. But many fear the advent of a more explicit purge of trans workers. In an atmosphere of justifiable paranoia, rumors abound: Some whisper that the Office of Personnel Management will ask agencies to furnish lists of employees whose background checks show a history of different names or gender markers. An executive order that laid the groundwork for a trans military ban declared transgender identity inconsistent with 'an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,' and thus incompatible with military service. It's easy to imagine the administration extending this argument to security clearances, leadership roles, or federal employment itself. Several transgender workers told me they see chilling parallels to the Lavender Scare, the McCarthy-era crusade to rid the government of gays and lesbians. Under the justification that they posed a threat to national security by being susceptible to blackmail, thousands of gay people were investigated, outed, and terminated from federal employment in the mid–20th century. The moral panic spread to state and local governments, too, making more than 20 percent of American jobs unavailable to openly gay people. The U.S. Civil Service Commission didn't end the ban on gays in the federal workforce until 1975, amid a mounting push by the nascent gay rights movement for nondiscrimination protections. Today, the Lavender Scare is widely viewed as a shameful period in U.S. history—a witch hunt that demonized a vulnerable minority to build support for a broader right-wing agenda. For Oliver, a trans man who now works for the Department of the Interior, that legacy added meaning to his decision to enter public service. In a previous federal role, representing his agency at a local Pride event 'was one of the proudest moments of my career,' he said. It felt momentous to speak to other LGBTQ+ people as a uniformed federal employee, 'when just decades before, that would not have been possible or anywhere near the reality of what the life of a trans person could look like.' The past two months have been disillusioning, to say the least. Oliver struggled to process the executive order that claimed trans-inclusive policies corrupt 'the validity of the entire American system.' Like Lily, he immediately realized that a bathroom ban would likely come next. Oliver is the only current federal employee I spoke to who agreed to use his real first name in this piece, because he plans to leave his job within the month. The demand, led by Elon Musk, that feds write up a weekly list of their accomplishments put him over the edge. 'I've had a lot of trouble sleeping over the last couple of weeks,' he said. 'Worrying about what my job is going to look like, worrying about my existence as a trans person in the federal government. That just made me reach my breaking point where I had to ask myself, 'What am I willing to subject myself to?' ' Oliver's story mirrors the journey of several other transgender federal workers who told me they had envisioned long, productive careers in public service. Within a few weeks of the Trump administration, that goal began to seem impossible or intolerable: Now, they say, it appears likely that they'll either be fired for being trans—even if the official pretext is something different—or be driven out by a degrading work environment that treats them with suspicion and contempt. One of the first transgender workers to lose her job in the new Trump administration was Amy Paris, who has worked for the federal government for most of the past decade. Over the years, she's had a hand in numerous projects that made the government work better for trans people and everyone else: adding an X option on passports for people who prefer their gender to be 'unspecified'; developing software that helps Americans file their taxes directly with the IRS; ditching the pink and blue buttons that required TSA agents to pick a gender before each body scan, which resulted in unnecessary pat-downs, longer lines, and the public humiliation of transgender travelers. Paris' most recent job was in the Department of Health and Human Services, where, until earlier this year, she worked to improve the nationwide system governing organ donation and transplants. Then, at 9 p.m. on a Friday in the middle of February, Paris received an email announcing her termination. 'Your ability, knowledge, and skills do not fit the agency's current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency,' it read. Less than a month earlier, a performance evaluation had rated Paris 'outstanding,' the highest ranking available in federal employment. It seems clear to her that her ouster was not based on an assessment of her work quality, though she can't be sure it was because she is trans. Members of the Trump administration 'are really out there to make sure that the federal government is not able to provide critical services, and that is their top goal,' she said. 'If they happen to hurt some trans people along the way, all the better.' In contrast to the days of the first Lavender Scare, there are thousands of out LGBTQ+ people currently serving in the federal government. But across the federal government, Paris said, there are also closeted trans people hoping they won't be discovered by the current administration. Being outed might have been a nonissue or simply unpleasant in the recent past; now, it could cost them their bathroom access or career. Closeted trans employees fear the day that the Department of Government Efficiency starts combing through employee background checks, searching for workers with disparate names and gender markers in their records. 