Sabrina Haake

Supreme Court’s MAGA majority wants us to burn

Just as parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable and nearly half the United States is under an extreme heat advisory, extremists on the Supreme Court have decided they know more about climate change than scientists and meteorologists.

Granting the wishes of private industry, particularly the fossil-fuel industry, the Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo effectively gutted the administrative state, overturning what’s known as the Chevron doctrine, which had guided federal agencies and federal law for four decades.

Under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal government agency’s professional expertise in interpreting ambiguities in federal legislation. Those agency interpretations were developed over years and relied on the professional expertise of scientists, doctors and engineers. So long as agencies’ expert interpretation made sense, comported with Congress’ intentions and was reasonable, courts accepted it.

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Trump supporters and organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, while pushing Trump’s Project 2025, have obsessed over Chevron and sought to dismantle the “deep state” for years. Their lobbying efforts and massive dark money campaigns focused on judicial appointments of zealot judges committed to weakening the federal government, largely to promote Christian Nationalism and protect corporate profits threatened by federal regulations.

Extreme rulings from zealots on today’s Supreme Court could not be any more destructive or disruptive. So much for judicial restraint.

The dangerous gutting of Chevron

After Trump packed the Supreme Court with three like-minded justices, these and other extremist justices finally constituted a sufficient majority to deal a death blow to federal agency administration.

In the recent Loper decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote outrageously that federal agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” Loper overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine by ruling that judges should substitute their own opinions for scientific expertise in interpreting federal statutes.

The absurdity of letting self-impressed men such as Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch substitute their personal, lay opinions for those of trained scientists, engineers and experts is worse than partisan — it’s suicidal. Thomas recently shot down the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ expert opinion that gun bump stocks keep firing the trigger like a machine gun, while Gorsuch repeatedly confused an air pollutant with laughing gas when gutting EPA protections for the environment.

The prospect of Trump-appointed judges deciding for themselves how many tons of toxic emissions our forests, farms and lungs can handle is terrifying. Think of Aileen Cannon from the Southern District of Florida slow-walking Trump’s straightforward documents case, or Matthew Kacsmaryk from the Northern District of Texas imposing a nationwide mifepristone ban.

The Supreme Court has now given all right-wing fanatics in black robes the green light to deploy junk science, consult their navels or review the Old Testament to arrive at their preferred conclusion in climate and other science-dependent cases.

This is how right-wing plaintiffs succeed

Deep pocketed right-wing plaintiffs, such as the anti-abortion doctors who challenged mifepristone even though they don’t administer the drug and have nothing to do with it, often fund lawsuits to challenge policies they dislike, and they know how to forum shop.

As the American Civil Liberties Union notes in the case involving mifepristone, for example, plaintiffs filed the case in Amarillo, Texas, “where they could guarantee it would be heard by a Trump-appointed district court judge with a record of hostility to abortion. That district judge rubber-stamped all of their requests, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely did the same – overriding the consensus of the Food and Drug Administration and every leading national medical authority in order to impose medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone.”

As the climate heats up and people lose their homes and livelihood to extreme weather, Big Oil will accelerate its challenge to barely-there climate legislation and EPA regulations. Congress won’t be able to keep up even if it wants to, as it disassembles into sophomoric antics in a Trump-divided country.

When they legislate at all, Congress often passes ambiguous legislation, knowing that agencies will tap professional expertise to fill in the gaps to effectuate Congress’ meaning. But under Loper, when an already dysfunctional Congress fails to map out every law with scientific specificity, more extremist judges will be invited to rely on their own personal opinions, drawing from their own personal bias.

Conflicted justices should recuse from all climate cases

Climate advocates challenging fossil fuels are also becoming more aggressive as lives, livelihoods and habitats are threatened. Fossil fuel cases are already among the most expensive to litigate, because they threaten the richest defendants in the world.

More troubling, in terms of whether the human race will survive its biggest threat, is that zealots on the current Supreme Court have solid ties to the fossil fuel industry.

As Politico reported, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a “highly active and respected member of the American Petroleum Institute for more than two decades,” raising concerns about Barrett’s participation in climate cases. During her confirmation hearing, she testified, “I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge ... I’m not really in a position to offer any kind of informed opinion.”

Her decision in Loper says otherwise.

Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito’s family leases more than 100 acres of land for oil and gas development, yet he failed to recuse from the case that hobbled the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. It has also become known that Thomas, who has accepted over $4 million in “gifts” from conservative donors, has been in fossil fuel investor Harlan Crow’s pocket for years.

Aside from obvious personal conflicts presented for Coney Barrett, Alito and Thomas because of their ties to fossil fuel wealth, all six conservative justices belong to the Federalist Society, and have ties to the Heritage Foundation. Both organizations are backed by fossil fuel money — in particular, Koch money.

The Heritage Foundation is a network of conservatives financed by the Koch brothers largely to promote climate change denial, and in particular to lobby against the government’s climate change efforts. Thomas has listed the Heritage Foundation on his disclosure forms, and the Heritage Foundation vetted lists of judges and current conservative justices for Trump appointments.

Koch and its subsidiaries also support the Federalist Society, which is focused on shifting federal power to gerrymandered and Republican-controlled states. Koch is the second largest private corporation in the United States, with $115 billion in annual revenue, operating in oil and gas exploration, pipelines and refining, and chemical and fertilizer production. Greenpeace describes Koch as “the oil and gas industry's top lobbying spender, one of the top polluters, a massive funding source to climate-denial front-groups, and major force fighting against clean energy policies.”

Meanwhile, the heat is terrible, and getting worse

More than just uncomfortable for people (and helpless animals!), extreme temperatures are dangerous. In the face of Congressional inaction, the world’s oceans have surged to record levels of warmth, threatening marine life and the global food supply.

Rising temperatures are also causing more extreme and frequent weather events. Deadly hurricanes used to begin in October; last week, Hurricane Beryl was the earliest category five hurricane ever recorded as deadly hurricanes are predicted to double and intensify this year, compared to prior hurricane seasons.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in Nature that, “For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions… We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.”

Drill, baby, drill

It’s a safe bet that any politician who calls climate change a hoax is profiting from it.

Trump’s Project 2025 should be required reading for every American who cares about climate change.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and chief antagonist against the “deep state” destroyed in Loper, has acknowledged the potential for violence in pursuing Project 2025’s extremist, authoritarian objectives, including the protection of fossil fuels.

Just as the first Civil War was fought to protect slavery wealth, the MAGA confederacy is protecting fossil fuel wealth with the Supreme Court’s help, even though the base doesn’t understand the connection. Trump voters won’t realize they have done the bidding of the industry destroying their homes until it is too late.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Time to fight a lawless Supreme Court

Federalist judges claim to loathe judicial activism. To preserve the separation of powers, federalist judges restrict their rulings to the narrow set of facts and laws in front of them, and go not an inch further lest their rulings impinge on the executive or legislative function.

But to find criminal immunity for former President Donald Trump, the Supreme Court’s federalist majority bucked all traditional and originalist leanings, and announced instead that the court would be “writing a rule for the ages” — and dealt an astonishing blow to the U.S. Constitution.

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After overturning Roe v. Wade for the sin of imposing “on the entire country a detailed set of rules for pregnancy divided into trimesters, much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation,” the Court did the very thing it just ruled unconstitutional: it imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules for presidential immunity, divided into three stages, exactly “like those one might expect to find in a statute or regulation.”

After declaring that the right to obtain an abortion was not “rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition,” the Court set 248 years of the nation’s history and tradition on fire.

The Roberts Court wrote new law

With the stroke of a pen, federalists on the high court skipped the arduous but constitutionally required process to amend the Constitution. They skipped ratification by two-thirds of the House and Senate, skipped the Constitutional convention, skipped two-thirds of the nation’s State legislatures altogether, and simply rewrote Articles I, II, and III of the Constitution to create the following three stages of presidential immunity:

• Absolute criminal immunity, which applies whenever a former president acts within his “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority. Any action undertaken under color or shade of the Constitution or laws is a function of core constitutional power, and Trump is free to break all criminal laws — bribery, treason, assassination, hoarding classified documents, siccing the military on protestors, selling secrets, subjecting critics to military tribunals and executions — as long as he does so in pursuit of his core presidential duties, which are vast and comprehensive.

Negotiations with foreign governments in particular fall exclusively under the presidential domain of Article II, even if treasonous, and remain immune from criminal prosecution no matter the scope of national injury.

• Presumptive immunity, which applies to other official acts and shifts the burden to the government to show that criminal prosecution would not create a “danger of intrusion” on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch. When Trump tried to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to stop the electoral count and adopt fraudulent electors, for example, Chief Justice Roberts said he was “presumptively” immune, a presumption the government could fight to rebut.

• No immunity applies to “unofficial acts,” but lower courts are left to guess where the line between official and unofficial sits, and Roberts put his thumb on the scale- and rewrote the rules of evidence -- by barring evidence of related “immune” acts from becoming evidence in any criminal trial for unofficial acts.

Roberts wrote that it was not the Supreme Court’s job to sift through, weigh, and consider the evidence to figure out what presidential conduct was unofficial. “That analysis,” Roberts wrote, “ultimately is best left to the lower courts to perform in the first instance.” The court could have examined Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election through the contorted lens of its own ruling, but that would have saved time. The court’s goal was to send the case back to District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan for detailed factual and evidentiary hearings that appellate courts and the Supreme Court will review again — months, and possibly years, after the November election.

The Roberts Court amended the Constitution

The American colonists, who demanded independence from King George III, despised the king’s corruption, and that of his military officers. With Trump and his corrupt enablers, only the names have been changed: Rudy Giuliani (just disbarred), Steve Bannon (now in prison), Peter Navarro (also serving time), Roger Stone (sentenced to three years for lying to Congress, pardoned by Trump), Paul Manafort (sentenced to 7 1/2 years for fraud, illegal foreign lobbying, and witness tampering, Trump pardoned him and brought him back to Trump’s 2024 campaign).

In the Declaration of Independence, colonists declared that they would no longer be governed by a lawless king and his enablers. Instead, they declared they would create a new form of government where all men, at least in theory, were equal before the law.

Supreme Court. (Wolfgang Schaller / Shutterstock)

When they later wrote the Constitution in pursuit of that goal, the framers did not draft immunity for the president; they did just the opposite by providing for the removal of the president for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

They also granted limited immunity to legislators in Art. I, §6, the Speech or Debate Clause: “Senators and Representatives . . . shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest (while traveling to and from, and while attending, Congress) and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” Note that the founders immunized their speech — not their actions.

The founders expressly declined to extend similar immunities to presidents. This was no oversight. Rather, the Constitution in Article I expressly anticipates criminal prosecution: After a President is impeached, convicted, and removed from office, he “shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

Not so, says the Roberts court.

What’s next?

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and chief advocate of Project 2025, Trump’s plan to turn the United States into a rightwing dictatorship, declared that we are “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Since SCOTUS also just stripped the federal government of most of its power to fight climate change, we could very well see violence from the left this time.

