#judiciary

Republicans in the Senate are not even pretending to give a shit about the sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh. They do not care about women. They care about nothing but the acquisition of power.

“On Monday, the Supreme Court turned away Indiana’s attempt to strip equal parenting rights from married same-sex couples. The court’s decision ensures that same-sex couples in Indiana will remain the lawful parents of their own children, ending the state’s six-year-long crusade to remove their names from their children’s birth certificates. But beyond Indiana, Monday’s order also suggests that a majority of the justices aren’t eager to roll back marriage equality.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/supreme-court-rejects-indiana-birth-certificate-case.html

“A federal judge just ruled that it’s unconstitutional for transgender people to be required to show proof from a doctor that they’re undergoing transition-related care in order to get a passport with the correct gender marker on it.

“The State Department “has provided no explanation, let alone any evidence, of why [it] has an important interest in verifying a transgender passport applicant’s gender identity, nor a cogent explanation of why the Policy requiring a physician’s certification increases the accuracy of issued passports,” U.S. District Court Judge Gloria M. Navarro wrote in her ruling.”

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/12/federal-judge-rules-requiring-proof-gender-identity-passport-unconstitutional/?fbclid=IwAR3jyKjbeO9SYFpfy__6BsxPeyQrBD9X7ZYMi319uQ13WYD0N3zz7W_QQTI

“OnSaturday, a federal judge in New York ruled Wolf assumed his position unlawfully and subsequently Wolf’s suspension of the DACA program was invalid.

“‘What the federal judge said was that was not lawful,’ Hoffman said. ‘The further attempt to ignore the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court already ruled that the government rescission attempt was not lawful. The further attempt to curtail DACA is not lawful, so it’s an important development.’”

https://abc13.com/daca-dreamers-on-recent-ruling-houston-recipients-texas-dreamer/7996602/

“A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration’s plan to relax restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, paving the way for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to enact new and stronger restrictions on power plants.

“The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia called the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy rule a ‘fundamental misconstruction’ of the nation’s environmental laws, devised through a ‘tortured series of misreadings’ of legal statute.

“On the last full day of the Trump presidency, it effectively ended the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to weaken and undermine climate change policies and capped a dismal string of failures in which courts threw out one deregulation after another. Experts have widely described the E.P.A.’s losing streak as one of the worst legal records of the agency in modern history.

…

“‘The real win here is that the Trump administration failed to tie the Biden team’s hands,” Ms. Freeman said. ‘They wanted to lock in a narrow legal interpretation and make it impossible for a new administration to set ambitious standards for power plants. That was their whole strategy. And it went down to spectacular defeat.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/climate/trump-climate-change.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

看到這段頗為震撼（和感慨）：

『那些在我們看來似乎是在某些方面相當野蠻的社會，如果我們從另一個角度考慮，可能會變成相當仁慈而且人道。讓我們拿北美洲平原區的印地安人（Plains Indians）為例子，舉他們做例子來討論這個問題具有雙重意義，因為他們既具有一些輕度的食人肉風俗，同時還具有在原始社會中甚為少見的組織化的警察制度。他們的警察（同時也是司法人員）永遠不會想到以切斷罪犯的社會關係來懲罰罪犯。如果某個土著觸犯部族的法律，處罰他的辦法是把他的一切財產全部毀壞，包括他的營帳和馬匹在內。但在處罰他的過程中，執法的警察卻也同時等於欠他一筆債：警察必須負責組織社會成員，集體償還因為犯罪而遭到的所有損失。集體償還罪犯的一切損失，就使那個罪犯有負於整個社會，罪犯也就不得不對他們表示感激，表示感激的辦法是由整個社會包括警察在內的一切成員幫助他累積一大堆禮物來送給償還他損失的人，這樣子也就把整個取予關係又倒轉過來；這樣的一來一往接二連三繼續下去，致送禮物，歸還禮物，一直到由該項犯罪行為所引起的失序狀態漸漸消失於無形，整個社會又回復以前秩序井然的時候為止。這樣的習慣不但遠比我們自己的辦法人道，這樣的辦法之邏輯也更完整一致，即使我們把這個問題用現代歐洲心理學的名詞陳述出來，他們的辦法還是更完整一致；從邏輯的觀點來看，施予懲罰這樣的概念既然表示把罪犯「小孩子化」（infantilization），罪犯也就理所當然有權得到獎勵，如果光只處罰，而不加以獎勵的話，原來的處罰程序便不會有效，甚至會產生出和我們想要的完全相反的結果。我們的制度是最高程度的荒謬，因為我們既把罪犯當做小孩，以便我們有權對罪犯施加懲罰，同時又把罪犯當做大人，目的是為了拒絕給他任何安慰；同時我們卻相信我們在精神上大為進步，而所依據的理由只不過是，我們不把我們的幾個同胞吃掉，而是使他們飽受身體上與道德上的割體斷魂。』

——

王志明譯（1989，2007）。p.546-547，〈三十八．一小杯蘭姆酒〉，《憂鬱的熱帶》（原作者：Claude Lévi-Strauss）（台北，聯經）（原著出版年：1955）

I don’t want to give any grandstanding GOP District Attorney ideas here, but I have a question about potential legal jeopardy of women who had abortions while Roe was good law following its likely invalidation in Dobbs.