Conspicuous Signs of Life, Public Utilities Suffer From Climate, and the 'War Crimes' Question
Roundup: Newsom wins recall, 'War Crimes' in Tigray?, Justice Barrett says she's not political, AUKUS, Vaccine Mandates, Public utilities and climate change.
In this edition: (1) Gavin Newsom wins his contentious performance review from the voters. (2) AUKUS and the Asian-Pacific. (3) The U.S. threatened sanctions over Tigray. (4) The military now admits the drone strike in Afghanistan wasn’t a “righteous kill.” (5) Justice Amy Conney Barrett, nominated to change the partisan makeup of the Supreme Court, doesn't like her partisan bias being pointed out. (6) Biden’s vaccine mandates. (7) Public utilities bankruptcies will go up thanks to anthropogenic climate change.
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Conspicuous signs of life: California Governor Gavin Newsom still breathing after the votes have been counted. He’ll serve out his term and presumably run for re-election.
Not a repeat, after all: As I mentioned in a previous edition, all signs pointed toward “no” for the recall: it was not all that much like the successful recall of Governor Gray Davis that led to the election of California’s last Republican “Governator” Arnold Swartzenneger. Despite how Newsom framed the election results, California is an entrenched state for his party.
Crying wolf: Elder, for his part, handled it like a champ, preemptively crying election fraud on a website before the voting had even taken place. It’s a bad sign for the republic if all losing Republicans are going to make this gambit after Trump. In fact, it’s already become a talking point about the foulness of American elections among non-American writers.
Bye-bye single-family housing: In California, Newsom signed a bill eliminating single-family zoning restrictions in the state (and, therefore, allowing other kinds of housing where it was previously banned). See my article for Investopedia from a few weeks back for details on the significance of that for inequality.
Time to go negative?: There’s a larger, open question about whether Newsom’s win proves that negative partisanship works for the Democratic Party and should be embraced for the midterms. I have doubts.
Cliques and nukes: The new defense pact, AUKUS, moved France to withdraw from a deal with Australia to build 12 submarines. The Asia-Pacific security pact brought together Australia, the UK, and the U.S. to share nuclear, AI, and other tech in a bid to combat China’s growing influence. China responded that the U.S. has a “Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice.” France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian described the defense deal as a “stab in the back.” As we’ve discussed previously, there’s some reason to suspect that pulling out of Afghanistan was the Biden administration’s way of freeing up resources to commit to the Asian-Pacific.
War crimes and sanctions: The U.S. threatened individual sanctions over the human rights disaster in the Tigray, but they’ve failed to use the word “war crimes” yet. As I’ve written for a DC paper, the “conflict, which has continued to deteriorate the stability of the region, has grown since last November. White House officials have said that the parties to the conflict have resisted steps to broker peace negotiations and that they are actively stymieing humanitarian aid.”
Body Count: Speaking of indelicate questions of international law, US Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, has admitted that the drone strike that killed 10 civilians, seven of whom were children, was a “tragic mistake.” Before, the military had said it was a “righteous kill,” a position they maintained for weeks. McKenzie now says that not even they think the target, who was shown to be an aid worker, was affiliated with ISIS-K.
Partisan? Who, me? Amy Coney Barret doesn’t want the court to be called partisan, according to New York Times’ reporting. However, the data from Juris Lab, which conducts empirical reviews of the Court, says it clearly is, as we had discussed in an edition of this newsletter from May.
Barret herself has a strong partisan bent, some rude person might even point out that she was nominated for exactly that reason:
[Juris Lab] found that Justice Coney Barrett disagreed with votes by lower court Democrat-appointed judges more frequently than any other justice at 94.44%. Comparatively, she disagreed with Republican-appointed decisions 66.67%, similar to Justices Roberts and Gorsuch. In fact, Juris Lab reports, “Each of the six more conservative justices disagreed with lower court Democratic-appointed judges more frequently than with republican-appointed judges.”
This sort of consideration tends to get minimized or swept away, but it is significant.
She’s not political, just all her friends and most of her decisions are.
Vaccines: Biden’s vaccine mandate ruffled feathers. Governors from conservative states have brought suits. I will tip my bias here: I've been in favor of mandating vaccines publicly since before the coronavirus crisis when immunity for nearly conquered diseases was falling off for irrational, fallacious, and superstitious reasons. Vaccine mandates already exist and they aren’t a violation of any defensible version of bodily autonomy.
The costs of climate on public utilities: I wrote for Investopedia about some of the complications for utilities of worsening climate conditions. Limited liability and clashing regulatory mandates can complicate things like securing relief for victims of climate disasters such as California’s wildfires. “An increase in the number of bankruptcies for utility companies is a perhaps surprising consequence of climate change. [But some] experts suggest that the PG&E bankruptcy in 2019 was the first in a new trend as climate change intensifies natural disasters.”