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Short of that, between now and November, we need to beat a loud and incessant drum for court reform. The Constitution, if it still matters at all, requires two-thirds of the Senate to remove Supreme Court justices. Given the lopsided power of rural states, it’s almost impossible that Democrats will win a two-thirds majority of the U.S. Senate in November, so they need to focus on winning a majority in the House. If that happens, there are several reform options, not mutually exclusive:

Expand the court and limit their terms: The Constitution does not set the pay, or the length of service, or the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Congress does. That means Congress can increase the number of justices from nine to 13, because there are now 13 courts of appeal below the Supreme Court; they can also impose term limits. Write to your representatives, write letters to the editor, support Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in his fight to fix the Supreme Court, meet with your neighbors, join protests and demand court reform from November’s election.

Investigate and impeach Thomas and Alito: The Supreme Court perfected Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt despite repeated calls for Justices Thomas and Alito to recuse for their public displays of pro-insurrectionist bias. If Democrats win a majority of House seats, they can establish an investigative commission similar to the J6 Select Committee. With full subpoena and investigative powers, the committee can also examine Alito's and Thomas’ donor gifts, Leonard Leo dark money graft, and various ethical violations with particularity. (Side bet: Trump, immunity, the court, and gutting Chevron by substituting expert opinions with judges’ lay opinions are all about protecting fossil fuel money.)

Impose mandatory ethics: Congress can also address the Supreme Court’s refusal to follow the rules of ethics that apply to all other federal judges in the nation. It should not be left to crooked justices to police themselves. At a minimum, Congress can establish an independent counsel to monitor and police the court and empower them, when necessary, to impose recusal and discipline.

Remove jurists who lied during confirmation: Another avenue for reigning in a rogue court is impeachment on the grounds that justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch each swore that they’d respect precedent on Roe v. Wade during their confirmation hearings, but seemed to forget about their testimony once they were sworn in. Lying to Congress is a felony.

Trump seeks revenge, retribution, and even executions for his political adversaries, and Republicans on the Supreme Court just gave him the green light. They have led the country into mortal danger, with no enforcement powers of their own. Perhaps deciding that a president can order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate threats to the nation was the wrong call.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Trust Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump

I watched the Biden-Trump debate in horror, like millions of moderates.

Here was a slick conman with a national bullhorn — sans fact checking — next to a decent man who tells the truth but can’t get his words out.

Even Republicans know Trump’s performance last week was a firehose of lies, but after-the-fact fact-checking is just background noise, irrelevant to all but political junkies. (We know who we are.) Trump’s base also knows he is a serial liar, which they consider a feature, not a bug. Whattaya do with that?

The sad reality is that facts vs. lies and the grave geopolitical risks facing us have now been upstaged by Biden’s pauses, weak voice and halting delivery, all of which seemed to confirm supporters’ fears about Biden’s age — he’s 81 — and fitness for serving out a second term, when he’d be 86.

Why, oh why, didn’t Biden open with, “Folks, I have a cold, bear with me, my voice is rough, but we’ll get through it…”? Instead, his voice gravelly and barely audible, he bumbled, even though most facts were on his side. Biden, far more forceful at a North Carolina rally right after debate, freely admits he stumbled. “I don’t debate as well as I used to,” he said, but “I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong.”

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Biden’s style, rather than the substance delivered by either Biden or Trump, has nevertheless dominated headlines. Too many Democrats are now calling for Biden to leave the race, without considering that Vice President Kamala Harris often polls worse than Biden, and picking someone else to top the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket would alienate black, young and many female voters — and rightly so.

As I see it, if Biden demures, Harris must either forcefully decline her candidacy — forcefully enough that her supporters would believe she’s doing it of her own volition — or, if she is ready to run and inside data show her path to victory, Biden should resign the presidency now so that she has four months as an incumbent.

Here’s a better option: Biden quadruples down. He marches toward the presidency in a fashion even Trump — who himself faced Republican calls to step down after his “Access Hollywood” debacle in October 2016 — couldn’t match. He lives the line of a poem he once quoted to a friend: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

What Biden has done in office in nearly four year counts far, far more than a bad 90-minute “debate.” As Harris said in her post-debate interview, “I got the point that you're making about a one-and-a-half-hour debate tonight. I'm talking about three-and-a-half years of performance in work that has been historic ...”

And she’s right: If this is a contest on the merits, on substance, Biden wins hands down.

Pundits don’t really know what’s next

The whole debate cringe fest was a Fox News fantasy come to life. I cried for my country, popped an Ambien and went to bed.

I realize, at this point, pundits are just echoing each other. No one really knows what the fallout will be, or how the undecideds felt about the debate. I have some shred of hope that Americans are smart enough to cut through the slick lies vs. bumbling truth and consider what both men actually said.

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But honestly, MAGA exists because about 30 percent believe violence and retribution are sexier than competent policy. Every. Single. Time.

Also, low information voters get juiced by hate, which stimulates the brain like an opioid. Hate is the brain’s most powerful motivator — right up there with fear — which means hate-filled people tend to vote in higher numbers than complacent moderates.

This, very simply, is why the stupidest 20 percent of the United States has been able to impose minority rule, supported by the morbidly rich seeking to avoid regulations and taxes. It’s also why Trump keeps trashing our country and lying about crime — it’s an opioid pump for his base.

Darwin suggests we get real serious about real education, real fast.

The gaslighting got upstaged, but it was masterclass

During the debate, Trump’s gaslighting on foreign policy was astounding, even for Trump.

When Trump said Hamas attacked Israel and Putin attacked Ukraine because Biden is weak, I worried, because many voters won’t think this through. No one should need any spin; Putin himself has said his invasion goes back to the 17th century, Peter the Great and his personal power-lust for restoring the Soviet Empire.

Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during the CNN Presidential Debate at the CNN Studios on June 27, 2024 in Atlanta, Ga. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The complexities of the Israel-Hamas war are even deeper. They far exceed Trump’s cranial capacity, going back decades, marginally beginning with Hitler’s atrocities. Israel’s history exceeds most voters’ attention spans, including mine. Biden has walked a tightrope, empathizing with suffering on both Israeli and Palestinian sides. He has forcefully denounced and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cruelty, and he immediately denounced the naked brutality of Hamas. No one alive could do a better job navigating Israel’s scorching complexity.

Suffering Palestinians deserve all the aid, support and compassion they are getting – far more – student protesters on the left are right in that regard. But where they’re wrong is in failing to understand that if Biden cut off support to Israel, Trump would collect tens of millions of dollars in donations overnight and storm back into power, and few people would ever hear or care about Palestinian suffering again.

Those who worked with Trump are warning us

Trump’s mendacity was unprecedented in U.S. presidential history, even before the Supreme Court ruled he was above the law. The damage he has already caused will linger for decades. His offenses are too numerous to list, including nominating Supreme Court justices who helped end the federal right to abortion, adding $8 trillion to the deficit, lavishing billionaires with tax cuts, selling the climate to big oil … blah blah blah. It’s redundant already.

Biden is running for reelection not to stay out of prison or engage in retribution, but to save America from Trump and his army of sycophants addicted to power. They are dangerous.

During his awful debate performance, Biden managed to reference — albeit far too softly — that a national study conducted by the University of Houston and Coastal Carolina University rated Trump the worst president in the history of the United States. Ever. According to America’s apolitical historians.

Don’t trust your own instincts after the debate? Let that sink in.

Not enough? Consider that Trump’s closest military and domestic advisers have warned us how dangerous it would be to return him to power. While most Trump toadies are too afraid of Trump to disagree with him, these are statements made on the record by Trump advisers, as CNN reported:

1. His vice president, Mike Pence: “The American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution. … Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”

2. His second attorney general, Bill Barr: “Someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.”

3. His first secretary of defense, James Mattis: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us.”

4. His second secretary of defense, Mark Esper: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

5. His chairman of the joint chiefs, retired Gen. Mark Milley: “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America – and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

6. His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”

Dozens of other professionals who worked alongside Trump until they realized what he really was have issued similarly dire warnings.

Biden may not be as physically or mentally robust as he was 20 or 30 years ago- few are. But I will take this old man over a con man any day of the week, because Biden is a better man. Always has been, always will be. And he still has time to prove to America that he’s the right choice — and he is — in November.

I’ll close with Robert DeNiro’s words because I really can’t top them. Here’s what he just wrote in a post-debate email:

"Over the years, I’ve played my share of vicious, low-life characters. I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, and the utter banality of their cruelty. Donald Trump is a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics who will do whatever he can to obtain power. As an actor, I could never play him. There’s not a shred of humanity to hang on to. I strongly support Joe Biden. He’s a lifelong public servant with great personal integrity. I trust him completely to run the country. He puts you first. Trump cares only about himself."

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Federalism for Dummies: How to survive Supreme Court stupidity without losing your mind

I love the “For Dummies” book series. They can teach an old dog new tricks without making the old dog feel stupid, although, I admit, “Getting Out of Debt For Dummies”” wasn’t particularly useful. (Turns out one must spend less than one earns; if they had just written that on the cover I’d be $18.79 closer to my financial goals.)

But the series pretty much answers all of life’s questions, from how to stop killing houseplants to understanding the basics of astrophysics.

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So, naturally, when confronted with last week’s dizzying patchwork from the U.S. Supreme Court, I turned to “Critical Thinking for Dummies” desperate to understand how “federalism” means one thing when the court talks about corruption, but something else entirely when it talks about abortion or guns.

Despite nearly 30 years as an attorney prowling the chambers of federal courts, my brain hurts.

Federalism’s new definition of corruption

Last week, Republicans on the Supreme Court stripped the executive branch of key power.

They also decided that bribing an elected official isn’t bribery if you wait a few days and call it a gratuity instead. In Snyder, six conservative justices agreed that gifts, money or things of value from grateful citizens who simply wish to “thank” public officials for their service is a “gratuity,” not a “bribe,” so the federal bribery statute doesn’t apply. No doubt Clarence Thomas, who has been thanked to the tune of $4 million for his devotion to guns, fossil fuels and culture wars, appreciated his colleagues’ skillful parsing.

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Before conservatives got out their X-Acto knives, the federal anti-corruption statute, 18 U.S. Code § 666, made it “a crime for most state and local officials to corruptly solicit, accept, or agree to accept anything of value intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with” any business or transaction worth $5,000 or more. James Snyder, former mayor of Portage, Indiana, stepped in it when he steered more than $1 million in city contracts to a local truck dealership, which then turned around and cut Snyder a $13,000 check.

Snyder called the money payment for consulting services; the feds called it illegal.

Snyder was convicted by a federal jury, sentenced to 21 months in prison, and appealed.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices Brett Kavanaugh (L) and Amy Coney Barrett (R) talk before President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on February 07, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In reversing the decision, and writing for the 6-3 Republican majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted that federal law prohibits bribery, but determined that bribing an official up front wasn’t the same as tipping them for highly agreeable service after the fact. Treating mere “gratuities” like bribery, he wrote, would infringe on “bedrock federalism principles” and thereby offend states’ “prerogative to regulate” graft for themselves. Kavanaugh reasoned that if the feds apply section 666 alongside state enforcement, some hapless elected official could get “trapped” by a law that leaves him “entirely at sea,” guessing which expensive gifts he is allowed to accept.

