For A.1. to cause such fear is understandable, because many of us are not comfortable with condiments.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Orwell, 1984

In a letter to his mistress Louise Colet, the novelist Gustave Flaubert remarked that “to be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.”  He then added, “though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”

In all seriousness, a friend reminds me that, once all “this” is sort of over, one way of reconciling oneself to the fact that seventy-seven million people voted for Trump in 2024, after everything that had happened over the previous eight years, is that a very large percentage of those people are idiots, and consequently have never achieved the level of mens rea, as lawyers would say, to merit the consignment to a fiery pit that a more knowledgeable choice would require.

The post Glass half full appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

He lovingly paints immigrants, praises free trade and diplomacy, and rues the coarsening of American politics. Why won’t he talk about Donald Trump?

"The Flight 93 election" was a term used by conservatives in 2016 to justify voting for Donald Trump. The basic idea was that, even though Donald Trump was essentially everything we, well, knew he was -- a racist, an idiot, a wrecker -- the absolute, desperate need to stop Hillary Clinton from being elected required action that may well be suicidal. "Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. [But] if you don’t try, death is certain."

Of course, to state the thesis is to underscore the absurdity-cum-perniciousness: the tier one emergency requiring conservatives to abandon all prudence and storm the cabin, was .... the possibility that a bog-standard Democratic politician might win the presidency. It is the prospect of ordinary democratic governance that was the emergency, and that shouldn't be forgotten. As Jamelle Bouie has noted, a running theme of contemporary conservative ideology is the belief that democratic outcomes are fundamentally illegitimate if they result in traditional White men losing. This is what unifies everything from birtherism to January 6 to the attack on mail-in ballots to great replacement theory.

In that vein, I think we might do well to start thinking of the current Supreme Court as a "Flight 93 Court". Over the past several months, it has interceded again and again -- with increasing levels of recklessness -- to sow chaos into the democratic system to the advantage of the Republican Party and the detriment of Democrats. First (well, not "first", but we'll start here) we had Callais, gutting the Voting Rights Act to enable Republican gerrymanders throughout the south and hopefully net the GOP a few more crucial House seats. Callais was followed by Milligan, and then today the Supreme Court's decision to intercede and (for now -- it's a wonky procedural posture) block a challenge to Donald Trump's efforts to sabotage mail-in voting in advance of November's election.

Aside from their obvious partisan tilt, what stands out about these decisions is their perversion of normal legal rules and processes -- blasting past the Court's own nominal guardrails to reach the preferred political result. The most obvious specific is the so-called Purcell principle, which supposedly forbids courts from issuing late-breaking alterations to the rules governing elections in close proximity to said election, but has very quickly developed the implicit caveat of "...unless doing so would benefit Republicans." But there are others. The Court's slaughtering of Humphrey's Executor -- and not just that they did it, but the way they did it; clearing the path for Trump's firings on an emergency basis notwithstanding the clear then-operative precedents that made them obviously unlawful -- spoke to a Court that is positively scrambling to let Trump consolidate as much power as possible, as fast as possible.

It is no revelation to anyone -- even someone as ideologically cocooned as John Roberts -- that these cases are obliterating the Court's legitimacy. Reforms like Court-packing, once viewed as fringe complaints from sore losers, are rapidly becoming litmus tests for any serious Democrat seeking higher office. It is almost impossible to imagine the Supreme Court surviving in its current form in the next Democratic trifecta. Last year, Justice Barrett lectured critics that "agree or disagree with the decisions that the court reaches ... we are engaged in a legal enterprise." The prevailing sentiment among liberal legal observers is to reject precisely this: that we are well past simply disagreeing with the decision the Court reaches, and into the terrain where the Supreme Court should no longer be viewed as engaging in a legal enterprise at all.

Given this cascading, calamitous drop in the Court's public esteem, what is prompting the Roberts Six to press forward? It's not commitment to legal principle -- again these cases stand out for their lack of consistent principle and their deviation from established precedential and doctrinal pathways. Rather, these cases give the unmistakable sense of a Supreme Court that is ready to do anything and everything -- no matter how reckless or lawless -- to stop the Democratic Party from taking power in 2026 and 2028. Nobody seriously thinks that the Court is announcing "law" in any meaningful sense, if by that we mean principles that will govern Democratic and Republican administrations in equal measure. The Court's rush to intercede to maximize Donald Trump's personal authority will not carry over to a Democratic administration. The Court is throwing caution to the wind because it views a Democratic political triumph as an existential threat. It is the charging the cockpit, knowing it might die.

Much like the original "Flight 93" justification, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, for the most part, the existential emergency prompting the Court's charge is little more than the prospect of Democrats winning. I'll concede there is a slight difference in this context because of the aforementioned emergent Democratic consensus that the Supreme Court needs to be utterly transformed at the nearest possible opportunity -- but again, that is a tide of revolutionary sentiment that is entirely of their own making. A regular, modest conservative Court would not have prompted this sort of backlash (precisely because, to crib from Justice Barrett, legal professionals do know how to distinguish between outcomes they disagree with and outright judicial lawlessness).

