And starring Sonya Sotomayor as The Voice

The voice of freedom, of conscience ... the liberal lion on the SCOTUS roared yesterday.

"It is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny," she wrote. "For generations, black and brown parents have given their children 'the talk' -- instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger -- all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. 

"By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time," she added. "It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged."

Co-starring the Five as The Police State.

In a 5-3 decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police have the right to detain anyone without cause and then arrest them on the spot if that person has an outstanding warrant.

For you budding constitutionalists out there, that is the direct opposite of what the Fourth Amendment guarantees.  Is this a conservative court or a fascist one?

In Monday’s ruling on the Utah vs. Strieff case, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, and Chief Justice John Roberts, argued that a police officer who randomly detains someone on the street without cause is not violating the rights of that detainee if they run their identification, find an outstanding warrant for a past offense, arrest them, and proceed to charge them with additional crimes based on what they find in a search. Any evidence found as part of such a search is now admissible in court.

So even if police violate the Constitution by stopping someone without suspicion, an arrest warrant entitles them to conduct a search.  In that circumstance, five justices said there is no "flagrant police misconduct."  Nina Totenberg at NPR:

The decision came in the case of Edward Strieff who was stopped after leaving a house that was under police observation because of an anonymous tip that it was being used for drug dealing. Though narcotics detective Douglas Fackrell later admitted he had no reason to believe Strieff had done anything wrong, he stopped him demanded that he identify himself and detained him while radioing in to see if there were any outstanding warrants against Strieff.

As it turned out, there was one for a minor traffic offense, so the detective searched Strieff and found a small amount of methamphetamines. The Utah Supreme Court later threw out the drug conviction because it stemmed from an illegal stop. Today, however, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the conviction. Writing for the five-justice majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that officer Fackrell's discovery of the outstanding warrant broke the connection to the unconstitutional stop. And that therefore the evidence found in the search could be used to prosecute Strieff. The generally liberal Justice Stephen Breyer provided the fifth vote to make a majority. 

I have to say that I'm stunned.  Not so much by Kennedy Breyer's fifth vote (thanks for the correction, Gadfly), but by all of the rest of the Supreme conservatives.  There's no life, liberty and pursuit of happiness to be found in this decision.  And it's not law and order, it's extending your local po-po a few more liberties as judge, jury, and executioner.

The decision was controversial because in some cities thousands of people have arrest warrants pending against them, mostly for traffic violations as insignificant as unpaid parking tickets.

There were 16,000 outstanding arrest warrants in Ferguson, Mo., as of 2015 — a figure that amounts to roughly 75% of the city’s population — the Justice Department found during its investigation into the 2014 police shooting of an unarmed, 18-year-old African-American man. Cincinnati recently had more than 100,000 warrants pending for failure to appear in court. New York City has 1.2 million outstanding warrants.

If you have a traffic ticket that you haven't paid, you have created probable cause to be arrested for something else.  Do you feel safer now?

With four major decisions due in the next week, including cases on affirmative action, abortion and immigration, Sotomayor's anger signals that what has been a quiet term since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia could get increasingly contentious.  

And three of the eight remaining decisions due are Texas cases.  Summer is about to get a lot hotter.  If some of you people living in swing states feel like the whole Supreme Court argument suddenly works for you, here's your hall pass.  And along that note, Quinnipiac's fresh polling suggests that Ohio and Pennsylvania still are, bur Florida may not be.

A lot of food for thought this morning.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is celebrating the summer solstice with a cold beverage and toes in the sand as it brings you his week's blog post roundup.

Off the Kuff sets a couple of hopefully attainable goals for Texas Democrats in 2016.

Libby Shaw at Daily Kos has had it with political inaction after yet one more tragic mass shooting. Enough is enough. The carnage has got to stop. Fire the cowards who enable gun slaughter: When Political Cowardice is Lethal.

Socratic Gadfly reads Bernie Sanders' call for election reforms and wishes he had real reform that included third parties.

The Texas Democratic Convention was held in San Antonio this past weekend, and by all accounts was underwhelming, as PDiddie at Brains and Eggs predicted.

Oil and gas exploration is threatening the health of all Texans, and TXsharon at Bluedaze has it all mapped out.

Egberto Willies interviewed an East Texas secessionist who's closely following the Brexit scenario to see if Texas can apply any lessons.

Texas Vox takes note of the 17th and most recent state, New York, to call for a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United.

Dru Murray at the Lewisville Texan Journal toured that city's newest whiskey distillery.

Neil at All People Have Value took his efforts to the streets to promote the value of everyday life to the corner of Cesar Chavez and Harrisburg in Houston. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

======================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Diana Wray recaps Dan Patrick's very bad day on Twitter following the Orlando massacre, and TFN Insider reviews state Rep. Matt Krause's claims that it "doesn't matter" that the Orlando victims were gay.

Kris Banks asserts that gun safety is an LGBT issue, and Nancy Sims mourns the tragedy in Orlando and asks what we all will do about it.

The TSTA blog calls for educators to unite against Donald Trump.

Highlighting the divide among Texas bloggers (and the rest of the Texas Democratic electorate), Somervell County Salon didn't attend the TDP convention this year and won't be voting for Hillary Clinton in the fall.

Ben Becker has some questions for TEA Commissioner Mike Morath about the STAAR test.

Alamo Heights ISD Superintendent Kevin Brown and several of his colleagues warn that we can no longer fool ourselves into believing that just because many students seem to do well and graduate prepared for college and career, that we can sustain those results over time.

Scott Braddock peeks behind the curtain at the handful of rich radicals who were trying to buy this year's legislative elections.