'I imagine they're going to come, eventually, for the entire LGBTQ spectrum. They're starting with trans people because we're the smallest group,' Paris said. A broader sweep may have already begun: In February, Mother Jones reported that certain departments have been asked to hand over the names of LGBTQ+ resource group leaders to higher-ranking officials. (It remains to be seen what they will do with these lists.) Inclusive policies around language and labels—such as the X gender marker that was available on many forms of federal identification until Trump took office—are also under attack. As soon as Trump signed his Day 1 executive order on gender, Lily said, colleagues who'd styled themselves as LGBTQ+ allies began deleting their pronouns from their email signatures. Eventually, Lily was directed to do the same. Many of the people responsible for enforcing the executive order are not Trump's ideological foot soldiers; they may resent having to carry out his anti-trans decrees. For Lily, that's hardly a comfort. 'That's my fear for other policies that will have to be implemented,' she said. 'People know that they will impact me and will be a detriment to my ability to contribute in the office, but they will still enforce them. Because they don't want to lose their jobs.' Gray, a nonbinary staff member at the General Services Administration, has had a hand in several projects designed to make federal workplaces more inclusive for trans employees. A few weeks ago, they were tasked with doing the opposite. After Trump's executive order on biological sex, Gray was the person who pushed the button to implement a change on government webpages, removing mentions of gender identity and pronouns. 'I sat there with tears streaming down my face while I did it,' they said. Gray has been connecting with other federal employees on Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Over the past two months, several group chats of trans federal workers—at least one with dozens of members—have come together to commiserate, offer job search assistance, and share moments of joy amid the chaos. One group is led by David, a trans man who has worked in the federal government for more than seven years. David wasn't out as trans at work before he started his agency's LGBTQ+ resource group. Having a devoted forum for meeting trans and queer colleagues 'helped me feel like I had a grounding and helped me come out of the closet,' he said. By dissolving these groups, the Trump administration is beginning to encourage workers back into the closet, suggesting that their identities are once again a liability in the federal workplace. One queer employee at the Department of Transportation said her resource group used to be a vibrant, active community with more than 400 members. Now, it's a 50-person Signal chat that most users have joined under pseudonyms, lest they leave a record of participation. Their coming together—and their caution—has historical precedent. During the first Lavender Scare, Frank Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, an early and influential gay rights group, after he was fired from his government job for being gay. At a preliminary meeting at a D.C. hotel, the hotel manager eavesdropped and reported the group to the FBI, which recruited an informant who outed dozens of alleged gays. Understanding the need for discretion, the majority of MSW members used pseudonyms, and membership records were stored under lock and key. Under the threat of targeted surveillance and mounting hostility, David has forced himself to consider what his red line would be. What if he arrives at his office one morning to find his computer login has been changed to his birth name? What if the administration opens an email address for telling on trans people using the restroom, like the one created to report on employees doing DEI work? 'The urge to say 'fuck you' to all these orders is so strong,' David said. 'But it's also really hard to weigh, like—if I lose my job tomorrow, it's going to have really serious impacts on me, on my family.' The parts of his job he once loved—the national impact, the public service, the security that helped him provide a stable life for his kids—no longer outweigh the stress of being trans in the second Trump administration, he said. 'If I was 25, if I didn't have a family, I'd just quit.' Some federal workers worry that even innocuous discussions in the workplace about being trans could mark them for dismissal. They see an ominous sign in what happened to more than 100 intelligence officers who posted messages years ago in two LGBTQ+ chat rooms hosted by the National Security Agency. Last month, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo published a leaked series of old chats from the groups, calling them a 'secret transgender sex chatroom.' In reality, the chats showed conversations about gender-affirming medical treatments and polyamorous relationships. Were a few of the comments inappropriate for work? Maybe. But hardly any mentioned sex. Even so, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called the message groups 'disgusting' and ordered intelligence agencies to fire those who'd participated. 'That is an opening to expand that aperture of, you know, trans people are dishonest. They're untrustworthy,' Lily said. 'I'm worried that that will be an excuse for removing clearances, as an example—or, outright, anybody that's trans can't be trusted with federal work at all.' Lily and her wife have drawn up a budget to see if they could make ends meet on just one salary. (It would be extremely tight.) They've started reducing their spending just in case and discussing whether they would stay in Texas if Lily were forced to end the career that she has spent more than a decade building. In just a couple of months, their plan for a future together that looked solid has become distressingly uncertain. 'It's an eventuality that I'm going to be forced out of the government,' Lily said. 'I am preparing for that as best I can.'
