Category: reason

Earlier today, attorneys for Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, filed a notice of withdrawal of their prior motion seeking the recusal of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett from  Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar. As I noted here, after the initial motion was submitted, the Luzerne County Council voted in support of withdrawing the motion.

The notice of withdrawal makes no mention of the County’s vote. It reads as follows:

Given the Supreme Court’s safety protocols, I understand that the Motion to Recuse which was electronically submitted on October 27, 2020, has not yet been officially filed. Given the Supreme Court’s refusal to expedite consideration of the petition for a writ of certiorari, thus allowing the Order of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to stand presently, we therefore request that the Motion be considered withdrawn.

The docket for the case now indicates that the prior motion was not accepted for filing.

For reasons I explained here, I do not believe the applicable standards or relevant precedent supports Justice Barrett’s recusal, though each justice ultimately decides whether to recuse in a given case.

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Pennsylvania is the state most likely to decide next week’s presidential election, but a Supreme Court ruling this week has all but guaranteed that we won’t know who won the Keystone State’s 20 electoral votes on Election Day.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a Republican effort to force Pennsylvania to discard mail-in ballots received after Election Day, but the high court left open the possibility of re-hearing the case after the election if those ballots could alter the outcome. Last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered counties to accept and count ballots that arrive through November 6, three days after the election, even if those ballots don’t contain postmarks showing when they were mailed.

If the election in Pennsylvania is close—and if the overall results hinge on who wins Pennsylvania—those late-arriving ballots are likely to end up being 2020’s version of the infamous “hanging chads” that defined the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

“We need to brace ourselves for a ‘blue shift‘ in states like Pennsylvania,” advises FiveThirtyEight‘s Geoffrey Skelley. “That is, states that primarily report Election Day results first could show Republicans with an initial lead on election night only to then shift toward Democrats as more mail ballots are counted.”

In short, it looks like the best-case scenario in Pennsylvania is that a winner is announced before the end of next week. The worst-case scenario sees a Florida 2000–type mess and the election’s outcome landing in front of the Supreme Court.

If that happens, newly minted Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be part of the decision-making process. She did not participate in this week’s decision to punt the Pennsylvania ballot issue—or similar cases involving late-arriving mail-in ballots in North Carolina and Wisconsin—because she did not have time to fully review the cases. She did not recuse herself.

On Monday, Trump tweeted that states “must have final total on November 3rd.”

In Pennsylvania—and probably in a few other places too—that is simply impossible.

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Winter is coming, and diagnosed cases of COVID-19 are increasing in the U.S. (and in Europe). Way back on April 30, researchers associated with the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) released a report in which they outlined three scenarios, based on past influenza pandemics, for how the COVID-19 pandemic might play out in the United States over the next couple of years.

In Scenario 1, the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a series of repetitive smaller waves that occur through the summer and then consistently over a one- to two-year period, gradually diminishing sometime in 2021. The occurrence of these waves may vary geographically and may depend on what mitigation measures are in place and how they are eased.

In Scenario 2, the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a larger wave in the fall or winter of 2020 and one or more smaller subsequent waves in 2021. This pattern will require the reinstitution of mitigation measures in the fall, in an attempt to drive down the infection’s spread and to prevent health care systems from being overwhelmed. This pattern is similar to what was seen with the 1918–19 Spanish influenza pandemic.

In Scenario 3, the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a “slow burn” of ongoing transmission, but without a clear wave pattern. This third scenario likely would not require the reinstitution of mitigation measures, although cases and deaths would continue to occur.

So: Six months later, how has the pandemic actually been evolving? Let’s take a look at the the daily diagnosed cases as recorded by the COVID Tracking Project.

Eyeballing the trend in daily diagnosed U.S. cases would seem to rule out the slow burn of Scenario 3, but the data cannot yet distinguish between the peaks and valleys in Scenario 1 and the fall peak in Scenario 2.

Although the number of diagnosed cases is ascending, the COVID Tracking Project’s data on deaths have been flattish at around 900 per day. That suggests that a different, less vulnerable age cohort has been getting infected and that clinicians have gotten better at treating COVID-19 patients. But in the absence of widely deployed effective vaccines, that trend isn’t likely to remain flat if the pandemic tracks Scenario 2.

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Winter is coming, and diagnosed cases of COVID-19 are increasing in the U.S. (and in Europe). Way back on April 30, researchers associated with the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) released a report in which they outlined three scenarios, based on past influenza pandemics, for how the COVID-19 pandemic might play out in the United States over the next couple of years.