So the Court is locked in on its path. It will endorse all of Trump's lawlessness, it will imperil democracy itself. It may kill us all in the process. But standing in the ruins of a shattered electoral system, they'll at least be able to tell themselves that they did everything they could to stop Democrats from winning.

On October 19, 2026, Albertans will vote on whether their province should secede from Canada. Except that isn’t quite right. Albertans will vote on whether the province should “commence legal proceedings” in order to hold a binding referendum on whether the province should leave Canada.

In other words, Alberta will hold a referendum on whether to hold another referendum on whether the province should secede from Canada. The farcical nature of the referendum aside, the prospect of Albertan independence raises the question of what might happen should Alberta decide to leave.

Although Alberta has never previously voted on whether to secede from Canada, other provinces, notably Québec, have held sovereignty referendums. The sovereignty question has long dominated provincial politics in Québec, with political philosophers weighing in on the ethics of separatism.

One longstanding argument in the debate over Québec separatism concerns how the province could be partitioned upon leaving Canada. Opponents of separatism have said that if the Québécois have the right to national self-determination, then other apparent national communities in Québec would have the same right to secede from a sovereign Québec, which would lead to it being partitioned.

This regress argument against the principle of national self-determination begins by asking one to assume the validity of the principle. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that nations are entitled to demand that the borders of the political state that governs their members align with the boundaries of their nation. This entitlement entails the right for national minorities within a state to secede or separate from that state at any time by just withdrawing their consent to be governed.

Now, suppose that a national minority elects to exercise this right and secede from the state to which they belong. After conducting a successful referendum, the territorially concentrated national minority secedes from the original polity. However, upon achieving its independence, the new state is confronted by a group who constitutes a national minority in the new state, and who also demand their independence.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau—fifteenth Prime Minister of Canada and political theorist in his own right—offered the following presentation of the regress argument:

To insist that a particular nationality must have complete sovereign power is to pursue a self-destructive end. Because every national minority will find, at the very moment of its liberation, a new minority within its bosom which in turn must be allowed the right to demand its freedom. And on and on would stretch the train of revolutions, until the last-born of the nation-states turned to violence to put an end to the very principle that gave it birth.

Thus, the conclusion of this regress argument is that the consistent application of the principle of national self-determination results in a level of political instability that renders states nonviable. In the least, the argument is a reductio ad absurdum, as the practical implications are unacceptable. Moreover, the argument could also be understood to demonstrate that national self-determination is self-defeating, if its end goal is understood to be the creation of an independent nation-state. The instability that results from this principle would make forming a cohesive nation-state impossible.

In 1995, the Canadian province of Québec held a referendum on whether to become an independent country. This sovereignty referendum was the culmination of a long historical process that reached back to before Canadian Confederation. Québec is the only province in Canada with a francophone majority, although significant francophone minorities are found in the English-majority provinces.

The 1995 Québec sovereignty referendum narrowly failed by a margin of 50.58 to 49.42 percent. The results of the referendum are helpful in this discussion because they illustrate how the province might be partitioned were Québec to gain independence. The leftmost map in the above illustration depicts the entirety of the province, and it is immediately striking that the majority of the people in the northern Ungava region opposed separatism, because this region has two-thirds of the province’s landmass.

Opposition to separatism in northern Québec was driven by Indigenous communities, such as the James Bay Cree and Inuit. The maps on the right side of the illustration depict metropolitan centers and areas along Québec’s border with other provinces. In South Québec, Hull, and Montreal, there are significant anglophone populations who also overwhelmingly opposed Québec sovereignty. These groups are thus plausible candidates for national minorities that would exist in a sovereign Québec.

If the principle of national self-determination were consistently applied, presumably these national minorities could vote to secede from a sovereign Québec. Some contemporary Québec separatists, such as provincial political party Québec solidaire, do concede that other groups in Québec possess this right to national self-determination.

The most salient difference between the cases of Alberta and Québec is that the former is not often conceived of as a distinct nation. If being a national community is a prerequisite for having the right to national self-determination, then it is not clear that Alberta would possess such a right. Instead, Albertan separatists typically claim that Alberta’s moral right to self-determination is grounded in purely democratic terms. Regardless of whether a province constitutes a distinct nation, its citizens have a right to vote to secede from Canada.

However, if Alberta is understood to have a right to self-determination that is not based on a claim to nationhood, then the regress argument has even more power. In the Québec case, the James Bay Cree and anglophone minorities have been raised as presumptive national minorities with the right to self-determination, but if nationhood is not a prerequisite, any given group of people could elect to secede. In other words, if the right to self-determination is purely democratic—simply a matter of a territorially concentrated group of people voting to leave—why cannot Edmonton, Lethbridge, or Red Deer simply vote to secede from Alberta? Denying those cities that right would be arbitrary.

Pierre Trudeau once observed: “Si le Canada est divisible, le Québec doit être aussi divisible” (“If Canada is divisible, Québec must also be divisible”). Given the principle of self-determination being invoked in debates over Albertan separatism, this is even truer for Alberta than for Québec. Should Albertans one day choose to secede from Canada, we should expect the province to be partitioned.

The post How to Partition Alberta first appeared on Blog of the APA.

I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro? No, he’s just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.

— David McCord