“‘Just Say No’ for Dummies,” anyone?

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s snarky and spot-on dissent called Kavanaugh’s “absurd and atextual reading of the statute” an interpretation that “only today’s Court could love.” Ignoring the advice she read in “Blind Deference for Dummies,” Jackson wrote forcefully that, “The Court’s reasoning elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain text” of the federal anti-corruption statute.

Federalism means something else when it comes to guns

The court’s newfound respect for state law on corruption — finding there was no corruption — is hard to square with its earlier decisions annihilating state law.

Take guns, for example. In 2022, the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision struck down New York’s conceal carry law. Citing federalism four times, the court struck New York’s law because the state couldn’t identify a concealed carry law that existed in 1790. Never mind that colonial era muskets, pistols and bayonets were too large to be concealed in anyone’s haversacks; colonial law didn’t bar people from strapping loaded cannons onto their backs, either.

But then, last week’s Rahimi case — about domestic violence and guns — forced conservative justices to see Bruen’s “historical antecedent” absurdity up close.

In Rahimi, Texas’ blood-red Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit followed Bruen and ruled that violent offenders under restraining orders could have guns because there was no law from 1790 that said they couldn’t.

Citing the Federalist papers nine times, Rahimi revealed the stink of Bruen’s “trapped in amber” jurisprudence, and left the Supreme Court with a choice: stick to Clarence Thomas’ wholly made up “historical antecedent” requirement by arming known violent offenders — and shed the Court’s last hair of credibility — or follow common sense and admit they were wrong. They didn’t quite admit error (see,“Reluctant Mea Culpa for Dummies”), but they did decide that violent men who brutalized their victims ought not have a gun to finish the job.

Using federalism to defeat equal protection

This rant closes, as it must, with Dobbs, another bombshell decision spurred by Donald Trump and animated by Republicans on the high court.

Whatever you think about abortion, bracket that opinion long enough to consider this: Would federalism allow states to mandate vasectomies for all men under 50, given that states now have the power to make life and death decisions without regard to pesky strictures of equal protection?

If state legislatures truly wanted to end abortion, wouldn’t mandatory vasectomies make more sense than state-forced birth? Vasectomies are effectively risk-free, while the maternal mortality rate is 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births. Vasectomies cost around $1,000; giving birth averages $19,000, to say nothing of more than $300,000 to raise a child. Ninety percent of vasectomies are reversible, while live birth causes permanent physical/chemical changes. Most importantly, for legal review, vasectomies, unlike forced birth laws, are nearly 100 percent effective.

Justice Samuel Alito (Photo via Erin Schaff / for AFP)

If the vasectomy question ever found its way to Justice Samuel Alito, you can bet he would tap the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection for men, even as he callously denied it for women.

States can now, by popular vote, force women into nine months of medical confinement, financial instability and excruciating childbirth pain — too frequently leading to death — but this Supreme Court would invoke federalism (or its twin corollary “originalism”) to strike state-forced vasectomies as “mere pretext” for “invidious discrimination” against men.

Up next: “How to Impeach Justices Who Lie to Congress During Their Confirmation Hearings for Dummies.”

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Clarence Thomas has a bump-stock death wish for Americans

In 2017, a man with bump stock-enhanced rifles perched himself at a Las Vegas hotel window, trained his crosshairs on thousands of concert-goers below and murdered 60 people. He permanently maimed hundreds more, concluding his carnage within a matter of minutes.

After the slaughter, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule classifying bump stocks as “machine guns” under 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b), and banned their sale.

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Last week, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the radicalized 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, overturned the ban, claiming that, “a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun,” given that “it cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.”

Thomas substituted the specialized expertise of the federal agency with his own personal opinion, deciding that a bump stock leaves the trigger finger in place after the shooter fires, but then the gun’s recoil continues to hammer the trigger so it’s not technically “a single function of the trigger,” even though the rapid-fire deadly results are the same.

Thomas sentences Americans to mass slaughter

Thomas’ callous disregard for life — playing word games to legalize bump stocks that function like machine guns — is hard to stomach. As the ATF argued, legalizing bump stocks simply because the trigger moves back and forth “exalts artifice above reality” to evade one of the few still-standing gun regulations under the 1934 National Firearms Act.

Thomas needs to tell the families who have lost loved ones to mass shootings — so many are children — how an automatic recoil hammering the trigger makes any difference to the permanent, gaping hole left in their lives.

AR-15 AR-15 with bump stock recovered by NYPD (Photo: NYPD)

Thomas is presumably safe from his own death warrant, because, unlike most Americans, he travels in the rarefied safety of a billionaire’s private jet.

When he’s not on Harlan Crow’s aircraft, Thomas and his insurrectionist wife, Virginia, travel in a tricked out RV — complete with a bulletproof Detroit diesel engine financed by another wealthy patron.

NRA-backed Republicans bastardize the 2nd Amendment

The 2nd Amendment does not say what the NRA, Thomas, and right wing radicals on the Supreme Court claim it does. The 2nd Amendment states, in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This Amendment was ratified in 1791 following a Constitutional Convention four years earlier, over which then-General George Washington presided as Convention president.

Washington had just lived and fought through the British occupation, and the colonies’ need to form a defensive militia was fresh in his mind. The right to bear arms was a grave matter of collective defense.

But nowhere does the 2nd Amendment state that citizens have the right to bear arms against each other or their neighbors.

Many Constitutional scholars, including the former Chief Justice Warren Burger, interpret the right to bear arms as written, i.e., as part and parcel of a well regulated militia — no more, no less. However, putative originalists on the Court, who otherwise claim to honor the original language of the Constitution, have all but deleted the “well regulated militia” language right out of existence.

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In 2008, in Heller, conservatives on the Supreme Court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” Conservatives on the Court decided that the militia language in the 2nd Amendment may have announced a purpose for the 2nd Amendment, but that the right of individual gun ownership was not limited to that purpose.

In 2022, expanding Heller further, Justice Thomas wrote the shameful Bruen decision to overturn New York’s concealed carry law. In Thomas’ view, an individual’s interest in carrying a concealed gun outweighs the government’s interest in reducing gun deaths.

Thomas held that New York state’s concealed carry law, requiring a person to “demonstrate a special need for self-protection” in order to carry a gun into public arenas, public transit, churches and concerts, prevented “law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public.”

Shady pro-gun results driven by shady pro-gun ‘research’

Turns out that multiple, federal pro-gun decisions have relied on “independent” gun research collected and presented by a single researcher, William English, who is anything but independent.

The New York Times recently reported that Dr. English, an economist at Georgetown University, has peddled NRA-backed research while refusing to disclose who funds his work. English’s research ostensibly backs conservatives’ claim that most gun owners don’t use their guns offensively; rather, most gun owners use them in self-defense.

Reviewing his survey instruments, however, other researchers say English’s surveys employ deliberately ambiguous wording, written to elicit answers that overstate the degree to which guns are used in self-defense. Equally problematic, his research results lack formal peer review.

There’s nothing independent about English’s questionable “research” — the New York Times reports that it has been mostly driven by litigation “backed with millions of dollars in dark money flowing through nonprofits that often exist only on paper.”

Clarence Thomas’ gun fetish: comical if it weren’t so dangerous

Justice Thomas paved the way for last week’s bump stock endorsement with his ridiculous 2022 Bruen opinion.

In Bruen, Thomas swept away all modern gun restrictions that cannot be tied to an “historical antecedent,” meaning, if a similar gun law like concealed carry didn’t exist hundreds of years ago, we can’t have it now. Never mind that in 1790 it was physically impossible to shove a bayonet, infantry rifle or musket down one’s pants and still walk.

Striking modern gun restrictions because they didn’t exist 250 years ago is as logical as outlawing electric cars because the founders didn’t drive them. Like the Dobbs decision overturning constitutional protection for abortion, Bruen and the bump stock ruling represent dangerous sleights of hand by conservatives to support their desired legal outcome. Dobbs left women dying in parking lots, just as the bump stock ruling will lead to more deaths caused by a most lethal kind of firearm — one capable of killing and wounding hundreds of people in a matter of minutes.

Although the court just upheld a gun restriction to protect victims of domestic violence — with Thomas dissenting — NRA-backed justices have been lying about the 2nd Amendment, putting all of us at risk, since at least 2008.

May bump stocks be the decision that puts SCOTUS in the crosshairs of American voters, upsetting them enough — to vote! — and make court reform an election priority this November.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Samuel Alito’s arrogance is of Biblical proportions

I was raised Catholic. When I was nine years old, waiting in enormous St. Benedict’s slow line for Communion, I studied the violent imagery adorning every window, crevice and corner of the church.

Romans were fond of crucifying people, and Jesus was no exception. The walls of the church depicted violence everywhere: the stations of the cross, nailed body parts, Pontius Pilate’s whips, stab wounds, bloody crowns of thorns. To top it off, a 20-foot-tall crucifixion with the same lifelike details loomed over the altar. It hit me that these images weren’t meant to comfort. They were meant to manipulate through fear, guilt and control.

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My dad had already taught our family the causal link between mortal fear and control, my mom had left him for that reason, and I didn’t need a repeat of the same lesson. It also didn’t sit right with me that we were surviving on peanut butter sandwiches, yet the tax-free church still wanted 10 percent of my mom’s barely-there wages, and what was up with priests having all the power while nuns did all the work?

I decided in that communion line that organized religion was mostly about power, control and money, and not in that order. Although Jesus’ woke messages of peace and love were transcendent and ethereally beautiful — Consider the lilies. Do unto others. Do not judge. Turn the other cheek … — men ruling the Catholic church ditched the beauty and embraced the power hundreds of years ago.

Using the High Court to promote religion

As a lapsed Catholic and long-in-the-tooth federal trial lawyer, I am more familiar with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s religious nuttery than I want to be. I certainly didn’t need any more proof that his jurisprudence — as well as his misogyny — has deep Catholic roots, but last week, filmmaker Lauren Windsor brought the receipts anyway.

A couple weeks ago, at the annual dinner for the Supreme Court Historical Society, Windsor secretly taped Alito agreeing with a stated goal of fighting to return “our country to a place of godliness.” I’m not a fan of secret wiretaps, but every public figure with a lifetime federal appointment should assume that what they say to strangers in public places could become public.

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When Windsor asked Alito about the nation’s current polarization, Alito replied that “one side or the other is going to win … you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.” So much for being a neutral arbiter, or an umpire calling balls and strikes where they fall.

Alito’s religious bias shows

Rolling Stone first reported the exchange, and observed that Alito, a George W. Bush appointee who’s served on the Supreme Court since 2006, makes little effort to hide that he is a partisan member of a hard-right judicial faction.

Alito’s statement that “fundamental things really can’t be compromised” suggests he sees cases as zero-sum affairs. Instead of serving as an arbiter trying to craft a just result based on established precedent, Alito picks sides, then drives his selective analysis toward his desired result.

Vox conducted an assessment of Alito’s “standing” decisions — cases that examine whether federal courts have jurisdiction to decide a particular dispute — and found that Alito has ruled in favor of conservative litigants 100 percentof the time. Standing means plaintiffs must have a personal stake in the dispute; they can’t just be interested bystanders. Finding standing among 100 percent of conservative plaintiffs — and zero percent among liberal plaintiffs — exposes irrefutable bias.

