Trump is stealing money from HIV programs to pay for migrant kids snatched from parents

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SCOTUS Nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s Other Radical Views

Brett Kavanaugh / PD-USGov

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is not only a threat to a woman’s right to choose and to LGBTQ equality. He is a danger to the government’s ability to regulate pretty much anything.

Judge Kavanaugh (not to mention Justices Thomas and Alito) has questioned the legitimacy of what lawyers call the Chevron doctrine. Chevron is a 1984 Supreme Court case that established a doctrine of court deference to administrative agencies. The case itself concerned a rule made by the EPA; in fact, the EPA, which was run at the time by Anne Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch’s mother, had weakened a Jimmy Carter-era rule based on the Clean Air Act.

When the Natural Resources Defense Council sued, the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the EPA, arguing that a court should give deference to an administrative agency tasked with interpreting the words of a statute. The scientists at the EPA, after all, are the experts. A federal judge is not. This doctrine, which to some extent clarified a federal court approach, is at the backbone of the modern administrative state. It allows federal administrative agencies to make rules and regulations passed by Congress. As such, it has been in conservatives’ cross hairs for years. They see Chevron deference as a tool of regulation and they want to get rid of it so their conservative judges in the federal judiciary can declare regulations void.

Judge Kavanaugh has also staked out a radically conservative approach to gun rights. Kavanaugh believes that the Second Amendment confers a right on every individual to not just own a gun, but to brandish it in public. In Heller v. D.C., he wrote a dissent in which he argued that neither Congress nor the states can pass a law that bans semi-automatic rifles.

Nor does he believe that the federal government has any power to regulate the environment. In EME Homer City Generation v. EPA, he argued that because individual states experience the effects of pollution differently, they should have the power to make environmental rules on their own. The EPA could set general standards, he said, but states should have the ultimate authority to determine how to meet those standards within their states.

Not only was that decision later overturned by the Supreme Court, but it is also remarkably unsound. The environment is the most public of public goods. A person in one state can be downwind of a factory in a neighboring state and experience negative effects if the plant is unregulated. That Kavanaugh cannot even recognize the cross-border nature of the natural environment shows how radical he really is.

As a judge on the DC Circuit, Kavanaugh has written or dissented in many cases involving the EPA. In almost all of them, he has sought to reign in the power of the Obama-era EPA.

Kavanaugh also has a broad view of executive power. When Congress drafted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it did so in a way that protected it from the president and Congressional meddling. Congress wanted to keep politics out of it. This was too much for Kavanaugh. It was too independent, he wrote in PHH Corp. v. CFPB. He preferred more presidential power, probably so conservative presidents could weaken it.

He doesn’t believe that companies, even non-religious ones, should have to provide birth control to their employees. Nor did he feel that an undocumented teen should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy.

In labor and employment law cases, Kavanaugh favors big business. In 2016, in Verizon New England v. NLRB, he reigned in pro-union expression. In National Association of Federal Employees v. Vilsack, he argued that the government needs no individualized suspicion to subject its employees to drug testing.

That may also speak to his dim view of privacy. Kavanaugh had no issues with the NSA’s dragnet surveillance program that gathered telephone metadata on millions of Americans and some foreign nationals. Such activities, he argued, did not raise Fourth Amendment concerns because the numbers we dial are freely handed over to the phone company and, therefore, not private. This doctrine, known as the Third Party Doctrine, still remains in Fourth Amendment law. But it was recently curtailed with respect to long term dragnet location-based tracking in Carpenter v. US.

Kavanaugh is at the extreme right of the legal community, and he is about to cement an extreme right majority on the Supreme Court.

The post SCOTUS Nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s Other Radical Views appeared first on Towleroad.

SCOTUS Nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s Other Radical Views

Larry Kramer, Croatia, Kathy Griffin, RuPaul, Arizona, Colton Haynes, Papa Johns, Hawaii, Asbestos: HOT LINKS

FIRST VIDEO. Thai boys rescued from cave recovering in hospital.

PILOT TIME. RuPaul explores daytime talk show.

LARRY KRAMER. For gays, the worst is yet to come, again: “We’ve come a certain distance from such a blanket suffocation. But by the time a modicum of acceptance by the outside world starts to arrive, we are visited with a plague. It is a plague of disease, and with our new president it continues to be a plague of hate. There is not one cabinet member who has supportive or welcoming words for us. Every week, it seems, Mr. Trump appoints another judge who is on record as hating us. They will serve for many years. A new Supreme Court will further echo this disdain.”