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Mask Is Really Off Now on Tech Billionaire Politics
Slate is offering six months of Slate Plus to current and recently laid-off federal government employees. If you or someone you know has been affected, click here to get six months of Slate Plus free. When I was growing up in Seattle in the 1990s, the city was shifting from the home of Nirvana and grunge music into a shinier, techier metropolis. A decade before Silicon Valley entered the general parlance, Seattle natives Bill Gates and Paul Allen were founding Microsoft and ushering in a new era of American innovation—and of the American ultrarich. For most of the period between 1997 and 2017, Gates was the richest man in the world, and Allen also amassed a large fortune. And with this new technological era came a new kind of billionaire: The nerd made good, who generally came along with a kind of bland good-guy libertarianism. Many of these early tech billionaires, Gates most prominent among them, were avid philanthropists too, giving away enormous sums and starting their own nonprofit entities. But by the time Amazon founder Jeff Bezos surpassed Gates as the world's richest man in the 2010s, the tech billionaire vibes had shifted. Yes, the billionaire philanthropists carried on. But another group—call them the hostile libertarians—were growing in power. And it's those men who now dominate the industry—and who are taking over American government and American media in a spectacular revenge of the nerds. These men have largely rejected any obligation to public service, choosing to hoard their wealth or spend it on vanity projects rather than use it to aid the far less fortunate. They tend to adhere to a libertarianism that claims to stand for broad personal liberties and expansive rights to free speech. The problem, though, is that they are ultimately thin-skinned and morally immature. When they get into positions of power, their libertarianism morphs from 'Freedom for All' to 'Freedom for Me'—including freedom from criticism or complication. And with Donald Trump in charge, a man for whom 'Freedom for Me but Not for Thee' is practically a lifelong mantra, we're seeing these self-identified libertarians behave unapologetically illiberally. Take Bezos. His politics have long seemed to be liberal-libertarian: He has donated to support same-sex marriage and lower taxes for the rich, and has given to Democratic politicians as well as Republican ones, along with the libertarian Reason Foundation. When he bought the Washington Post, he pledged to maintain its independence even under pressure. And by most accounts, he did—until Trump's reelection loomed. In a now-infamous move, he ordered the Post's editorial board to scrap its endorsement of Kamala Harris, declaring that the paper would no longer back any political candidate. It's an order that would be controversial at any point, but coming as it did, 11 days before an election, was a shocking overreach and resulted in a mass exodus of subscribers from the paper. Then, after Trump was elected, Bezos again used his position at the outlet to exert wildly inappropriate editorial control, sending a note to staff that read: 'We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.' Those others? They can be found, he said, on 'the internet.' One wonders which definition of personal liberties includes refusing to publish views at odds with the paper's tech billionaire founder. Thanks to Bezos' meddling, the Post is hemorrhaging subscribers. Many of its opinion writers have left. One has to imagine that, even though Bezos has not yet exerted control over the Post's reporting, its journalists—who are among the best in the business—are anxious about what is to come and are looking elsewhere. The country may now lose one of its last great national newspapers: an outlet that broke the Watergate story, that provides unparalleled coverage of the nation's capital, and that remains one of the last remaining publications to post correspondents overseas, bringing the rest of the world to American readers. If Bezos had any decency left, he would sell off the paper—or, better yet, create a trust that would fund it into perpetuity, then make his exit. But he seems more interested in pleasing Trump than in maintaining a newspaper that is foundational to the free press, a pillar of American democracy. This is an entirely self-serving decision. Bezos is transparently attempting to curry favor with Trump because of, one suspects, his interest in securing government contracts and possibly in being spared some pain in the trade war Trump wants to wage. (As Paul Krugman suggested back in November, one purpose of the Trump tariffs may be to allow the president, who can grant tariff exemptions to particular companies, to financially reward loyalists and punish dissenters.) To see his encroachments on the free press spoken of in the language of liberty and freedom is especially cynical. This through-the-looking-glass definition of liberty is in line with how several other Trump-adjacent tech titans define freedom, which seems to be: Criticism of me trespasses on it; censoring views I disagree with does not. Elon Musk, for example, is a self-styled 'free speech absolutist.' When he bought Twitter and rebranded it as X, he criticized its content moderation policies and pledged that the site would no longer censor controversial views. 'Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,' Musk said when the acquisition was announced. He was right on both counts: Free speech is essential, and social media platforms, including Twitter, are modern town squares. His free speech absolutism, though, doesn't seem to have been anywhere near absolute. X complies with most government