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Alito seems particularly inclined to find standing when religious beliefs are offended, as crystallized in 303 Creative LLC, a case involving a homophobic web designer.

In 303 Creative, Alito and the conservative majority allowed business owners to refuse to do businesses with gay couples on the grounds that gay marriage offends their religious beliefs. The plaintiff, a web designer, didn’t have standing to sue — no gay clients sought her services, she claimed she was afraid that Colorado’s non-discrimination law meant she might have to design a wedding website for gay couples.

Alito and the conservative majority found standing anyway, and they issued what amounts to an advisory opinion, simply to set anti-LGBT policy for the nation.

So much for Federalists not legislating from the bench.

Alito’s Catholicism-driven misogyny comes through inCasey, Hobby Lobby and Dobbs

When Alito served on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, his dissent in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey would have required women to notify their husbands prior to getting an abortion. Equating a husband’s control with parental control, Alito showed complete indifference to women brutalized by domestic violence who would have risked their lives by notifying their abuser of their plans to abort.

Then, in 2014, in Hobby Lobby, in a 5-4 split, Alito wrote that an employer had the right to exclude contraceptive coverage from employee insurance plans based on the employer’s religious beliefs.

Contraceptives are routinely included in most health care plans under the Affordable Care Act. To circumvent the ACA, Alito focused on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allows religious objectors to be exempt from federal law unless compliance is “necessary to a compelling government interest.”

In Alito’s final analysis, allowing women to avoid unwanted pregnancies so they can earn a living was less “compelling” than employers’ religious beliefs that God meant women as birthing vessels first, employees second.

In his infamous Dobbs opinion, Alito revived a 13th century treatise on English law and custom, written when women were burned alive as witches.

Alito’s sleight of hand used selective misrepresentations of ancient common law history to overturn 50 years of constitutional protection for reproductive choice. He determined that legal abortion did not exist as common law, despite his own passages detailing how “abortion was a crime after ‘quickening’ (around 25 weeks) throughout common law. Pages 16 through 28 of Alito’s own opinion describe how abortion was legal up to 25 weeks, for centuries, so when Alito said there was no abortion throughout centuries of common law, he was lying to reach his preferred outcome.

Alito’s hubris and refusal to recuse should lead to his impeachment

During oral argument on former President Donald Trump’s election interference case, Alito offered a crazy argument that presidents need broad immunity from criminal consequences, because an incumbent president who “loses a very close, hotly contested election” would not “leave office peacefully” if they could be prosecuted by the incoming administration.

Alito addressed a hypothetical future president’s fear, instead of addressing what actually happened when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.

That Alito allowed an insurrectionist flag to be flown at his home and allowed a Christian Nationalist flag to be flown at his vacation home, should have triggered his recusal from all cases dealing with Trump’s insurrection.

But it didn’t.

Federal law on federal judges’ recusal requires any justice to recuse “in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” i.e., you can’t fly your freak flag and pretend not to be a freak.

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Alito’s strident ideological bias, entitled hubris and decades of misogynistic rulings have brought the nation’s opinion of the High Court to an unprecedented low. In his quest to rewrite history to fuse church and state, Alito disregards centuries of violence and wars carried out in the name of religion. He has bastardized the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment — a venerated shield protecting religious freedom — into a sword for imposing his religious worldview onto others.

The weapon of federal law should be turned on him. Democrats and moderates need to make Court reform a top campaign issue, use Alito’s (and Clarence Thomas’) outrageously unethical conduct to win a sufficient majority in both chambers, and impeach them as the first order of business.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Republicans weaponizing ignorance is a dangerous game

Donald Trump’s felony convictions are fueling another disinformation campaign, this one equal in destructive force to his Big Lie. Orchestrating a unified response reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Trump acolytes are weaving Trump’s criminality into a false indictment of the American legal system.

Republicans are falsely blaming Joe Biden for outcomes over which a sitting U.S. president has no control: convictions of Trump on 34 felony counts, pursued by an independently elected DA, pursuant to a state criminal code, as determined by 12 independent jurors, selected with the help of Trump’s own trial team.

The GOP’s target? Low-information voters.

Their weapon? Blatant disinformation.

Their allies? Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine.

Their illiberal objective tracks the geopolitical strategies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and strongman dictators adversarial to democratic systems in general: Weakening institutions through chaos that exhausts voters, allowing oligarch-backed extremists to seize power, peacefully or otherwise, amid the mayhem.

Feigned outrage to entertain the masses

The performative outrage in this week’s program includes eight Republican senators vowing retaliation for Trump’s convictions by opposing any legislation authored by Democrats; they also promise to withhold Senate confirmations.

Meanwhile, Johnson revealed his “three-pronged approach” to retaliation, including withholding congressional appropriations for the Department of Justice. Declaring that Republicans would “do everything we can” to exact revenge for Trump, Johnson and his Republican colleagues are currently pursuing legislation that would allow Trump to pardon himself of state crimes if he retakes the presidency.

U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (C) listens as former President Donald Trump (foreground) talks with reporters as he arrives for his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to an extramarital affair with Stormy Daniels, at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 14, 2024, in New York City. (Justin Lane - Pool/Getty Images)

Johnson has also suggested the "Trump-ed up" Supreme Court would “step in” to overturn Trump’s state convictions, the irony of simultaneously claiming that Biden controls the judiciary apparently over his head.

Advocating illegal acts is itself illegal.

Trump strategists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — the latter headed to prison soon himself — are openly urging Republican officeholders to use their offices to attack Democrats. They clearly need reminding — almost as much as they need fast, effective counsel — that using public resources for partisan purposes violates federal law.

Demanding that Republican district attorneys open investigations into Democrats, they urge attorneys general in Republican-controlled states to target Democrats for unspecified crimes.

Jeff Clark, the former Trump Justice Department official indicted in the Georgia election case, has broadened the call, urging “brave” district attorneys in conservative areas to file lawsuits in federal court against anyone involved in criminal cases against Trump.

Openly advocating illegal acts, and doing so in writing no less, suggests these fools have themselves for clients.

Republicans’ gaslighting campaign is reckless

Trump, for his part, is priming Fox News viewers for violence in the event he is sentenced to serve time in prison, saying, "I'm not sure the public would stand for (my potential prison sentence) ... You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point."

The right’s gaslighting-of-the-uninformed campaign is working, as evidenced by online demands for bloody revenge. In trying to dox the jurors in Trump’s Manhattan hush money case, one of Trump’s supporters posted, “Hang everyone. 1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That's the only solution.”

Supporters of former President Donald Trump gather at the entrance of a Trump campaign rally in Crotona Park on May 23, 2024, in the Bronx borough in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

A Proud Boys writer chimed in, “Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun.”

Without considering what comes next when the rule of law is hobbled — paramilitary hillbillies rounding up foreigners come to mind, as do drug cartels dropping roadside bombs from drones — Republicans are defending Trump by viciously attacking the judge, jurors, prosecutor, evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, the attorney general, the Department of Justice and mainstream media; they have also threatened to end the career of any GOP candidate who dares to voice respect for the American legal system.

So much for “law and order.”

Like a man blaming his wife as he kicks her down the stairs, Trump tells anyone who will listen — which apparently includes most media outlets — that Democrats have “forced” him to “take revenge” against government adversaries. Salivating over the possibility that he will finally get to imprison his political foes, brandishing his prison shiv, Trump told Newsmax, “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them…”

One is almost tempted to have compassion for Melania.

From whence does the GOP’s amnesia come?

Republican outrage is overplayed, as if everyone has forgotten about Trump’s well-documented criminality, played out over decades.

In 1998, the Treasury Department imposed the then-largest fine of $477,000 on Trump Taj Mahal casino for money laundering; Trump admitted that he pocketed millions of dollars raised from charity; he was ordered to pay $2 million for diverting donations from a televised fundraiser for veterans; in 2023, a civil jury adjudicated him a rapist; he was previously found to have engaged in business fraud to the tune of $354 million dollars.

When his niece Mary Trump sued him for allegedly defrauding her out of tens of millions of dollars — she said Trump extorted her by threatening to withhold medical coverage from a severely disabled nephew — she declared “Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.”

Despite his consistent criminality and organized crime connections, Trump’s felony convictions hit differently, triggering the GOP’s kamikaze declaration of war as three more criminal trials and 54 combined felony counts loom.

Democrats must punch back harder

Republicans are using disinformation as a weapon against uninformed voters to keep them aligned with Trump. Their ploy seems to be working, as Trump informally reported a $52.8 million haul in online donations in the first 24 hours after the verdict was announced.

Instead of confessing to the obvious that Trump’s criminality is driving his legal woes — not Biden, not the “Deep State,” not rigged justice — MAGA Republicans would prefer to round up Trump’s adversaries as political prisoners.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump greets supporters during a Turning Point PAC town hall at Dream City Church on June 6, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. Trump delivered remarks and took questions from the audience during the "chase the vote" town hall. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

After Trump’s deadly mob wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence to block Trump’s 2020 loss, they are lusting for another fight; historically, coups are regularly attempted more than once.

It is clear that the United States is under siege by illiberal forces, aided by a relentless propaganda machine committed to fomenting violence. My money is on the justice system — and on voters being smart enough to detect the ruse.

The politically moderate sports announcer Colin Cowherd recently summed it up: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you… Trump’s campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons… It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Here's to slapping back.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Republican dodo birds have a death wish for us all

In the 1850s, British naturalist Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. In his book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin presented years of data, notations he’d made while observing plants and animals in their natural habitats.

Over decades of painstaking observation, Darwin discovered that organisms with traits that favor survival tend to leave more offspring, causing survivalist traits to increase in frequency over time among successful species. In a word, Darwin concluded, successful survival of all living organisms requires them to adapt.

Species that fail to adapt? They go extinct, some more rapidly than others.

We are approaching unsurvivable temperatures

Last year was the hottest of the past 170 years, which is when meteorologists first began tracking global temperatures. According to NASA, the 10 warmest years since Darwin’s 1850s have all occurred during the last decade, with the same predicted for 2024.

Dead monkeys are falling out of trees in Mexico. Other primates are dying, along with toucans, parrots, insects, bats and one million other species. Animals are dying from heat and dehydration at such alarming rates that even Fox News has reported on it — though they have not yet found a way to blame President Joe Biden or the border.

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Last week, avoiding the words “climate change,” Fox News quoted thedirector of an eco-conservation park in Mexico saying they’d “never seen a situation like what’s happening right now.” The conservation park resuscitates and rehydrates dying animals for re-release into the wild, but if heat like this continues, the director predicted, “there is not going to be much we can do for the animals.”

As animals go, so go we

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that a “wet-bulb” temperature of 95° F — a measure that considers both heat and humidity — is the absolute limit of human survival. The human body temperature is around 98° F, allowing for a constant balance between heat loss and heat gain. But there’s a temperature/humidity point at which the human body can’t lose heat fast enough. At that point, everything in the body, from enzymes to organs, including kidneys, lungs, heart and brain, begins to shut down.

