Latest news with #progressives
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Liberals Are Going to Keep Losing at the Supreme Court
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Supreme Court delivered a string of major losses for liberal Americans in recent weeks. Two in particular stand out: In United States v. Skrmetti, the Court's conservative majority upheld a state law outlawing minors' access to puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices created a new constitutional entitlement for religious parents to shield their children from learning about LGBTQ people in public schools. Defeats like these have become the norm since Donald Trump jolted the Court rightward. For many progressives, the narrative is straightforward: Ambitious, doctrinaire, Republican-appointed justices are systematically dismantling liberal precedents over the impassioned but impotent dissents of their Democratic-appointed colleagues. This account accurately captures the speed, scope, and partisanship of the Court's conservative counterrevolution. Yet it obscures a difficult truth: Progressive lawyers paved the road to these losses. Rulings such as those in Skrmetti and Mahmoud are the predictable consequences of liberal litigation strategies that invite a hostile Court to codify an agenda that the Court's conservative majority was handpicked to establish. The Supreme Court cannot act without cases. It cannot initiate litigation. To reshape doctrine in the ways the justices want, they depend on litigants to bring suits to them. Both of these cases represent unforced errors; liberal lawyers chose to fight for ideas the justices were explicitly appointed to oppose. Poorly chosen liberal challenges are a gift to a conservative majority eager to recast constitutional law. [Paul Rosenzweig: The Supreme Court's inconsistency is very revealing] Progressive lawyers need a strategic recalibration, something I argue in a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article. They need to stop reflexively turning to federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court. Avoiding high-risk, high-profile litigation in inhospitable forums does not mean abandoning constitutional advocacy. It means redirecting that advocacy toward the democratic arenas of constitutional politics, such as legislatures, ballot initiatives, grassroots organizing, and the broader public square. In these spaces, progressives can build popular support, blunt the impact of adverse rulings, and shape the constitutional culture that, over time, influences judicial doctrine itself. The Skrmetti case began in April 2023, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennessee to block the state from banning certain treatments of gender dysphoria for minors. (I'd worked at the ACLU as a legal fellow a year earlier but had no involvement in the case.) After an initial trial-court victory for the liberal plaintiffs, the state appealed the decision to the Sixth Circuit. That court overturned the lower court's decision and upheld the ban. The ACLU could have accepted this regional setback. The Sixth Circuit's decisions bind just four states—Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Although the outcome was surely painful for the plaintiffs, the ruling did not overturn other lower-court decisions protecting transgender rights that had been decided in other states. Declining to appeal need not constitute an endorsement of the decision. Rather, it would have reflected a pragmatic assessment that the Court's conservative justices were more likely to amplify than alleviate harm. Instead, the ACLU (later joined by the Biden administration) petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. The Court's conservative majority obliged and accepted the case for full review in June 2024. The decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts earlier this month, which was joined by all of his fellow Republican appointees, is the unhappy result. In concrete terms, the decision allows states with previously blocked bans to seek their restoration, and emboldens states without bans to enact them, assured of constitutional cover. Yet when the Supreme Court adjudicates, it does more than resolve a dispute between two parties. It shapes the trajectory of constitutional interpretation and political contestation. Its rulings influence not just courts and legislatures but also public discourse and perception. By affirming the result and much of the rationale of the Sixth Circuit—and condoning the open animus toward transgender people voiced by Tennessee lawmakers—the Court didn't merely uphold one type of law. It radiated anti-transgender sentiment in explicit constitutional doctrine and the wider constitutional culture that shapes politics, law, and public dialogue. Legally, Skrmetti deprives transgender advocates of a key sex-discrimination argument and signals to lower courts that the highest court takes a skeptical view of transgender-rights claims made under equal-protection law. Politically, it encourages Republican officials to pursue even more restrictive laws targeting transgender people. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump-administration figures praised the ruling and vowed to escalate their crackdown on transgender rights, including access to gender-affirming care treatments for minors in blue states. Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Skrmetti concurrence—joined in full by Justice Clarence Thomas and substantively endorsed by Justice Samuel Alito—goes further in inviting discrimination against transgender people. Before oral argument, some progressives had hoped that Barrett would serve as a swing vote to strike down the law. Instead, she staked out a position even more extreme than the majority opinion, writing that transgender people do not qualify as a suspect or quasi-suspect class under the equal-protection clause. Her reasoning, if embraced by lower courts, would uphold sweeping discriminatory policies targeting transgender adults—such as bans on receiving gender-affirming care and using public facilities—under the guise of 'legitimate regulatory policy.' And it telegraphs to lawmakers agitating for more aggressive attacks on transgender people that the Court will not stand in their way. Advocates should know that this is a risk they are taking. Supreme Court justices have little stopping them from addressing unraised issues and disturbing unrelated