Many colleges weren't making much effort at inclusion and diversity, before

Yes, the decision by the ultra-corrupt, extremist Trump SCOTUS is disgraceful. But here's something of a reality check regarding the status quo.

If there is any hope following the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action and overturn more than 40 years of precedent last week, it might be this: Selective colleges and universities are suddenly pledging “unwavering commitment” to access and inclusion.

If only many of them had really made that effort in the first place.

I’m still reading through heartfelt statements from college presidents touting the importance of race-conscious admissions and having people from different backgrounds represented on their campuses.

Yet our years of reporting and collecting data on this issue at The Hechinger Report show little evidence they’ve actually done much to diversify their student bodies, even before the affirmative action ruling. Black student enrollment in colleges and universities has been dropping steadily, while many flagship universities lag way behind when it comes to enrolling their state’s Black and Hispanic high school graduates.

And nearly 700 schools have been raising prices paid by their lowest-income students – who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic – more than the prices paid by their highest-income ones. - The Hechinger Report

The EPA can still do plenty about emissions

It just needs the gumption, and/or a good kick in the butt.

Even as the EPA resists taking action in Utah, it has a wide range of regulations already on the books or currently planned that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It has proposed rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and is targeting vehicle tailpipe emissions. The Supreme Court ruling expressly leaves the EPA with the authority to regulate pollution from the electricity sector — as long as it doesn’t order plants to switch from coal to renewable energy the way it would have under Obama’s plan.

(EPA chief Michael) Regan said that his agency also plans to tighten regulations that would force power plants to clean up pollution — in many cases, an expensive undertaking. He made it clear that he hopes that the owners of coal-fired power plants will decide to close dirty facilities rather than spend the money to clean them up. “They’ll see it’s not worth investing in the past,” Regan said. - Mother Jones

SCOTUS screws farmworkers

From June 23. No matter how this court rules on major social issues, it will remain fundamentally what SCOTUS has almost always been - a tool of the plutocrats.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court published its decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a case involving an employer challenge to a California regulation that allows union representatives to visit the property of agricultural employers—in narrowly tailored and time-limited circumstances—to carry out efforts to organize the hundreds of thousands of California farmworkers who work in hazardous and low-paying jobs, and who suffer disproportionately high rates of wage and hour violations.

In a disappointing 6-3 decision, the Court’s conservative justices ruled that the California regulation constitutes a per se physical taking of the employer’s property, which in practical terms means union organizers will no longer have the right to access the farms where farmworkers are employed.

The vast majority of farmworkers across the country are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act—the federal law that enshrines the right of workers to join and form unions. - EPI

Maybe a harbinger of the Trump SCOTUS's plans

Or maybe not. I do think the far-right majority continues to serve the rich man, first and foremost, and that might - might- keep them from getting too out of control. But it will continue to be bad.

Take a walk with me inside the mind of Brett Jones. He was the plaintiff in Jones v. Mississippi, the United State Supreme Court case I told you about (April 26). In a 6-3 opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court rolled back two previous rulings regarding lifetime imprisonment without parole for minors. The previous rulings, called Miller and Montgomery, held that lifetime imprisonment for juvenile offenders was justified only in the worse of the worse cases—when a convict is "permanently incorrigible." In Jones, Kavanaugh said nah. Life in prison's fine even if corrigible.

I want you to take this walk with me to understand more fully the complex layers of cruelty in Kavanaugh's opinion. By understanding that his point is not punishment in the service of democracy and justice but instead punishment in the service of impunity and power, I hope you will understand the need for calling this barbarism instead of what we usually call it. Conservatism seems like something debatable. Barbarism isn't...

In this, the Supreme Court affirmed what every single survivor of childhood trauma secretly believes but fights every single day: the idea that the weak in this world are the playthings of the strong, and that democracy, equality, freedom, morality and all the rest have nothing to do with it. In deciding Jones, the court, led by Kavanaugh, said yeah, you're right. What matters began long before you came into being, so that Boy Kavanaugh can commit crimes with impunity while rising to the pinnacle of judicial power to sit in judgment of Boy Jones who can now only curse the day he was born. - AlterNet

How Trump's SCOTUS is paid for

Disgraceful, that this is legal, and happens. And imagine the freakouts on the right, and the corporate media attention, if progressives did this kind of shit.

A close informal advisor to President Trump who has been deeply involved in all three of his Supreme Court nomination battles is the sole trustee of a mysterious group that brought in more than $80 million in 2018, according to a previously unreported tax return uncovered by CREW. The filing vastly expands the amount of money known to be flowing into the growing constellation of dark money groups tied to Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo and provides new details about his role in a secretive firm that was responsible for one of the largest donations received by President Trump’s inaugural committee.