According to MIT, a sunny area with 50 percent humidity and no wind will hit an unlivable wet-bulb temperature of 95°F when the thermometer reaches only 109 °F.

A billboard shows the current temperature over 100 degrees on June 5, 2024, in Phoenix, Ariz According to the National Weather Service, Phoenix will experience record temperatures over 100 degrees as a pattern of high pressure builds over the region. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Last year, temperatures in many U.S. cities, especially in Texas, Florida and Arizona, repeatedly exceeded 109 °F, to say nothing of newly uninhabitable regions in Mexico, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Many U.S. cities will again surpass 109 °F this year, causing heat-related deaths and illness. Between 2004 and 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, heat-related deaths in the U.S. increased by a whopping 439 percent.

Oil-funded Republicans refuse to adapt

No serious debate remains about what is causing the climate to change. Scientists have known, for decades, that this point was coming. We have the technology to reduce carbon emissions and re-develop an energy grid with sufficient capacity; engineers and scientists calculated years ago that there’s more than enough wind, solar and hydro power to meet the needs of all people — and manufacturers — on earth.

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The intelligent adaptation to dead animals falling from the sky would be a transition to renewable energy as quickly as practicable, blending a graduated mix of alternative fuels with decreasing reliance on petrofuels.

But instead of modeling Darwin’s survival of the fittest and adapting new energy strategies, Republican governors of southern states — states experiencing climate change at accelerated rates — are modeling what happens when species refuse to adapt.

Emboldened by former President Donald Trump, these strutting dodo birds are attacking climate science while at the same time seeking extraordinary federal funding for climate mitigation. (President Biden: awarding climate mitigation funds to governors who lie about climate science is self-defeating.)

Darwinism on display

In Florida this spring, cities such as Miami were hit with extreme heat even before the arrival of summer.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, addicted to culture wars and language bans, just signed a law that removes the words “climate change” from state publications, forbids the construction of offshore windmills and halts the state’s clean energy goals.

To DeSantis, people concerned about climate change are “radical green zealots.” Meanwhile, his state’s beloved manatees are disappearing, storm-battered Floridians can’t afford property insurance and buildings are collapsing in coastal cities.

In Texas, another of the most threatened U.S. states when it comes to sea level rise, hurricanes and extreme heat, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott refers to Biden’s climate efforts as “an attack” on Texas jobs, and he vowed to “fight” the “climate agenda.”

Even though Texas has ranked first in the number of billion-dollar disasters per year since 2001, Abbott has vowed to “exclude renewables from any revived economic incentive program,” and he supported bills to lower support for wind and solar projects while forcing renewable energy to subsidize fossil fuel expansion.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott looks on during a weather briefing on January 31, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Livestock farming, a major methane contributor, creates deplorable lives for the animals while simultaneously warming the planet. There are humane solutions that could alleviate both problems. What are Republican governors doing? They are banning or trying to ban cruelty-free meat produced in a lab — dictating to everyone else what they can and cannot eat, and effectively mandating animal cruelty and methane emissions at the same time.

The list of GOP maladaptions goes on. Republican leaders are attacking science overall, while on a parallel crusade to delegitimize truth, the rule of law and democratic institutions. They’re turning American ignorance into a malignant tumor hellbent on killing its host.

DeSantis and Abbott deserve Darwin Awards

DeSantis and Abbott, along with Republican attorneys general in 19 states who just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block climate action, are entertaining know-nothing voters, attacking climate science frontstage and collecting donations from Koch Industries’ backstage. It’s all performative ignorance, like watching Cro-Magnon men show up at a ballet, dragging women by the hair.

The unfortunate twist is that, as long as we share the same planet, the Cro-Magnon is dragging all of us by our hair.

Darwin Awards commemorate idiots who protect our gene pool by dying in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.

We need a parallel award when the most ignorant members of a species doom the rest of it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Michael Cohen, Red Finch and the fateful moment Trump lost the jury

I have an unusually high win record with jury trials, partly because I’m chubby and matronly, traits jurors seem to find trustworthy. When smart things come out of my pudgy mouth, it’s a novelty to them, like a stuffed animal come to life, and what juror doesn’t want a warm cuddly friend offering life advice?

About 15 years ago, I tried an injury case before a jury in Chicago. This was before Ozempic; I was even fatter. The plaintiff, my client, was walking her dog on a jogging path when she was hit smack in the eye by a golf ball. The ball had sliced 90 degrees right off the first tee from the adjacent public golf course.

It wasn’t my client’s fault, it wasn’t the golfer’s fault. It was management’s fault, because golf course employees saw so many first tees repeatedly slice right toward the jogging path, they took bets on which ones would hit people. From a damages perspective, it would have cost less for management to erect a net barrier than my client paid in medical bills for her eye, and I suited up in the morning seeing dollar signs.

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The trial was going well, I knew jurors were sympathetic. Plaintiff’s injury was permanent: the muscle controlling her iris (pupillary sphincter, you’re welcome) could no longer constrict in response to sunlight or other light, affecting her depth perception. She was credible — she neither overstated nor understated how it felt to rely on a cane to step off a curb — until defense counsel asked her about wearing a self-adjusting contact lens. (It seems there are contact lenses that automatically adjust to differing light. Technology, go figure.)

My client said yes, yes she could wear one of those lenses. But then she hesitated. She reconsidered. She got snarky. She appended her “yes” with, “I could, but why should I have to, I’m not the one who caused this, am I?”

I wanted to kick her. She had had the jury in her palm, then she flicked them away, haughtily. She should have conceded that yes, there were adjustments she’d be willing to make. Yes, she would learn to live with this inconvenience, but she’d do it. She’d adjust. Accidents happen, she was lucky she still had her eye, too bad there wasn’t a net to protect pedestrians.

ALSO READ: Justice delayed is not always justice denied

Instead, she showed defiance. And aggression. If jurors don’t like defiance, they like aggression even less.

With that tone, the jurors shifted. I felt their collective demeanor realign. That snark — that tiny entitled bit of victimhood — caused jurors to look mostly down when I re-directed her. They shifted their eye contact from me to the defense counsel, who slyly sneered my way in recognition of my misfortune.

I could have transmogrified into a talking teddy bear in that moment and it wouldn’t have mattered. Most trial lawyers have experienced this dreaded transition among jurors at some point in their careers: That moment when they know their client has either offended the jury or lost their sympathies, and there’s really no effective way to rehabilitate them.

Red Finch jury shift

For me, during the Trump trial — which I considered more an election fraud case than anything — that shift moment came when Michael Cohen was asked about his dealings with Red Finch, a tech firm.

Defense counsel asked Cohen about stealing from Trump payments intended for Red Finch. The goal: to show jurors that Cohen could not be trusted.

Cohen had admittedly lied in Trump’s service, repeatedly, so that made him a liar, and how could jurors trust a liar to tell the truth? Now Cohen was also admitting to stealing — he paid Red Finch only $20,000 of Trump’s $50,000 payment and pocketed the $30,000. That made him a thief as well as a liar, and wasn’t he really just out to extort President Trump all along?

“You stole it from the Trump Organization?” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked about the $30,000, to which Cohen replied, essentially, “yes.”

On redirect, winding up for the pitch — prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked Cohen: What, exactly, was the purpose of Red Finch, anyway?

Cohen then explained that Red Finch was an online tech company Trump hired to artificially boost Trump’s ranking in an online opinion poll.

Michael Cohen is seen on May 20, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Andrea Renault/Star Max/GC Images via Getty Images)

The opinion poll wasn’t even marginally important — it was a poll soliciting public opinion about “history’s most notable business leaders.” Trump owed Red Finch the $50,000 fee for fraudulently skewing the results of the poll in his favor. When Cohen told jurors about the arrangement, the curtain was pulled back to reveal a green haze of sleaze.

Trump paying Red Finch $50,000 to lie for him, to present pathetically fraudulent proof that people liked Trump more than they really did, was a business decision no amount of cross examination could wash off.

When the truth about Red Finch came out, there was nothing defense lawyers could do to fix it. Here was Trump, a man so steeped in fraud, so accustomed to lying to the public, that he was paying a tech firm to skew the results of a largely irrelevant opinion poll on his behalf. Having opened the door, defense counsel couldn’t move to strike it from the record, and even if they had, the green sleaze oozing out from under Trump couldn’t be unseen.

I remembered jurors’ faces when my golf ball client said she shouldn’t have to wear a corrective lens. No doubt Trump’s team began to see the same faces.

It was an examination gamble that backfired. Cohen shouldn’t have kept the $30,000, but jurors forgot about Cohen’s deceit when Trump’s deceit upstaged it.

Worse for Todd Blanche, Trump paying Red Finch to fraudulently manipulate public opinion tracked perfectly with Trump paying Cohen, Daniels and the National Enquirer to fraudulently influence the 2016 election.

Whether Trump meant to lie to the Federal Election Commission or not (yes, he meant to), I don’t think there’s any fact, evidence or argument that could have dislodged this proof from jurors’ minds.

In the end, the jury gave Trump 34 reasons to regret his choices.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas need a spanking

Chief Justice John Roberts, this is your moment of consequence. History will either laud you for preserving America’s 221-year arc toward justice, or it will align you and your Court with tyranny.

You may need reminding that the Supreme Court has no army. You have no police; you lack all mechanisms of enforcement. Your authority depends on America’s trust in the rule of law, which you are allowing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to mock.

Having spent nearly 30 years as a federal trial lawyer, under an oath to promote, uphold and defend the Constitution, I feel mocked, as do many of my colleagues. Unlike the partisan zealots on your bench, we took our oaths to heart. Many of us wish we hadn’t.

Alito, Thomas subvert the Constitution

Alito and Thomas, batting for theocracy, have consistently bastardized the Establishment Clause into a tool for inflicting their own religion onto others — exactly the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson counseled.

Men who gave their lives to separate church and state are rolling in their graves at Alito’s Christian Nationalist flag, and Thomas’ voyeuristic obsession with what goes on in other people’s bedrooms.

A vitriolic and aggrieved duo, their dissent in Obergefell painted equality in sepia tones of their own bitter resentment: In their telling, marriage equality would “vilify” Americans who are “unwilling to assent” to the “new orthodoxy” of gays living in dignity.

ALSO READ: Inside Donald Trump’s billion-dollar Big Oil heist

Then, feigning originalism in Dobbs, they (and you) vitiated Equal Protection, elevating the legal rights of zygotes over those of living, breathing women, citing 12th century mores when men like Alito burned women like me at the stake. Alito wrote the splotchy, results-driven screed, while Thomas used it to suggest “reconsidering” gay marriage and contraceptives, the pull of other peoples’ bedrooms apparently still intact.

This villainous duo appears restless, itching to do more to subvert the rule of law in former President Donald Trump’s name. They are doing this on the heels of accepting lavish gifts from litigants before the Court, and their own dishonest explanations for why they failed to report them. Their revolting lack of ethics, their partisan partiality and your spineless failure to rein them in, Chief Justice Roberts, suggest that under your watch, the rule of law has become illusory.