precedent. The Roberts Court has made something of a habit of doing so, with its conservative justices frequently reaching to decide questions not before them. In Skrmetti, instead of merely applying precedent on the appropriate standard for evaluating Tennessee's law and then remanding to the Sixth Circuit for further proceedings, the conservative majority decided the law's constitutionality outright—an aggressive and unnecessary move. That this was totally avoidable underscores that liberal advocates would be wise to refrain from channeling long-shot cases to unsympathetic courts—not just the Supreme Court but many federal appellate courts as well, which are filled with ideologically vetted conservative judges from the previous Trump term. Even if liberals do occasionally win at appellate courts, those victories can prove Pyrrhic, setting up conservatives with a fast track to the Supreme Court. Mahmoud v. Taylor offers a cautionary tale of initial liberal wins turning into bigger defeats. After adding books with LGBTQ characters and themes to elementary curricula, the public-school district in Montgomery County, Maryland, created a notice and opt-out system for parents who wanted to withdraw their kids from instruction with the materials. The district later removed the opt-out system following protests from LGBTQ families that found it stigmatizing and discriminatory. Then a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents with young children objected to the removal. By all accounts, these parents were sincere in their religious convictions. They sought accommodations that neighboring school districts had given similarly situated parents; none wanted to ban the books entirely from the school. Many of the objecting parents were comfortable with their kids reading the books at more advanced ages. Yet the district refused to compromise, dismissing hundreds of parental complaints requesting a restoration of the opt-out. What could have been resolved through negotiation transformed into a culture-war flash point and a lawsuit. From the outset of litigation, the school district should have seen the warning signs. The Becket Fund, a powerhouse religious-liberty organization that has won eight (and lost zero) Supreme Court cases in the past decade, represented the parents in their suit, and conservative media outlets regularly covered even routine procedural developments. That should have alerted the district that the stakes were far greater than local policy. A strategic retreat—restoring the opt-out and pursuing legal maneuvers to moot the case, including after the Court granted certiorari—would have shown prudence, not capitulation. Instead, the district pressed on. Its temporary wins at the trial and appellate stages then teed up the Supreme Court reversal that has now reshaped constitutional doctrine nationwide. In ruling for the parents, the Roberts Court extended a nearly unbroken streak of favoring free-exercise claimants, largely conservative Christians. Mahmoud imposes a rigid, nationwide rule that sharply limits schools' ability to balance inclusion with parental concerns. Discovering a new constitutional right for parents to opt out of teaching 'subtle' themes that conflict with their religious beliefs, the decision strips locally elected school boards of the power to make nuanced curricular judgments and hands it to federal judges. It saddles schools with new administrative burdens, inhibits the development of pluralistic curricula, and invites ideological censorship masquerading as religious accommodation. Ironically, a local effort to affirm LGBTQ dignity in a county of 1 million residents led the Supreme Court to inflict a blow to that dignity across a nation of 340 million. Much was lost in the crossfire. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, Mahmoud threatens the 'very essence' of American public education and democracy. For advocates in the progressive legal world, deprioritizing litigation will require a theoretical shift, a move away from the court-centric constitutional vision that has defined progressive legal thought since the Warren and early Burger Courts and has been sustained by occasional liberal victories in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. It will necessitate recognizing that the Court is not the sole or even primary engine of constitutional interpretation. The Court's pronouncements on constitutional law are important, of course. But other institutions and spaces—legislatures, referenda, classrooms, workplaces, media, even group chats and other parts of the public square—have a role to play in the articulation of constitutional ideas. De-emphasizing the courts as sources of legal interpretation and policy change can allow progressives to correctly conceptualize constitutional politics as a participatory, democratic project with institutional and noninstitutional dimensions, not a top-down one outsourced to nine people on the Supreme Court. The public's views should matter a great deal. No Court, however reactionary, operates in a vacuum or with impunity. Justices are shaped by the same gravitational social and political forces as everyone else. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo observed in 1921, 'The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.' Polling shows that most Americans, including four out of every five Republicans, support restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Even in liberal Maryland, two-thirds of voters oppose LGBTQ-focused curricula for young students. Asking a conservative court to override that sentiment—to go where many Democratic voters have yet to go—was never viable. Without public opinion on their side, liberal litigators had little leverage or hope of winning. I saw this disconnect up close at the ACLU. My colleagues were smart and dedicated, carrying the immense emotional weight of fighting for the fundamental dignity of vulnerable people in a climate of growing prejudice and political attack. But many treated any doubts about transgender rights as simple bigotry. Although this approach foregrounded empathy for transgender people, it often failed to genuinely engage with the majority of Americans, who had questions about athletic competition and medical decisions for minors. [Leah Litman: The archaic sex-discrimination case the Supreme Court is reviving] Rather than speak directly to these concerns, liberal litigators sometimes scorned public opinion, confident in the righteousness of their views. As a recent New York Times Magazine feature revealed, the legal advocates behind Skrmetti operated from academic and activist theories of sex and gender that were out of the mainstream. While public support for transgender rights and the medical consensus on treatments for minors' gender dysphoria fractured, advocates such as the ACLU doubled down on rhetorical purity rather than persuasion. In one widely shared post, the ACLU declared, 'Men who get their periods are men. Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.' Another post dismissed as a 'MYTH' the near–universally held view that 'sex is binary, apparent at birth.' This kind of messaging garners engagement in insular, algorithm-driven online spaces but does not create a cultural foundation that moves skeptical voters and conservative judges. A political and legal strategy anchored in Judith Butler is not going to convince Brett Kavanaugh. This recalibration doesn't mean giving up on litigation altogether. But it does mean approaching it with greater realism, aiming for incremental change, not sweeping wins. It requires reading the judicial landscape honestly, studying conservative legal thinking carefully, recognizing when legal action may do more harm than good, and accepting some losses in order to preempt even bigger ones. For example, the Sixth Circuit's Skrmetti opinion, written by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, clearly foreshadowed where Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were likely to land, given Sutton's influence on contemporary conservative legal thought and the intellectual proximity of his approach and their own. Ditto for Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee to the Fourth Circuit who dissented in Mahmoud. There's a revealing paradox in contemporary liberal legal advocacy at the Supreme Court. Many progressives describe the current Court as dangerously rogue and reactionary. Yet their actions suggest a lingering faith in the Court's legitimacy and potentiality as an agent of progressive change. This dissonance surfaces when an ACLU lawyer who calls the Supreme Court a 'vile institution' is the same person who brought Skrmetti to it. Ultimately, a Court that cannot be trusted to protect rights should not be empowered to undermine them. The path forward lies in organizing, legislating, and persuading, not in supplicating before an antipathetic bench. If they take this new path, progressives may find that they can cultivate constitutional power in places the Court cannot reach. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
This Arizona Primary Is the Real Bellwether for Democrats
In search of a way out of the political wilderness, many in the Democratic Party have been quick to look at the surprising victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York's mayoral primary and come up with lessons to learn. Be more authentic! Be more progressive! Be a millennial who actually knows how to use social media! Instead, Democrats would be better served by looking beyond deep-blue New York and toward more purplish places like Arizona — a strategically important and growing swing state dominated by the increasingly important voting bloc of Latinos. That's why it's worth watching the Democratic primary election to fill the seat of Representative Raul Grijalva, a popular progressive who died in March after serving 22 years in Congress.
Arab News
a day ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Democracies rediscover the importance of bread, housing and a decent life
The rise of Zohran Mamdani, who last week won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, the largest and most impressive city in the US, has jolted the American public out of their slumber, which had seemed endless since Donald Trump entered the White House. To avoid drawing hasty conclusions, we must acknowledge that this young Afro-Asian Muslim who openly identifies as a socialist has only won a single round. Just one round in the fierce battle that the moderate and progressive wings of Western democracies are waging with the rising far right in its conservative, fascist and racist iterations across Europe and its control over the world's two largest democracies: India and the US. On these pages, I have written about what a university professor of mine once told me: If the 20th century was the century of ideology, the 21st is the century of technology. His claim is that the incredible pace of technological progress in our era will, in practice, solve many of the economic and ideological struggles that once pushed humanity to develop theories and abstract solutions. Of course, we cannot fully endorse or entirely reject this claim just yet. We are only a quarter of the way through the 21st century and technological progress continues at a truly astonishing pace. Achievements and discoveries that once took centuries or generations are now emerging in months, not years. Even in Western democracies that have long found comfort in the stability of their institutions, everything is changing Eyad Abu Shakra The whole is no longer what it was, and it will never again be what it is today, given the pace of economic shifts, innovations, shifts in professions, evolving beliefs and interests, the tremors shaking the structures of societies and their interactions, and the limbo that politics and value systems have entered. Our societies, all of them, are intellectually teetering between extremism and counterextremism, and between isolationism and the collapse of barriers to invasions that had stood in their way regardless of pretext. In short, these are uncertain times. And the wisest among us are those who place no bets, believe no one's rhetoric and take no risks backing any political project. Even in Western democracies that have long found comfort in the stability of their institutions, unlike our own 'young' states in the so-called Third World, everything is changing before our eyes and the eyes of their citizens. The very notion of the nation state, although it seemed firmly entrenched and secure after the end of the Cold War, is now threatened by populist and racist politics. The Ukraine war has sparked immense fear across Europe, which has become terrified of a power that is still nostalgic for the era of czars and red banners. Meanwhile, the UK's exit from the EU was driven by the far-right isolationists who now threaten