What makes Rule of Law Trust (RLT) particularly interesting is that despite its $80 million haul, the group seems remarkably hollow. It claimed it had no employees and no volunteers in its first year and listed what appears to be a virtual office in Virginia as its main address. Its stated mission is “to advance conservative principles and causes through communications, research, strategy and assistance to other organizations,” but there’s no apparent public information to demonstrate what that work entails, not even a website. - CREW

Sen. Sanders calls for ban on for-profit charters. Would it fly?

I of course wholeheartedly support the concept. And if you click and read it all, he seems to have a lot of bases covered. (It's a little unclear, from what I've seen, if the proposal includes shutting down existing for-profits. I'm taking a bit of a leap of faith here and presuming that that's part of the intent of the entire package.)

Sen. Bernie Sanders will unveil a major plan to support public education and rein in privatization on Saturday, CNN reports. Sanders will call for a ban on for-profit charter schools and pledge that, as president, he would refuse to use federal funds to open new charter schools.

On the anniversary weekend of Brown v. Board of Education, Sanders will take up the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charter school expansion, at least while the schools are audited. Sanders will also propose subjecting charter schools to the same oversight as public schools—something that charter backers have oh-so-mysteriously fought tooth and nail—and transparency measures like financial disclosure and student attrition rates. That oversight and transparency would be combined with requirements for representation of parents and teachers on charter school boards.

Sanders isn’t stopping there... - Daily Kos

But:

- Even to my not-a-lawyer head it seems like there would be constitutional issues with an outright ban. Moreover, that could very possibly have been the case even before the Trump/McConnell savaging of our federal courts. Perhaps denial of federal funds to existing for-profits would have pretty much the same effect as a ban. But I wouldn't put it beyond the far-right majority on our current SCOTUS to knock that down, and even have the gall to cite Brown as a precedent requiring purported "equality of opportunity," here.

- Plenty of “non-profit” charters are being strip-mined for big bucks by greedheads. I don’t know that for-profit charters couldn’t just make a few cosmetic changes in how their cash flows are treated, label themselves non-profit, and go the same route. It’s the charter-industrial complex in general, not just the overt for-profits, that needs to be cut way, way, way down to size. Full funding of our public schools, along with much stiffer federal regulation of all charters, would be good starting points.

MN AG: Ellison joins one of many Trump-blocking lawsuits

From Monday:

Attorney General Keith Ellison announced today that Minnesota is joining a multistate lawsuit, led by the State of California, to enjoin the Trump administration from illegally and unconstitutionally diverting federal funds to build a wall along the United States southern border that President Trump announced in his emergency declaration on Friday, February 15. Minnesota is one of 16 states to join the lawsuit.

“President Trump, who has been unable to persuade Congress and the American people that a wall is necessary, is harming the people of Minnesota by forcing this constitutional crisis. I have joined this lawsuit because I cannot allow him to do that,” Attorney General Ellison said. - MN Attorney General website

It seems pretty likely that the Supreme Court will block Trump's effort. In fact, I suspect that Chief "Justice" John Roberts is pushing hard for a 9-0 vote (though he may not get it), because of what letting Trump get away with this would potentially mean for the "constitutional balance of power," or whatever.

As far as I'm concerned, one of the first steps that the new, Democratic president should take, in January 2021, is to demand that all judicial appointments made by, among many other reprehensible and contemptible things, a god-damned traitor against the United States of America, immediately resign. (And, yes, that includes Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.) One could indeed argue that the new prez would be derelict in her own duties, if she lets those appointments stand.

Probably a pipe dream, I know. But having Trump-appointed judges block every effort in coming decades to make things better is to my mind far more unthinkable. When things have gone very, very wrong, we have the right to do what it takes to fix them.

SCOTUS stuns forced-birth zealots

This doesn’t guarantee anything in the longer term. All they did was grant a stay. But the news could have been a lot worse.

This probably is another indication, though, that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t intend for “his” court to go down as a thundering bastion of radical-right extremism, which wouldn’t look good in the history books. Not to mention which could produce huge electoral backlashes, amplifying those already created by the ultimate embodiment of “movement conservatism,” namely, putting a massively narcissistic and delusional, corrupt beyond description, treasonous, and most of all just an absolute god-damned fucking pitiful idiot in the White House.

In June 2016, an eight-member Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that required doctors who perform abortions to have the authority to admit patients at a local hospital. The makeup of the court has changed significantly since then: In 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died a few weeks before the Texas case was argued, and Justice Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018 and was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But although the court by most measures has become more conservative, the justices (yesterday) granted a request from abortion providers to block a similar Louisiana law from going into effect while the providers appeal a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in a dispute that some court-watchers regarded as a bellwether for the court’s possible direction in future abortion cases. - SCOTUSblog