requests to remove content, and it complies more often than the company did when it was still Twitter. Several journalists who cover Musk saw their accounts suspended after he took over. (Musk claimed, falsely, that those journalists shared 'basically assassination coordinates' of where he was.) He permanently banned the account @ElonJet, which tracked the location of Musk's private plane—information that is publicly available. But blatant white supremacists, Nazis, misogynists, and disinformation purveyors remain, because free speech. If X is a town square, it's a pretty unpleasant one. Musk has also said that he hopes individuals and organizations that publish media safety standards—and that tell companies which social media platforms are responsible and worthy of advertising on, and which are not—are criminally prosecuted (because, of course, these groups sometimes suggest that a platform home to members of various hate groups is maybe a bad bet for ads). He has asserted that journalists who publish stories he doesn't like or thinks are incorrect should be fired or imprisoned. In this, he mirrors fellow tech billionaire and former PayPal collaborator Peter Thiel, who at once claimed to 'strongly believe in the First Amendment' while secretly bankrolling the case that put Gawker out of business, because he didn't like what it published. This is, to be fair, a broader right-wing problem. Trump himself was elected by a modern right galvanized by an opposition to 'cancel culture' and embracing the language of free speech, but in truth it seems eager to use claims of censorship primarily to gain power. With Trump in office, speech has been constrained in ways that are best characterized by various ignominious -ists: McCarthyist; fascist; and, with the attacks on education, language purges as a means of eliminating the ideologies behind them, and the elevating of true lie-parroting believers over competent and honest actors, approaching Maoist. The administration has a list of banned words, making verboten everything from diversity to gender. Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. green-card holder and graduate student at Columbia University, was recently arrested by immigration officials and shuttled off in secret, seemingly for speech this administration has deemed antisemitic and a threat to national security (a designation not made of the various far-right figures in Trump's orbit, including self-identified Christian nationalists, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, and men who throw up the Nazi salute). The arrest seems transparently politically motivated and intended to send a message: Protest, and you pay. Hypocrisy from the MAGA movement and the Christian right is nothing new. Tech leaders, though, seemed to promise something different. Their money, the implicit argument went, shielded them from the concerns of mere mortals, and certainly of politicians. They could be advocates of ultimate freedom, and they could (literally) afford to be ideologically consistent. But as we're now seeing, commitment to a particular philosophy was never the real driver of these tech leaders' views; selfishness apparently was.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The U.S. Just Handed Ukraine a Clear Advantage
Slate is offering six months of Slate Plus to current and recently laid-off federal government employees. If you or someone you know has been affected, click here to get six months of Slate Plus free. Maybe President Trump isn't clamoring to push Ukraine under the bus after all. Tuesday's meeting in Jeddah, between his top officials and their Ukrainian counterparts, ended with the Americans handing Kyiv a clear advantage—militarily and diplomatically—and putting Moscow in a tight, awkward spot. According to a joint statement released after several hours of talks, the two countries agreed to a 30-day ceasefire in the Russia–Ukraine war, hopefully to be extended for a longer span, segueing into negotiations toward a permanent peace. The ceasefire deal—which also contains details about a long-term settlement that have not been publicly disclosed—will soon be presented to the Russian government for its acceptance or rejection. Meanwhile, whatever the Russians decide, Ukraine will enjoy an immediate resumption of U.S. military and intelligence assistance, which Trump had suspended after his disastrous Oval Office meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 28. Trump's suspension of weapons deliveries—and especially his halting of intelligence on Russia's movements—had started to damage Ukrainian troops' strength and morale at a time when both sides are facing shortfalls and exhaustion. Even before the Oval Office meeting, when U.S. and Russian officials met to discuss an end to the war without inviting any Ukrainians to the talk, it seemed as if Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were about to impose a peace on Kyiv—and that Trump had capitulated to Russia's position. Zelensky had pushed for the meeting in Jeddah to repair the damage done by the Oval Office disaster and, more broadly, to restore good relations with Washington, which are necessary not only for Ukraine's war effort but also for his country's stability—and possibly survival—after the fighting is over. Whatever happens next, from Zelensky's standpoint, the Jeddah meeting was an unqualified success. Russian President Vladimir Putin must be displeased—and more than a bit surprised. He has opposed a ceasefire unless it is preceded by a settlement of the war's 'root causes.' By his definition of those causes, he has insisted on the removal of Zelensky's regime (which he sees as illegitimate), the 'demilitarization' and 'neutralization' of Ukraine (meaning its disarmament and a pledge never to join NATO), and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from much of Eastern Europe (which is to say, the reversal of the West's Cold War victory). In recent weeks, Trump has expressed sympathy for Putin's views, saying that Ukraine started the war and remains the main obstacle to peace. At the very least, the results of the Jeddah meeting put that proposition to a test. 