In Scenario 1, the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a series of repetitive smaller waves that occur through the summer and then consistently over a one- to two-year period, gradually diminishing sometime in 2021. The occurrence of these waves may vary geographically and may depend on what mitigation measures are in place and how they are eased.

In Scenario 2, the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a larger wave in the fall or winter of 2020 and one or more smaller subsequent waves in 2021. This pattern will require the reinstitution of mitigation measures in the fall, in an attempt to drive down the infection’s spread and to prevent health care systems from being overwhelmed. This pattern is similar to what was seen with the 1918–19 Spanish influenza pandemic.

In Scenario 3, the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020 is followed by a “slow burn” of ongoing transmission, but without a clear wave pattern. This third scenario likely would not require the reinstitution of mitigation measures, although cases and deaths would continue to occur.

So: Six months later, how has the pandemic actually been evolving? Let’s take a look at the the daily diagnosed cases as recorded by the COVID Tracking Project.

Eyeballing the trend in daily diagnosed U.S. cases would seem to rule out the slow burn of Scenario 3, but the data cannot yet distinguish between the peaks and valleys in Scenario 1 and the fall peak in Scenario 2.

Although the number of diagnosed cases is ascending, the COVID Tracking Project’s data on deaths have been flattish at around 900 per day. That suggests that a different, less vulnerable age cohort has been getting infected and that clinicians have gotten better at treating COVID-19 patients. But in the absence of widely deployed effective vaccines, that trend isn’t likely to remain flat if the pandemic tracks Scenario 2.

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Award-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, known for his civil libertarian writings on free speech and national security issues, announced on Thursday his resignation from The Intercept, the progressive news website he co-founded in 2014.

In his resignation letter, Greenwald—a recipient of Reason‘s Lanny Friedlander Prize for helping to bring to light Edward Snowden’s documentation of the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance of Americans—said the last straw was Intercept editors’ stipulation that he must remove “all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden” from an article he sought to publish.

“Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication,” writes Greenwald, adding that Biden is “the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.”

The Intercept released a statement accusing Greenwald of “distortions and inaccuracies—all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.” Editors said they would release a full accounting of what happened with his article in due time, and that “it is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept.” On Twitter, former colleagues have taken various positions.

Greenwald has yet to publish the article on his own—he has recently joined Substack—so it’s not yet possible to say whether editors’ concerns were reasonable, or even accurately described. The Intercept has certainly not been shy about criticizing Biden in the past, though its anti-Biden slant was stronger back when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), a progressive more in line with the publication’s outlook, was still a viable contender for the nomination.

Greenwald has a number of other concerns about The Intercept‘s trajectory, and these will be familiar to readers who have followed the woke takeover (for lack of a better term) of various newsrooms, including the The New York Times and The Atlantic. From Greenwald’s resignation post:

The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and—regardless of the risks involved—simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates….

Courage is required to step out of line, to question and poke at those pieties most sacred in one’s own milieu, but fear of alienating the guardians of liberal orthodoxy, especially on Twitter, is the predominant attribute of The Intercept’s New-York based editorial leadership team. As a result, The Intercept has all but abandoned its core mission of challenging and poking at, rather than appeasing and comforting, the institutions and guardians most powerful in its cultural and political circles.

Greenwald cites The Intercept‘s mistreatment of staff reporter Lee Fang, who was denounced as a racist for spotlighting a black man who expressed disagreement with violent protest tactics. Whether Greenwald has endured a similar thing is not quite knowable, but it certainly was true in Fang’s case—where the drama unfolded in public—that a willingness to question progressive orthodoxies got him in trouble.

Greenwald and Fang belong to a group of left-leaning writers who find themselves out of step with the modern progressive movement’s emphasis on elite cultural issues and trendy activism and who often agree with libertarian-leaning critics of performative social justice excess. Greenwald has also carved out a niche for himself as a leftist skeptic of the liberal mainstream’s reporting on Russian election influence, and he frequently appears on Fox News to deride other networks’ handling of these issues.

It should go without saying that this is not a First Amendment issue. Legally speaking, whether The Intercept is required to publish Greenwald’s article with minimally invasive editing is at best a contractual dispute. In any case, people will still be able to read Greenwald’s frequently excellent work.

But the broader issue raised in Greenwald’s resignation letter is one that should provoke plenty of concern—especially as Biden’s victory in the 2020 election looks likely. A mainstream press that looks at anti-Biden stories with suspicion, staffed by young progressives who think dissenting viewpoints should be squelched for fears of offending their own ranks, would be a danger to investigative journalism. And if The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden expose was an experiment in how such a thing will be handled by mainstream outlets and social media companies in the future, we are in for a rough four years.

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