Lawlessness in service to the oligarchy

Alito and Thomas monetize their religious fervor with the deep pockets of oligarchs champing at the bit to see Trump eliminate corporate taxes and pesky regulations. Groomed by Big Oil, the NRA and corporate donors, Alito and Thomas believe their benefactors will profit when the rule of law is gone and resources are up for grabs.

While they are correct that oligarchs profit when the rule of law is defeated — it’s why tycoons tend to oppose central governments globally — it seems a refresher in how authoritarianism unfolds is also in order.

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If you allow Alito and Thomas to facilitate a Fourth Reich, as they both appear wont to do, you and the entire judiciary will be rendered powerless in a matter of months, Chief Justice Roberts:. Enablers only think they’ll be able to control their dictators once in power, as the financiers surrounding every criminal despot throughout history have mistakenly believed.

You will rubber stamp what Trump and his corporate backers want, but inevitably, their desires will diverge from your own. At that point you will have no recourse, because there will be no laws except for paper platitudes that serve the dictator’s interests. Ponder what role for the judiciary will remain thereafter.

If not impeachment, recusal

Impartiality is the sine qua non for any jurist, therefore, the privilege of a lifetime appointment requires strict avoidance of even the slightest appearance of partisanship. Flying treasonous flag(s) at your own home(s), and presiding over cases implicating your own wife's treasonous conduct, subvert the very premise.

The Court took only three weeks to support Trump in the Colorado ballot case, determining that “States have no power under the Constitution” to kick insurrectionists off their ballot, — otherwise, “state-by-state chaos” would result. This from the same smug lot that created state-by-state medical chaos under Dobbs that left women bleeding in parking lots.

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Despite your alacrity in the Colorado case, it is taking you months — months — to parse whether a president can assassinate his rivals with immunity from prosecution. Neither of your compromised blackguards, sir, recused themselves from these insurrection cases or the case considering whether the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol amounted to obstruction. No matter how you contort justice to serve Trump before this term ends, your decision(s) will not be respected because of the flagrant partiality of Alito and Thomas.

Last year, you assured the American Law Institute that you were “committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct,” and you said that we lawyers should trust the Court to develop its own Canon of Ethics. But self-policing has proved an epic fail: the Ethics Code you adopted is a toothless joke that said nothing about Alito and Thomas’ malfeasance. They remain unaccountable to anyone but themselves and their benefactors.

Subjecting the highest court to the lowest standards

Federal law on judges’ recusal is clear and unequivocal: “Any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

Existing guidelines for Supreme Court staff prohibit all employees from engaging in partisan political activity or any “political activity if the activity could reflect adversely” on the impartiality of the Court.

Remind me: Why, exactly, are justices on the highest court subject to lower standards than their staff members?

Is it, perhaps, because Alito and Thomas’ treasonous conduct, demonstrated corruption, ax-to-grind rulings and contempt for long-established precedent scream partiality from a bullhorn?

Alito’s kingmaker claim in The Wall Street Journal that, “No provision in the Constitution gives (Congress) the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period,” was embarrassing and absurd.

Congress funds you. Congress has also been regulating the Court, dictating its salaries, dictating its size and legislating statutory jurisdiction from the beginning. It is clear Congress must now assert itself and rein in your venal rogues since you apparently will not. It must rebalance the Court without the current nakedly partisan tilt that has stymied our republic’s ability to function.

After voters speak in November — the ones still allowed to vote, that is — a Democrat-dominated Congress will set term limits, enlarge the court, impose ethics with teeth and investigate these rogues, for starters.

I — and at least half of the federal trial bar — look forward to their official spanking and remind you: Alito and Thomas are not the only ones who can angrily dispense with precedent.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Inside Donald Trump’s billion-dollar Big Oil heist

As soon as fossil-fuel financed Donald Trump was sworn into office, he got busy destroying the nation’s climate progress.

In June 2017, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, shamefully walking away from a global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — the only signatory country to do so.

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Among Trump’s other early steps to halt climate progress: Scott Pruitt, his Environmental Protection Agency director, scrubbed climate science information off the agency’s website. Pruitt, who resigned under an unethical cloud of scandal the following year, “cleansed” (read: removed) federal data about fossil fuels and carbon emissions from web pages that had been educating the public since the late 1990s.

Going into the 2024 election, Trump is warring with climate science again. Even as global temperatures hover at a precarious tipping point endangering habitability, Trump has solicited a billion-dollar contribution from fossil fuel execs in exchange for letting the planet burn baby burn.

Trump’s lowly $1 billion price tag

At a shockingly under-reported event in April, the presumptive Republican nominee invited fossil fuel representatives to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago where he served up a foul tasting entrée of quid pro quo.

More than 20 oil executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum and other fossil fuel concerns attended.

Over a steak dinner, Trump offered attendees $110 billion in tax breaks and said he’d reverse Biden’s environmental protections. Trump also pledged to scrap President Joe Biden’s policies on electric vehicles and wind energy and other initiatives opposed by the fossil fuel industry, including legal barriers to drilling and the Biden administration’s rules designed to cut car pollution.

The catch: the oil barons must agree to donate a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign.

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Trump said it was a good “deal.” Ponying up $1 billion to get Trump re-elected would be advantageous for Big Oil, he promised, because the value of the tax and regulation cuts he’d give them in return would far exceed that amount, including new offshore drilling and speedier permits.

Forbes reported that during an Arizona campaign rally in 2020, Trump similarly suggested that he could offer ExxonMobil permits in exchange for a $25 million campaign contribution. Appalling and galling though it was, last month’s Mar-a-Lago Big Oil fete wasn’t the first time Trump’s open corruption jeopardized a livable planet.

Dr. Evil would have been proud.

Trump advances Big Oil’s disinformation campaign

Climate disinformation from the fossil fuel lobby is legion, and it has gone on for decades.

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers has undertaken an extremely well-financed campaign against Biden’s EPA tailpipe rules, misleading consumers and voters by calling the rules a “ban” on “gas cars.” The lobby has purchased ads in battleground states to lie to voters about Biden’s efforts to increase the manufacture of EVs, claiming that increasing EV production and adopting the charging station infrastructure to support them will restrict consumer choice.

Their disinformation efforts are obscene because their profits are obscene.

Last year, ExxonMobil and Chevron reported their biggest annual profits in a decade. Three of the largest oil and gas producers reported combined profits of $85.6 billion in 2023. ExxonMobil reported $36 billion, while Chevron reported $21.4 billion. Shell’s reported profits were down from 2022 but still reflected the second-largest profits in a decade.

Then-President Donald Trump speaks to 5,000 contractors at the Shell Chemicals Petrochemical Complex on Aug. 13, 2019, in Monaca, Pa. President Donald Trump delivered a speech on the economy, and focused on manufacturing and energy sector jobs. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, the oil industry also received hundreds of billions of dollars in new financial incentives to expand carbon-reducing technologies. Given that larger fossil fuel companies have already diversified into renewables, one would think they would lead the discussion on what an appropriate energy mix looks like, instead of falsely lambasting Democrats’ transition efforts.

The rub, it’s clear, is timing and greed. They want the U.S. to rely primarily on fossil fuels for several more decades, but by then, scientists warn, the transition will be too late.

Democrats investigate

Politico reported last week that oil executives are licking their chops, eagerly drafting industry-friendly executive orders Trump would sign as soon as he returns to office.

Democrats say not so fast.

After the Washington Post reported that Trump had offered to dismantle Biden’s environmental rules in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions, Democrats on the House oversight committee sent letters to nine oil executives asking about the Mar-a-Lago meeting.

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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote in the committee’s letter that, “Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that “Trump’s offer of a blatant quid pro quo to oil executives is practically an invitation to ask questions about Big Oil’s political corruption and manipulation.”

The Houston Chronicle says Democrats are pearl clutching. While it is true that Democrats promise donors they will try to protect abortion access, there’s a vast moral and legal chasm between vowing to protect a fundamental human right — healthcare — and vowing to destroy a fundamental human right — breathable air.

A tale of two countries

Whether or not voters understand it, the climate contrast between Biden and Trump couldn’t be more dramatic.

Biden refers to global warming as an “existential threat” and has engaged in over 300 actions aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution, restrict toxic chemicals and preserve public lands and waters. Biden’s administration has taken more action to combat climate change than any other administration in U.S. history. The Inflation Reduction Act led to record investment in solar, wind and increased EV sales.

Although these policies will take years to deliver climate results, by one early assessment, they have already resulted in a 3 percent cut in energy emissions.

President Joe Biden points to a wind turbine size comparison chart during a meeting about the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership in the Roosevelt Room of the White House June 23, 2022, in Washington, D,C. The White House is partnering with 11 East coast governors to launch a new Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership to boost the offshore wind industry. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Trump, amplifying Big Oil’s decades-long disinformation campaign in exchange for money, has called climate change a “hoax.” At his New Jersey rally last week, Trump vowed to stop offshore wind “on day one.”

He has claimed without evidence that wind energy causes cancer, and that he knows “windmills very much,” because he has “studied it better than anybody I know.” Demonstrating the principles of Darwinism, Trump eliminated more than 125 environmental rules and policies during his time in office and is now promising more destruction.

In November, we will elect the president we deserve. Whether Trump or Biden is elected, both men are elderly. That means they will be gone long before the worst environmental disasters arrive.

The choice is before us. One of these candidates promises his grandchildren will eat from a golden plate. The other promises there will be something on the plate.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

My Mother’s Day gift to my mom: honesty

My mom died from COVID-19 four years ago, just after Mother’s Day. I couldn’t write about it until I could be honest about who she was, a feat complicated by my then-pending congressional race, which I lost in spectacular fashion. Apparently, climate change isn’t at the top of voters’ concerns. Yet.

The worst part of my mom’s death was that she — like most COVID patients — died alone in a sterile hospital room with no family allowed to visit. Every time I tried to write this Mothers’ Day column, my simmering anger at how Trump mismanaged and lied to the country about the novel coronavirus percolated into a full boil that scalded my best intentions.

Instead of honoring my mother’s truth without deflection or self-pity, I kept churning out bitter screeds about how elections have consequences, and our democracy wouldn’t be on the brink if only — if only — everyone who cares actually bothered to vote.

My mother was extraordinary in many ways, including her oft-repeated 1960s disdain for a woman’s “fate” to be stuck in the house, raising children, while men got to “see the world.” The man whose ticket out of Southern Indiana she co-opted — my father’s — would buy her passage to the West Coast, where he served in the U.S. Navy in Oahu, Hawaii. It was also where he brutalized her, us, and anything that moved, repeatedly, with impunity, and without regard to audience.

Because of my father’s predilection for extreme violence, I became my mother’s caretaker from a very early age. After the final episode, complete with burst capillaries from her near-total asphyxiation, we went into foster care.

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When my mom eventually got out of the hospital and rehab — what can be done, anyway, to “rehab” someone who was oxygen-deprived long enough for tiny red capillaries to burst all over their face? — we moved back to Southern Indiana.

My mother was so afraid my father would return from the Vietnam War and finish the job, she never sought child support, which meant years of dire poverty on top of whatever brain damage she sustained from the burst capillaries episode. Even in her compromised state, my mother knew that when a man promises to finish you off, he will keep his promise if given half the chance.