'The ball is in Russia's court,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio said coming out of the meeting. If Putin rejects the ceasefire offer, he added, 'then we'll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace.' If Putin says nyet, even Trump might get the picture. He might even turn against Putin—whom he has openly admired for many years—for dissing his high-profile plan to end the war. He told reporters on Wednesday that Russia would face 'devastating' penalties, mainly financial in nature, if it rejected the deal. He didn't elaborate, nor is it clear what these penalties might be, given that the U.S. has already piled sanctions on Russia and that trade between the two nations is too scanty for tariffs to matter. Nonetheless, Putin's foreign policy rests largely on staying cozy with Trump and thereby splitting the U.S.–European alliance; he may take the vehemence of Trump's remarks as a warning that this partnership might be in danger. Of course, Putin could accept the ceasefire, then refuse to abide by it. We have all seen, most recently in the Middle East, how difficult it is to sustain even a 30-day ceasefire, especially when one or both sides would rather keep fighting. It is unclear, at least from the U.S.–Ukrainian joint statement, how the ceasefire—whether for 30 days or an extended span—would be monitored and enforced. Some European countries, notably Britain and France, have offered to deploy peacekeeper troops on Ukrainian soil. Putin has rejected that idea out of hand. If actual peace talks get underway, he may have to change his position—or risk being seen, by the rest of the world and even by Trump, as the bad guy. Even if a ceasefire happens, that wouldn't necessarily mean the outbreak of peace. Nobody believes that a final deal would give back all the territory that Ukraine has lost to Russia since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 or even since the wider invasion of 2022. Zelensky doesn't concede the point, but has said that he can't stop fighting without some form of security guarantees, if not formally from NATO, then in some manner from select Western countries, including the U.S.—in order to deter or prevent Russia from reinvading months or years down the road. Trump has said that the minerals treaty—which he and Zelensky were about to sign until the Oval Office blowup and which they now seem set to try signing again in a do-over—would be a more-than-ample substitute for a security guarantee. The Russian army, he argues, wouldn't dare threaten Ukrainian soil once American miners and engineers are present, exploring and excavating its minerals (whose revenues the U.S. would then share). There may be something to this, but it's doubtful that Western companies would send their workers to Ukraine without U.S. security guarantees—especially since half of Ukraine's mineral wealth is buried on land that Russian troops currently occupy. But those are issues for the future. In the meantime, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz—who represented the U.S. in Jeddah, along with Rubio and Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff—is carrying the ceasefire proposal, including details not yet publicized, to Moscow. Trump also said he will personally talk with Putin soon. During that phone call, Putin will probably repeat his rambling lecture that distorts and falsifies the history and geopolitics of Russia and Ukraine—a lecture that Trump has accepted in the past. Trump very much wants to believe the tall tale, just as he wants to restore good ties between Washington and Moscow—but whether he continues to do so may depend, this time, on Putin's actions as well as his words. If true, that in itself marks a major change in the relationship.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Yahoo
We're Really Doing Execution by Firing Squad Again?
Slate is offering six months of Slate Plus to current and recently laid-off federal government employees. If you or someone you know has been affected, click here to get six months of Slate Plus free. On Friday, South Carolina put Brad Sigmon to death for the 2001 murder of his ex-girlfriend's parents. The crime was quite gruesome; Sigmon struck each of his victims nine times in the head with a baseball bat. Even so, his execution would not have been particularly noteworthy except for the fact that it was carried out by firing squad. Before Sigmon, no one had been put to death that way in the past 15 years. And he is just the fourth person executed by firing squad in the past 50 years. In 2010 Utah used the firing squad to kill Ronnie Gardner, the third time since 1977 that it had done so. That year, the state also used a firing squad to execute Gary Gilmore, who waived his appeals and volunteered for execution. He became the first person executed after the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976. C.M. Frankie reported in 2021 that, offered the choice of hanging or the firing squad, Gilmore said, 'I'd rather be shot.' Gilmore preferred the firing squad because 'he considered it a more 'dignified' way to die than hanging.' Like Gilmore and Gardner, Sigmon also chose to be shot. He preferred it to execution by lethal injection or the electric chair, the other methods authorized by law in the Palmetto State. But his choice doesn't make execution by firing