to dethrone the country's two major parties, the Conservatives and Labour, with the rising proto-fascist isolationists well placed to replace them. At the same time, a resurgence of the Labour left seems to be on the cards, as the credibility of the current Labour government declines. The state of affairs in Britain is part of a broader pattern across Western Europe: moderate forces on the right and left are in decline, while the extreme right and, to a lesser extent, the radical left are gaining ground. This is also obvious in France, where Marine Le Pen's far-right and Jean-Luc Melenchon's left-wing movements have gained ground. In Germany, it can be seen in the rising popularity of the Alternative for Germany party, while Italy's Giorgia Meloni is the leader of the Brothers of Italy party. In Portugal and Spain, the far right (Chega and Vox, respectively) are embracing the legacies of the fascist regimes, led by dictators Antonio Salazar and Francisco Franco, that imposed their rule for decades. With its strategy for reversing the challenge posed by the far right's upward trajectory, the traditional moderate left is losing its soul and ability to resist. Frankly, this outcome is not surprising at all. The most these anti-far-right forces can hope for is to build fragile, ad hoc alliances that have no credibility, principles or platform. Yes, all the moderate Western left has done is evade honest conversations, buy time with empty rhetoric and seek to contain the rise of the far right, whose fervor drives its pursuit of wiping out its opponents entirely. The result? The far right is now dictating the political agenda and determining priorities. In Britain, for instance, the far-right Reform UK party recently surpassed the ruling Labour Party in opinion polls. This is a telling message and a dire warning delivered to a party that has sacrificed its core principles in an attempt to appease powerful lobbies and temporarily broaden its appeal in the face of a populist force willing to ride any wave. Mamdani has shown his party that victory is impossible without clear principles, no matter how risky sticking to them may seem Eyad Abu Shakra In the US, the Democratic Party has made serious mistakes, dragging its feet far too long and trying to cash in on empty slogans. Democrats understood the nature of the battle they faced in 2016 against Trump and his populist 'Make America Great Again' base. However, they have committed two grave errors. First, they underestimated the far-right's capacity for stirring anti-immigrant sentiment among unskilled workers and the Rust Belt. Second, they ignored the material demands at the heart of this struggle. The US' most prominent left-wing politician, Sen. Bernie Sanders, did recognize this problem. He tried to appeal to disaffected working-class voters and bring them back into the Democratic fold to ensure they did not become easy prey for Trump and MAGA. The Democrats repeated the same mistake later. This time, it was more egregious. The unconditional support of Joe Biden's administration for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Gaza war cost the party's 2024 candidate, Kamala Harris, tens of thousands of votes from the left, as well as the votes of Muslims and Arab Americans in key swing states … votes that could have gone her way, at least in theory. Mamdani may or may not win November's mayoral race in New York — a city that remains the hub of Jewish American life. Nonetheless, he has shown his party that victory is impossible without clear principles, no matter how risky sticking to them may seem. Mamdani understands that the people of New York face urgent material crises that need solutions, not the empty slogans of opportunists and domestic and foreign lobbies that are amplified by Fox News and the like. Even in the century of technology and virtual worlds, people still need bread, jobs, medicine, employment and social security.
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At Glastonbury, Left-Wing Politics Are Shocking Again
The notion that conservatism is 'the new punk rock' has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorized safety and sensitivity, members of the new right reveled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech. This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don't like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth. Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump's orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolized 'overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said.' This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled 'Heil Hitler.' Increasingly, however, it's the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in Gaza and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain's Glastonbury music festival this weekend. The act's singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of 'Death, death to the I.D.F.,' the Israel Defense Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticized Bob Vylan for 'appalling hate speech,' and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members' visas. The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticized it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of 'Free, free Palestine' and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their U.S. visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He's said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn't know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap's appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offenses. Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. 'What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,' Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. 'The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul searching among British society,' wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It's hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
‘This is an exciting time to be a New Yorker'
Regarding the June 25 online news article 'Mamdani poised for major upset after Cuomo concedes NYC mayor primary. Here's what's next.': I'm proud of New York for delivering Zohran Mamdani a commanding first-round lead in the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday. It delivered a major win for progressives. With all of the infighting in the Democratic Party, New York just got a clear answer as to what the people want: change and progress.