So we moved to Huntingburg, Indiana, to live with my mom’s equally poor sister, Aunt Maggie. My mom and her sister Margaret were apparent small-town lookers whose beauty and ambition attracted the same kind of husband — one who needs to capture, then own and cage, a beautiful thing. Aunt Maggie was making her way as a newly single mother as well, and for the same reason.

Shortly after we all moved in together, Aunt Maggie’s escape — and her life — ended abruptly. Her rough life and violent ending would upstage even that of my mother.

Maggie’s death was a continuation of an unending rotation, a locked cycle of poverty and trauma. It was the same story played out across the country in the nightly news, only the names have been changed. In case anyone is unschooled in the ways of poverty, poverty causes trauma causes poverty causes trauma. After some years stuck on this decidedly American treadmill with one tragedy following the next, my mom eventually remarried a wonderful man, my stepfather Bob Hyde, who would stop to help a struggling beetle.

While we were fortunate to have a kind benefactor in our lives, neither of my siblings overcame their early origins. You hear that formative childhood years — one through five — pretty much set the tone, and I guess that’s true enough in our case. I'm pretty sure the only reason I became "successful" (whatever that means, here I mean financially) while my siblings floundered, was because my mom tapped me to take care of her, which meant early financial responsibility and an unusual work ethic. I started earning money at 11 and never stopped. I financially supported my mom and sister all my adult life. My brother Curtis, meanwhile, started his own poverty-trauma treadmill, probably because it was what he knew, and today he runs on it still.

My mother's situation left her entirely dependent on me, and over the years, her dependence developed into raging neediness over all things, large and small. I’ll never know whether my mother’s mental health challenges were organic, or caused by extreme domestic violence. On the campaign trail, when I spoke about growing up with the effects of untreated substance abuse and domestic violence, I was talking about my father. When I spoke about growing up with untreated mental illness, I was talking about my mother. For sure, all three things in our household were interrelated, as they are in most every tragic, sad headline running in the evening news.

The only Mothers Day gift I can offer up now is full honesty and ownership of a story all too common in America. It’s a reality of extreme domestic violence, substance abuse and untreated mental illness. It’s the American struggle of single moms so afraid of their abusers they live in poverty instead of seeking child support. It’s an American story that plays across racial lines, geography and culture, one that state-forced births will only exacerbate, trapping more vulnerable women with their murderous abusers.

My tribute to my mother is a siren of agency and honesty, so kids and mothers in the same situation know they are not alone. Stigma, and societal judgment, only make tragedies worse, which is why we should spare no time for them. Instead, we should salute the women and children who survive.

I miss my mother. She was a stone around my neck, but she was my heavy necklace.

It took me a minute to write this because the real tragedy wasn’t in how the country failed her at her death. The real tragedy is how our laws and our system failed to protect her — and hundreds of thousands of women like her — in life.

So I guess my screed survives, after all. Stripped of angst, anger, regret and sorrow, it boils down to one simple word: vote.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Donald Trump is making America stupid

Recent polls suggest half the country may vote against their own self-interests in November.

The self sabotage is head-turning: Christians who defend Donald Trump’s debauchery, poor people who give their money to a billionaire with rotating Ponzi schemes, pensioners who don’t understand that tax cuts for the 1 percent threaten their own entitlements.

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As the new Time Magazine interview made clear, Trump has done nothing for the common man and everything for his wealthy donors. Yet somehow, in the MAGAverse, that fact doesn’t seem to compute.

To misquote Jesus, the stupid will always be among us.

But stupid seems to be spreading in the U.S., and data suggest that excessive sensory stimulation may be the cause.

Our politics reflect a cognitive decline

When Trump celebrated his 2016 election win, his declaration, “I love the poorly educated” made headlines. Nearly eight years on, it’s not that half the country supports violent coup attempts, it’s that half the country sincerely believes the 2020 election was stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The United States seems to be slumbering toward Idiocracy, a funny-not-funny satire about Americans in the year 2500. Instead of possessing superior intellect, they have lost the ability to think. In the movie, Americans elect as president a dimwitted pro-wrestler — President Camacho — because he is loud and manipulative and they don’t know any better. The Trump sequel writes itself.

Supporters of Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump listen while he speaks during a Get Out The Vote rally at Coastal Carolina University on Feb. 10, 2024 in Conway, S.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Amusing as that movie was, America’s declining cognition is serious. Americans’ logic, language and reading comprehension levels have fallen measurably. Last year, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Oregon reported that, while Americans’ IQs increased dramatically over the past century, their cognitive abilities showed measurable decline between 2006 and 2018. Scores in three of four broad domains of intelligence fell during that period: logic, vocabulary and visual/mathematical problem-solving.

Excessive use of personal electronics, social media

In 1850, unwashed kids aged 6 to 18 were crammed into smelly one-room schoolhouses with no electricity or technology — and often no books. Yet despite their primitive educational settings, most still emerged well-versed in Latin, French, humanities and trigonometry.

Today, with whiteboards, laptops, separate rooms for each grade and teacher/student ratios at historical lows, student comprehension levels are falling instead of rising. Last year, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for 13 year-olds hit their lowest scores in decades, which isn’t explained by the COVID-19 gap of recent years.

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The explanation may be found in a growing reliance on smartphones, social media and electronic devices that offer addictive and excessive visual and audio stimulation, dulling the brain’s ability to think critically and organically.

Observational studies in human learning have shown a direct link between a child’s exposure to fast-paced television in the first three years of life and his subsequent attentional deficits as he gets older. Excessive sensory stimulation (ESS) during childhood has been shown to increase cognitive and behavioral deficits overall. Even rising levels of ADHD among older children and college students are correlated with subjects’ early exposure to excessive electronic media.

Educators are taking cellphones out of the classroom

Educators are paying attention. This year, dozens of schools across the country have taken steps to remove cellphones from the classroom.

Although three-quarters of U.S. schools already disallow cellphone use in the classroom, it’s up to individual teachers to enforce, which results in high variability among schools and classrooms. Unruly and disruptive students who need instruction the most may be getting it the least as exhausted teachers pacify them with their cellphones to keep them quiet and in their seats so others may learn.

Congress is catching on, too. Bipartisan concern is growing over how cellphones and social media may be harming children. With about a third of U.S. teens reporting that they are on social media “almost constantly,” the U.S. surgeon general recently issued a warning about social media and mental health. It is clear that more studies on the relationship between ESS and both mental and cognitive health are needed.

In this photo illustration a woman holds a smartphone displaying on its screen the Donald Trump's page on the US online social media and social networking site 'X' (formerly known as Twitter) on Feb. 25, 2024. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Oddly enough, Congress may actually do something about it. In November, lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill to study how cellphones affect mental health and cognitive development. The Focus on Learning Act, presently in committee, would require the U.S. Department of Education to complete a study on the effects of cellphone use in K-12 classrooms, both on students’ mental health and their academic performance.

Over-stimulation, overall, reduces our ability to think

It seems logical that over-stimulating the human brain with loud colors and noises would, over time, reduce our capacity for nuanced and critical thinking. Just as over-reliance on crutches can cause leg muscles to atrophy, over-exposure to electronics and addictive but thoughtless social media can atrophy the learning centers of the brain.

Smartphones aren’t the only culprit. Recent studies have also shown that high levels of noise, including exposure to high-decibel music at home or in the car, and loud, omnipresent television, also leads to cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in the brain.

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It’s been reported that 100 million people are exposed to dangerous environmental noise due to traffic, personal listening devices and other sources. Noise pollution has emerged as a risk factor for depression, cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative disorders of the central nervous system leading to cognitive and memory defects.

It seems the entire nation could use a long walk in the woods, or an extended visit to one of our 429 national park sites — sans devices.

Education levels are affecting U.S. politics

America’s growing political divide may have more to do with education and cognition levels than policy differences. By wide margins, the mostly highly educated congressional districts in the United States elect Democrats, while the least educated districts elect Republicans.

According to data compiled by Politico, Democrats control 77% of the most highly educated congressional districts, while Republicans control 64% of the least educated districts. The rural poor love Trump, even though Democrats deliver kitchen table results that benefit them most: jobs, infrastructure, broadband, healthcare, and industry regulations so trains don’t derail and parts don’t fly off aircraft at 16,000 feet.

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Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, was known for his attacks on the monarchy and his advocacy of democratic reforms. He famously wrote, “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

Even though Trump’s closest advisers widely regard him as an idiot, he has a preternatural skill: manipulating ignorance.

Call it a conman’s intuition.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack,The Haake, is free.

How Fox News is lying about Trump’s trial

David Pecker, long-time publisher of the National Enquirer and Donald Trump’s bosom buddy, spent hours on the witness stand in Manhattan last week.

With the relaxed demeanor of a jovial grandfather, Pecker described how he, candidate Trump and Michael Cohen met in 2015 to plot how they’d influence the outcome of the 2016 election. During that meeting, they conspired to hide news that could harm Trump and embellish fake stories that disparaged Trump’s rivals.

All was done, Pecker testified, with the express and stated intention of promoting Trump’s candidacy for U.S. president.

Pecker’s testimony revealed a conspiracy

Pecker’s testimony made clear that mainstream media’s insistence on calling the case a “hush money” trial is sloppy. The case is about Trump’s conspiracy to violate federal election laws. Paying hush money to a porn star is legal. Falsifying business records to hide illegal campaign contributions is not.

Trump, Pecker and Cohen paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to “kill” news that could hurt Trump’s campaign, without reporting those payments to the Federal Election Commission as the campaign contributions they were.

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As part of the same conspiracy, Trump and Pecker also manufactured fake stories to damage Trump’s political rivals. Who can forget Trump’s claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was involved with the assassination of JFK? During an interview, Trump told Fox News, “(Cruz’s) father was with Lee Harvey Oswald” just before Oswald was shot.

It was a complete fabrication hatched by Pecker and Trump, and it made headlines — as intended.

Federal rules on this question aren’t complicated: Under federal campaign finance law, “anything of value given, loaned or advanced to influence a federal election” is considered a campaign contribution.

Money. Office equipment. The purchased silence of an adult film actress.

Stormy Daniels is seen outside "The View" on March 21, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images via Getty Images)

All such political contributions to federal candidates’ campaign committees are subject to the Federal Election Campaign Act’s source prohibitions; they are also legally subject to the Act’s amount limitations. Expenditures to purchase media coverage are reported campaign expenses. Expenditures to suppress media coverage are the same.

In an effort to track illegal contributions, influence and foreign interference, every campaign contribution is tightly monitored, and subject to the Act’s recordkeeping and reporting requirements. Individual contributions to politicians’ campaign committees are limited to several thousand dollars per person. Nowhere under federal election law can an individual or a candidate advance hundreds of thousands of dollars to directly aid a candidate’s campaign without reporting it.

Killing the Stormy Daniels story fit Trump’s pattern

The crux of Trump’s current case — the first of four separate felony trials he’s slated to face — is Trump’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to kill her story about their tryst in 2006, just after his wife gave birth to their son, Barron.

Trump similarly conspired to kill a story from Karen McDougal, a Playboy model Trump referred to as “our girl.” Pecker’s arrangement with McDougal went beyond a simple payment to bury her story about Trump. It also guaranteed McDougal the opportunity to publish her fitness columns with the National Enquirer’s parent company, and it included a guarantee of two magazine covers.