Grits for Breakfast goes beyond the narrow, politicized explanations for the spike in homicides last year.  He also has a terrific aggre-post regarding the limits of Politifact, crime wave hype, police pension politics, and Harris County as a driver of mass incarceration.

And in the latest installment of 'West Texas Exceptionalism', Make West Texas Great Again retells the stories of the Texas Cowboy Reunions from the 1930s up to the present day.

Revolutionary News Vol. 8: The Wisdom of Dads

Is your mind capable of holding competing thoughts simultaneously?  Here we go ...

-- Donald Trump does NOT have a path to victory in November.

To reach 270, Trump’s team is aiming to capture America’s Rust Belt — specifically, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin — where polls generally show him performing better than Mitt Romney did at this point in 2012. If he can capture Florida and keep North Carolina — the 2012 red state of the lightest hue — a strong showing that includes capture of the Rust Belt could, Trump’s team believes, put him over the top.

But the odds are long, veteran strategists said.

“It’s a fantasy. Romney got 19 percent of nonwhites. Is Trump going to do better? I don’t think so,” said Stuart Stevens, Romney’s 2012 campaign strategist. “It’s a joke. It’s just talking. It has no grounding in reality.”

-- Neither should anyone expect the entrenched insider Republicans to overthrow the will of their voters and install someone -- anyone -- else as the GOP nominee at their national convention in Cleveland next month.  There would be an actual revolution, complete with lots of shooting from many guns and real blood running in the streets if they tried.  Bernie Sanders does, in fact, have a greater chance of being the Democratic nominee than (fill in the blank with any name you like) has of being the Republican one.  And Bernie has essentially no chance at all.  Better chances of winning the Powerball.

Only a federal indictment can stop her now, and perhaps not even that.

That won't stop the Sandernistas from their #SeeYouInPhilly mission, and whatever they accomplish beyond a few platform positions that some will characterize as "transforming" the Democratic Party will be, in reality, negligible.  Their hearts are in the right place, I suppose, but they're using their heads to beat against the castle wall.  It will feel so good to them when they stop that.

The head of Debbie Wasserman Schultz on a pike comes about three months too late.

-- More evidence that they aren't getting on the Clinton bandwagon.

Hillary Clinton may be the presumptive Democratic nominee, but the fight to unify the party and its traditional allies in the wake of an unexpectedly long and contentious primary is poised to go on much longer.

The more than 3,000 Bernie Sanders supporters and progressive activists gathered here at the "People's Summit" have engaged in little open talk about Clinton, preferring instead to plot a path forward in the wake of the Vermont senator's defeat -- and questioning the motivations of the Democratic Party and the legitimacy of its nominating contest. 

"There is massive corruption in the machinery of the Democratic Party," said RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director of National Nurses United, the powwow's principal organizer, who had endorsed Sanders. "The only way that we can overcome that corruption and manipulation is for all of us not to work in isolation."

The People's Summit folks shut out Jill Stein and the Greens.  Everybody seems to want to start from scratch; I'm getting email now from the United Progressive Party. Their website is inoperable at this posting, but their logo should tell you everything you need to know.

The progressive left in the United States -- which has one foot inside the tent and one foot out -- has always been fractured and disorganized and ineffective as a result, and it may be even more so in 2016.  That would be unfortunate but not unexpected.

-- So Stein is going full-bore after the ruling duopoly.  Read all of this profile of her and her party; it's the best one yet.  Here's a snip about "safe states":

Sanders has drawn fire from Democrats for staying in the race despite lacking the delegates to win the nomination, but Stein may be even more politically brash than Bernie. Not only does she lack Sanders’ squeamishness about tipping the race to the Republicans, she is burying the tentative approach to presidential campaigning tried by 2004 Green candidate David Cobb. Following the 2000 election, when many blamed Nader for contributing to Democrat Al Gore’s defeat in Florida, Cobb pioneered a “safe-state” strategy—hunting only for votes in deep blue and deep red states, thus successfully protecting the Greens from the “spoiler” label. But he wasn’t successful in winning votes, garnering only 120,000 votes compared to Nader’s 2.9 million.

Stein defiantly told Politico Magazine she has a “No Safe State strategy,” because “there is no safe state under a Democratic or Republican future.” She’ll be stumping in Pennsylvania later this month.

--  Noam Chomsky has co-written a treatise about it; Counterpunch has counter-punched it. Bold emphasis below is mine.

[Chomsky and co-author John Halle] ... make an argument that by electing Clinton (i.e. by voting for her in swing states) this allows for the continuing growth of the left and reduces the amount of harm that will be caused over the next four years. I do not doubt their desire for radical change, nor do I doubt that they make these arguments because they find them morally justifiable in consideration of the consequences of our actions. Yet, it is dubious whether we can consider Clinton an LEV, just as much as it is dubious whether electing Clinton would enable the growth of the Left. I am not arguing from what they call a “politics of moral witness”, but argue in the same analytic vein that they have placed their brief. That is, is Clinton on topics such as climate change, trade, and militarism actually an LEV in comparison to Trump? Taking their criteria of consequences over rhetoric, there seems at best a “dimes worth of difference” on these topics.

Go ahead and try it on, see if it fits.

I'm an advocate of the "safe states" mission, but am swiftly moving in the direction of the "fuck 'em all" premise.  Some people say that's white privilege.  I say if someone wants to fix white privilege, then they need to go vote it out of office.  I won't be bothered one little bit by that.

-- The Texas Democratic convention this weekend past was, as I predicted, a joke.  These accounts of the steamrolling of Sanders delegates are essentially all you need to know about why there is a #SeeYouInPhilly movement.  But it was funny/not funny in pretty much every other way you can think of.  I'm glad John had a good time, though.