A Scalia-less Court hears 2016's big abortion case; the post–Super Tuesday landscape (is a blighted hellscape for the GOP); how to think about the Apple/FBI battle.
This was the first major case to be heard without Justice Antonin Scalia, but because it's a big culture-war case, the swing vote was always Justice Anthony Kennedy anyway.
The case, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, challenges a law Texas passed in 2014 (the one famously filibustered by Wendy Davis). The law requires all abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals and all clinics to be equipped for surgery (even if they didn't perform surgical abortions).
Since the law's passage, many clinics have closed, though supporters of the law dispute that it caused the closures.
Women's groups claim the closures could put an undue burden on women seeking abortions, something that Supreme Court precedent considers unconstitutional.
It seems likely that Kennedy will kick the can down the road on the case, perhaps by sending it back to the lower courts for more evidence on how much the new laws have restricted abortion access.
It might honestly be too late for the brokered convention, which requires GOP voters to hate Trump as much as Republican and conservative professionals do.
It is definitely too late for a non-Trump option. Maybe if other candidates had actually attacked him — something this graphic demonstrates they didn't do until far too late — things would have been different, but here we are.
It also might be too late for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Tuesday night proved that Sanders hasn't expanded his coalition. And he wasn't winning the support of his key demographics at the same rate he was in New Hampshire.
And it is realistically too late for Ben Carson, who announced today that his campaign wouldn't be going forward. On the other hand, he's not formally suspending it. It's not clear whether anything real will change, since he was kind of a nonfactor anyway.
The FBI's lawsuit against Apple over a phone formerly belonging to suspected San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook continues this week.
The argument over the lawsuit can get very muddled. Ben Thompson, at Stratechery, offers three ways to think about it: the case at hand (Farook's phone), the PR battle over protecting privacy, and the ongoing legal battle over encryption.
The case at hand is confusing enough in its own right. The FBI actually had the phone unlocked, then locked itself out — and it's not clear that the phone had anything relevant to the investigation of Farook.
It's similar to other cases that the FBI has tried to pursue against Apple compelling phone unlocking. One FBI request from October 2015 was totally smacked down on Monday by a federal judge, James Orenstein, in a ruling that gave a lot of hope to Apple's defenders in the Farook case.
There is something a little less than ideal, as Navneet Alang acknowledges, about relying on Apple (or corporate interests generally) to be the defenders of privacy in court.
And the need to win the PR battle is leading Apple to some weird legal arguments — like claiming that code is speech, so any mandate from the FBI would trample Apple's First Amendment rights.
Worth remembering, though: The parts of the case we see could also be a proxy for a battle going on behind the scenes. Apple might be worried about slippery slopes to kinds of FBI requests we don't know about. Guan Yang offers very useful background on this.
The Texas State Board of Education is surprisingly powerful, wielding influence over textbooks nationwide. And a woman who thinks Barack Obama was a drug-addicted gay prostitute in his 20s is looking like she's about to win a seat there.
"'Go back to Fuckheadistan,' growls Neanderthal Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) as he knifes a faceless goon about halfway through the grab bag of dog-whistles and dog-shit filmmaking that is London Has Fallen."
"Trying to turn lead into gold is nothing compared to taking something mechanical like an instrument—a string and a bow—and using it to evoke a human soul, preserved through the centuries."