CARCINOGEN. Russian mining company puts Trump’s face on pallets of asbestos. ‘Uralasbest, one of the world’s largest producers and sellers of asbestos, has taken to adorning pallets of its product with a seal of Trump’s face, along with the words “Approved by Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States”.’

ARIZONA. Christian extremist law firm challenges Phoenix nondiscrimination ordinance: ‘In new legal filings, attorneys for Alliance Defending Freedom are telling the Arizona Supreme Court that the U.S. Constitution protects not only the right of individuals to speak but also their right to not be compelled to say things they do not believe. In this case, they contend that a Phoenix anti-discrimination ordinance is effectively telling Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski, the owners of Brush & Nib Studio, that they have to design wedding invitations for customers that “celebrate” same-sex marriages. And that, the legal papers argue, violates the religious beliefs of the “Christian artists.”’

HAWAII. Supreme Court rejects Christian extremist law firm’s appeal of a lower court ruling that the business had violated Hawaii’s anti-discrimination statute when it denied a room to a lesbian couple because of their sexual orientation.

OH CANADA. Colton Haynes has arrived in Vancouver.

PAPA JOHNS. Founder used N-word in conference call: ‘John Schnatter—the founder, chairman and public face of pizza chain Papa John’s—used the N-word on a conference call in May, a source with knowledge of the event told Forbes. The call was arranged between Papa John’s executives and marketing agency Laundry Service. It was designed as a role-playing exercise for Schnatter in an effort to prevent future public-relations snafus. Schnatter caused an uproar in November 2017 when he waded into the debate over national anthem protests in the NFL and partly blamed the league for slowing sales at Papa John’s.’

I JUST WON’T GO DOWN. Nightline interviews Kathy Griffin.

WORLD CUP VIDEO OF THE DAY. Croatian firefighters can’t watch last penalty.

HUMP DAY HOTTIE. Eddie Cheng.

The post Larry Kramer, Croatia, Kathy Griffin, RuPaul, Arizona, Colton Haynes, Papa Johns, Hawaii, Asbestos: HOT LINKS appeared first on Towleroad.

Larry Kramer, Croatia, Kathy Griffin, RuPaul, Arizona, Colton Haynes, Papa Johns, Hawaii, Asbestos: HOT LINKS

BREAKING: House Appropriations Republicans Adopt “License to Discriminate” Amendment

Today, HRC blasted House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee for adopting a discriminatory, anti-LGBTQ amendment to a funding bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. If it remains in the final bill, the amendment would grant a “license to discriminate” in the provision of child welfare services, allowing child welfare placing agencies that receive federal government funding to turn away qualified prospective parents based on the agency’s religious beliefs. The vote in the committee was 29-23, along party lines, with Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) the lone Republican to vote against the amendment.

This amendment, introduced by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), would have a sweeping, harmful impact in child welfare services by enabling discrimination against LGBTQ people, same-sex couples, interfaith couples, single parents, married couples in which one prospective parent has previously been divorced, or other qualified parents to whom an agency has an objection. The biggest barrier to placing children with families is a lack of qualified prospective parents; having the government give contractors and subcontractors a license to discriminate, thereby limiting the pool of prospective parents for no legitimate reason, is unconscionable and an unacceptable use of taxpayer dollars.

“Any Member of Congress who supports this amendment is clearly stating that it is more important to them to discriminate than it is to find loving homes for children in need,” said David Stacy, director of government affairs at the Human Rights Campaign. “Congress should be focusing on ways to help children in the child welfare system find homes rather than creating needless obstacles for prospective parents, effectively shrinking the pool of qualified folks who want to provide children with a loving home. HRC urges Congress to reject this discriminatory amendment in the final appropriations bill.”

HRC recently released a report, titled Disregarding the Best Interest of the Child: License to Discriminate In Child Welfare Services, detailing the harms of efforts to write anti-LGBTQ discrimination by child welfare agencies into law. Statistics suggest that an estimated two million LGBTQ adults in the U.S. are interested in adoption, but the LGBTQ community often remains an untapped resource when it comes to finding families for children and youth in foster care.

Research consistently shows that LGBTQ youth are overrepresented in the foster care system, as many have been rejected by their families of origin because of their LGBTQ status, and are especially vulnerable to discrimination and mistreatment while in foster care. This type of amendment will only exacerbate these challenges faced by LGBTQ young people.

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