The National Enquirer is photographed at a convenience store on Feb. 8, 2019, in New York City. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

Pecker testified under oath that the agreement with McDougal was camouflage, intentionally disguised as a “contract for services” in an effort to circumvent federal campaign finance laws. Pecker said he feared at the time that what they were doing violated federal law. He said he told Cohen as much at the time, but Cohen was unfazed because, “Jeff Sessions is the attorney general and Donald Trump has him in his pocket.”

Fox News models Trump’s fake news in the National Enquirer

Anyone hoping Pecker’s explosive evidence will dampen the enthusiasm of Trump’s ~~cult~~ supporters will be sorely disappointed, because, thanks to Fox News, they will never know about it.

The big reveal here isn’t the criminality of a defeated ex-president. It isn’t that Trump had sex with a porn star. And it isn’t that Trump and Cohen, his “fixer” — what kind of presidential candidate has a “fixer,” anyway? — paid to kill stories in order to influence the election.

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The big story is that, in a trial exposing how Trump used fake news to get elected in 2016, Fox News continues to peddle the same kind of genuinely fake news to its viewers that got it in such massive trouble after Trump’s defeat in 2020.

Despite paying nearly $800 million for admittedly lying to viewers about the 2020 election, Fox is up to the same tricks in 2024. Fox continues to falsely portray Trump’s trial, while embellishing stories like the “border invasion” to harm Trump’s political rivals.

During voir dire earlier this month, Jesse Watters, a Fox News commentator, announced on Fox: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury,” painting Trump as a victim of the “deep state.” There was, and remains, no evidence of liberal activists trying to get on the jury, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Biden has anything to do with the Manhattan district attorney’s charging decisions. Said district attorney is independently elected within New York City

Jesse Watters (R) of Fox News shares a moment with then-Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway (C) after a "Celebration of America" event on the south lawn of the White House on June 5, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Fox also claims that the court requiring Trump to attend his trial, as any criminal defendant is required to do, is “cruel and unusual punishment.” On the morning of the first day of Pecker’s testimony, instead of discussing what Pecker said, the network platformed Trump’s rants against the entire trial, as he fumed outside the courtroom, full throttle, for nearly three full minutes.

On the night of Pecker’s shocking testimony, which made headlines across nearly all mainstream outlets, Foxnews.com didn’t cover it in any meaningful way. The only trial-related news Fox ran called the trial an “historic mistake,” based on an editorial that was written prior to Pecker’s testimony.

With the headline, “Law professor roasts Manhattan DA's case against Trump in NY Times guest essay,” Fox buried all pertinent facts about Pecker’s testimony, substituting real news with fake news and spin just as Pecker, Cohen and Trump did in 2016.

Fox News should be held accountable

As the 2016 election and January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol proved, fake news is powerful. The resulting damage to our country, the election process, public discourse and democratic norms is incalculable.

This week, former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the U.S. House’s J6 select committee, described Fox News’ “line-up of flame-throwing commentators” who, every night, shout “alarms about the so-called communists and socialists — read: liberals — who supposedly threatened America’s very existence.”

Noting how Rush Limbaugh, then Tucker Carlson, and now Jesse Watters have all “served the same function — twisting facts and making their followers’ blood boil” in service to the party of Trump, Kinzinger concluded that, “these [GOP adjacent] media figures have done more to divide America than another single factor ...”

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It is also widely suspected that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of” the GOP base, because Fox News constantly repeats Putin talking points in service to Trump.

Writing for the Washington Post, Robert Kagan wryly observed that, “A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see (other than Trump’s) well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power…?”

Kagan is not wrong, but he assumes the MAGA base has seen evidence of Trump’s well-documented criminality. They have not. Fox News-watching MAGA voters haven’t seen, heard or read about Trump’s crimes, because Fox News consistently lies about them, just as it is continuing to lie about Trump’s separate election interference case.

Fox has convinced roughly 40 percent of Americans that a dangerous demagogue is qualified to have the nuclear codes once again. Just as Hitler’s supporters eventually learned that his power was based on manufactured propaganda, Trump’s supporters will, gradually and eventually, learn the same. As long as their belief system remains unchallenged by their main source of information, Fox News, they can delay their own moment of reckoning.

Perhaps their reckoning will begin when Fox next appears in court to face the staggering damages they have caused through their destructive brand of fake news.

A massive, adverse court ruling kind of accountability that hurts — and one that can’t be hushed up — would be an excellent start.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.

The arc of justice finally bends against Big Oil

In an historic ruling that could change the trajectory of a rapidly heating planet, a court of law with binding jurisdiction over most of Europe has ruled that governments can be held liable for inadequate responses to climate change.

The European Court of Human Rights determined that rising temperatures in Switzerland caused direct and tangible health consequences among Swiss citizens, and that governments failing to take adequate steps to mitigate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions could owe damages to people hurt by their inaction.

So what, in practical terms, does this mean for a planet that is literally burning in an increasing number of locations?

Europe could take climate cases in a new direction

The ECHR ruling is unprecedented in several respects, beginning with its reliance on principles of human rights.

The Court ruled that governments failing to do enough to address climate change were violating the European Convention on Human Rights, which holds as its first tenet that, “Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.” By failing to meet its own climate goals, the court held, the Swiss government impaired citizens’ fundamental rights to life.

The plaintiffs themselves were also unique. In climate cases pending around the world, including in the United States, the vast majority of plaintiffs are young people worried about how they will survive on a sweltering planet with rapidly disappearing habitats and resources.

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The ECHR case, in contrast, was brought by elderly plaintiffs, most of whom were women in their 70s who proved that their age and gender make them particularly vulnerable to health risks linked to climate change. Heatwaves, in particular, can be deadly for the elderly as excessive heat triggers a strained cardiovascular response. Cognizant of their own time limitations, these women sued to benefit the next generation. One plaintiff told the BBC, “We know statistically that in 10 years we will be gone. So whatever we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children's children.”

Because there is no avenue for appeal, the ECHR ruling will directly influence energy policy throughout the industrialized economies of Europe. Although it falls to Switzerland to comply with the ruling, its precedent is legally binding on all 46 member states, including Germany, the U.K., France and Italy — all fuel-burning heavy hitters.

Climate challenges in the U.S.

The European Court ruled that Switzerland’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions had been “woefully inadequate.” Although the ruling isn’t binding on U.S. courts, the domestic fossil fuel industry will be directly affected by it, since the U.S. has recently become the biggest supplier of crude oil to the European Union.

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Climate litigants in the U.S. follow a different strategy. State and local governments are now suing fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute for damages caused by climate change — astronomical damages that inevitably fall to states, cities and towns that can’t afford to pay for them.

These climate cases name private fossil fuel companies as defendants, seeking to hold responsible various for-profit companies, including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell, for increasing carbon dioxide and methane emissions caused by their products.

Big Oil’s campaign of deception

Legal claims and allegations pending in the U.S. focus largely on Big Oil’s deceptive practices. Like the tobacco disinformation cases from the 1990s, these cases allege fraud, nuisance, conspiracy and negligence arising from the industry’s long-standing public disinformation campaigns.

Congress has conducted numerous investigations into Big Oil’s pattern of deception. Despite conclusive evidence that oil executives have long known the causal connection between fossil fuels and climate change, industry executives have consistently lied about it to protect their profits.

Nearly 10 years ago, Democratic members of Congress addressed a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluding that “there was a coordinated campaign of deception” on climate science by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, Peabody Energy and other members of the fossil fuel industry.

Tanker drivers working for Shell in Grangemouth, Scotland. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Big Oil’s targeted acts of deception over a decades-long campaign included “forged letters to Congress,” secret funding of allegedly independent but industry-controlled scientists, creating “fake grassroots organizations” to influence policy, and multiple, ongoing, and in-depth “efforts to deliberately manufacture uncertainty about climate science.”

Evidence of the industry’s deceptive practices could be pivotal in cases brought by state and local governments paying a staggering tab for intensifying storms, flooding, crop-destroying droughts, extreme heat events and, for states and towns on major bodies of water, coastal erosion.

In the meantime, the fossil fuel industry continues to profit outrageously from extracting, distributing and marketing dangerous products known to increase Earth’s already feverish temperature: March was the 10th month in a row to set a new monthly global heat record, both on land and in the oceans, as global reliance on coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel of all — continues to climb.

Landmark climate cases in Montana, Hawaii

The ECHR decision was the first to rule that governments are obligated under human rights laws to address climate change, but it won’t be the last. Cases pending in Montana and Hawaii also allege damages from unmet climate obligations by their respective state governments.

Last August, 16 young plaintiffs scored an unprecedented victory in Montana. They argued that the state violated a state constitutional provision that guarantees Montana citizens a healthy environment, and Judge Kathy Seeley agreed. She ruled that permitting coal, oil and gas production worsened the climate crisis, in violation of the “healthy environment” guarantees found in the Montana constitution.

In result, state regulators issuing permits for fossil fuel developments must now consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions as part of their overall analysis of whether to grant or deny the permit. After the state appealed the maverick ruling, Montana’s Supreme Court, in a 5-2 decision, denied the governor’s request to block the ruling pending appeal.

In Hawaii, another pending climate case involves 14 youths. Plaintiffs in Hawaii allege that the state’s transportation department, by funding highway projects that increase fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, violated a constitutional duty to protect the environment.

A protestor holds a 'Polluters Pay Up' sign outside the Phillips 66 Los Angeles Refinery Wilmington Plant on Nov. 28, 2022, in Wilmington, Calif. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

After the state challenged plaintiffs’ standing, claiming they could not show particularized harm because climate damages are already “baked in,” the judge ruled that climate damages to plaintiffs “are not hypothetical,” and allowed the case to proceed.

When the state asked Hawaii’s legislators for more than $2 million to hire outside counsel to fight the case, one state legislator told Hawaii Public Radio that instead of “spending the millions of dollars we’re spending on some hotshot law firm,” Hawaii should apply that money toward emissions reductions instead.

The case was scheduled for trial this summer, but in February, the fossil fuel defendants petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that federal law precludes damages claims against them.

Take heart, then take action

Climate activists should be uplifted and encouraged by the ECHR decision, particularly as its effects begin to ripple through the fossil fuel industry, industrialized economies and reluctant courts.

It won’t change the prognosis or the immediate future — today’s youth throughout the world will still live through the worst effects of climate destruction, even though they had nothing to do with the policies that caused it.

It’s the same lament heard from emerging economies in Asia and Africa. Struggling countries and coastal populations who had nothing to do with industrialization over the past 150 years are now paying the steepest price through their own rapidly disappearing habitats.

Thousands of school students join protesters in a Climate strike rally on September 20, 2019, in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Mark Evans/Getty Images)

But one major, outcome-determinative difference between these two rightfully aggrieved populations remains: the right to vote.

As enraging as it is for young Americans to hear oil-financed politicians deny climate change (“Drill baby, drill!”), we could fund the transition to clean energy — including an upgraded, nationwide grid of sufficient capacity — if every young adult simply voted.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.