squads any less ghoulish. It serves to highlight the horror of dying by the other methods. As the AP reports, Sigmon well understood those horrors. He didn't want to be executed by the electric chair because he thought it would 'burn and cook him alive' and because he figured lethal injection would be 'just as monstrous.' Sigmon feared he would suffer like the three men South Carolina has executed by lethal injection since September. Each of them 'remained alive, strapped to a gurney, for more than twenty minutes.' Sometimes, what looks like a choice is hardly meaningful. Selecting the method the state will use to kill you may be one of those times. Today four states—Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah—list the firing squad in their menu of execution methods. The Idaho Legislature just passed a law making the firing squad its primary death-penalty method. However, the firing squad has been part of the American story for a long time. As ABC News observes, it 'was a punishment for mutiny in colonial times, a way to discourage desertion during the Civil War and a dose of frontier justice in the Old West.' ABC continues: 'Since 1608, at least 144 civilian prisoners have been executed by shooting in America, nearly all in Utah.' In 1878 the Supreme Court approved its use to express the 'humanity of the nation.' A year later, the execution of Wallace Wilkerson, the man who lost that case, was anything but humane. James Acker and Ryan Champagne describe it this way: 'Shots from the marksmen's rifles missed his heart. Not strapped into the chair where he had been seated, Wilkerson lurched onto the ground and exclaimed, 'My God! … They missed it!' He groaned, continued breathing, and was pronounced dead some 27 min later.' In 1913 Nevada became the next state to employ the firing squad. To do so, it 'built a contraption that fired three guns by pulling strings because it had trouble finding volunteers to serve on a firing squad.' As I have previously argued: 'The history of the firing squad is marked by gruesome mistakes when marksmen missed their target. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.' In addition, firing squads 'did not gain much use,' law professor Deborah Denno explains, because even when they went as planned, people 'viewed them as barbaric' and were offended by their 'bloody reality.' Moreover, as the AP's Michael Tarm puts it, 'The image of gunmen in a row firing in unison at a condemned prisoner may conjure up a bygone, less enlightened era.' That less enlightened era was certainly on display in Sigmon's execution. To prepare for it, South Carolina renovated its death chamber. It installed 'bullet-resistant glass between the death chamber and witnesses, as well as a metal chair' where the condemned would be seated. The state 'also cut into the brick wall of the chamber to make an aperture through which the three shooters—all volunteer employees from the Corrections Department— …thread their weapons, all loaded with live ammunition.' Before they killed Sigmon, corrections officials put a hood over his head and placed a 'small aim point' over the inmate's heart. The warden read the execution order, and the volunteers fired from a distance of 15 feet. Witnesses could see what happened to Sigmon, but they could not see the people who shot him. One of those witnesses, Jeffrey Collins, a reporter who has witnessed many executions, said, 'The firing squad is certainly faster—and more violent—than lethal injection. … My heart started pounding a little after Sigmon's lawyer read his final statement. 'About two minutes later,' Collins continued, 'they fired. There was no warning or countdown. … The white target with the red bullseye that had been on his chest, standing out against his black prison jumpsuit, disappeared instantly as Sigmon's whole body flinched. … A jagged red spot about the size of a small fist appeared where Sigmon was shot. His chest moved two or three times.' The executioners 'fired at the same time. … Sigmon's arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give … a breath or two with a red stain on his chest'; Collins added that 'small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound.' Sigmon's lawyer was more concise, calling Sigmon's death 'horrifying and violent.' However, neither of those accounts can tell us what Sigmon experienced either in the minutes before the shots rang out or as the bullets hit him. Borrowing from what Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested in 2017, we can't know whether his death was 'comparatively painless' or whether, as Denno says, South Carolina's firing squad delivered a 'swift and certain death.' Anesthesiologist Joseph Antognini, an expert on execution methods, offers a different possibility. In his view, someone shot like Sigmon 'could remain conscious for up to 10 seconds after being shot depending on where bullets strike … and those seconds could be 'severely painful, especially related to shattering of bone and damage to the spinal cord.' ' Randy Gardner, the brother of Ronnie Gardner, who was executed by firing squad in 2010, agrees with Antognini. He says that the autopsy photos show that his brother's execution was 'gory' and 'very barbaric.' Whether Sotomayor, Denno, Antognini, or Gardner is correct seems to me a bit beside the point. Although the suffering of the condemned is crucial to determine the cruelty of an execution, how we punish is also about those who impose it. Punishment reflects who we are and who we want to be. That is why I hope that someday soon, this country will not want to be associated with capital punishment. In the meantime, let's not fool ourselves: Killing Sigmon or anyone else by firing squad only exacerbates the shame of that deed.
