So much for the belief that this is all “contained.”
The farcical thinking in last night’s futures trading has been erased as it is clear the Novel Coronavirus is anything but “contained.”
With Trannies hit hard (Boeing not helping) and the rest of the cash markets giving up gains…
And with bond yields plumbing the post-Soleimani missile strike spike lows, stocks have a lot of explaining to do here…
Source: Bloomberg
As Goldman warns, the situation could worsen in the near term, given lags between initial infection to the reporting of cases, and the intensity of travel in the coming week within and around China. In particular, 2020Q1 consumption growth in the region faces downward pressure if trips are canceled and travel is curtailed.
While the severity of the economic impact is unknown, it is likely to be short-lived should it follow the pattern of historical cases. In the SARS case and other recent outbreaks (e.g. H1N1, H7N9), the trough in activity typically occurred 1-3 months following the outbreak.
Increased public awareness, advancements in health technology, and better practices among both health professionals and government agencies may be mitigating factors relative to prior outbreaks such as the 2003 SARS episode; however, transportation links and travel intensity within China have increased significantly over this period which potentially could broaden transmission.
And in case you still believe this is ‘contained’, Wuhan Hospital has set up a temporary tent to cope with a large number of patients That May Appear]…
“We don’t want these things done in 2050, 2030, or even 2021,” Thunberg said. “We want this done now.”
The 17-year-old demanded participants “from all the companies, banks, institutions, and governments” in attendance to immediately halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, end fossil fuel subsidies, and divest from all fossil fuels.
“I’ve been warned that telling people to panic about the climate crisis is a very dangerous thing to do, but don’t worry—it’s fine—I’ve done this before and I can assure you: it doesn’t lead to anything.”
“Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour. We are still telling you to panic, and to act as if you loved your children above all else.”
Quite a speech, and the billionaire crowd at Davos soaked it all up, proudly patting themselves on the back and supporting Greta and her ‘movement’.
However, as Niall Ferguson, Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explained during a brief (and uncomfortable) interview on CNBC, it’s all bullshit.
“…remember there’s a cognitive dissonance at the heart of Davos.”
“Publicly, you have to agree with Greta Thunberg and you have to be part of the virtue-signaling community on climate change, on ESG.”
“Privately, you’re quietly agreeing with Trump.”
For the ultra wealthy, Ferguson said Trump remains the obvious favorite if faced with a choice between Trump and Democratic front-runners Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
“The dirty little secret of Davos 2020 is they all need him to get re-elected,” told Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christophorus, when asked if wealthy attendees are begrudgingly rooting for President Donald Trump. “Nobody wants to say that out loud.”
But the real point of note from Ferguson was his honest angst at Greta’s platform of lies.
“The reality is that the Green Deal [and its massive debt load] will amount to a drag on German manufacturing and the eurozone economy as a whole.”
“Privately, a lot of people are admitting that Trump is doing the stuff we should be doing – fiscal stimulus.”
Simply put, Ferguson dares to say that all the virtue-signaling is not in any way candid, because if it were, they would admit that
“60% of CO2 emissions since Greta Thunberg was born is attributable to China… but nobody talks about that. They talk as if its somehow Europeans and Americans who are going to fix this problem… which is frustrating because it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.”
Ferguson comfortably admits that there is a climate change problem, but that’s not the point. The point is what are we going to do about it, to which he asks rhetorically…
“If you’re serious about slowing CO2 emissions and temperatures rising it has to be China and India that are constrained.”
But Greta goes to New York or Davos:
“I don’t see her in Beijing or Delhi.”
Hard to argue with “facts” and “science” that this is true…
Now that the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump has begun, it has become evident that there are a great number of viewers who are hoping that Chief Justice John Roberts will use his magical powers to remove the president from office. Unfortunately, the chief justice does not possess magical powers.
In giving the Senate the “sole Power to try all Impeachments,” the Constitution specifies that “when the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.”
This provision has given rise to a great deal of undue optimism about what role the chief justice can, should, or might play in the impeachment trial. Some have suggested that the chief justice should bar senators who are insufficiently “impartial” from participating in the impeachment trial. Others have suggested that the chief justice should impose his own rules for the trial and determine who will and will not testify. Others have posited that the chief justice should issue whatever directives might be needed to insure a “fair trial.” Others have suggested that the chief justice should sanction Trump’s attorneys for lying on the Senate floor. Perhaps the chief justice should simply send the marshal of the Supreme Court to arrest the president and be done with it.
It is my sad duty to report that impeachment trials do not work that way. The chief justice is not sitting as the presiding judge in an ordinary criminal trial. He does not have the final say on how the trial is conducted, who serves as jurors, what arguments are presented, or what evidence is presented.
The chief justice performs the much more modest role of presiding officer of the Senate. This is such a negligible position that the vice president, who has no constitutional duties other than to serve as presiding officer of the Senate while waiting for the president to shuffle off this mortal coil, quickly decided that he had better things to do than sit around the Senate chamber. The task instead routinely falls to the president pro tempore of the Senate, an honorary office bestowed on the longest serving member of the majority party.
The chief justice’s job in a Senate impeachment trial is simply to administer the rules that the majority of the senators have themselves put in place. If a majority of the senators do not agree with how the chief justice is administering those rules, they can overrule him at any time. The chief justice has no authority to take unilateral actions in the impeachment trial and no capacity to make the senators do anything that a majority of them do not want to do. If Senate rules tolerate lies being said on the Senate floor, the chief justice has no authority to say otherwise. (If Senate rules insist that speakers should be civil and not call each other liars, the chief justice is expected to remind speakers who depart from that expectation as the Senate has traditionally understood it.) If the senators prefer that every senator be allowed to participate in the trial, the chief justice has no authority to remove them. If the senators prefer to hear from no witnesses, the chief justice has no authority to make them.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a student of impeachment history, understood how limited his role was when he presided over the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. He is said to have remarked afterwards, “I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well.” Chief Justice Roberts hopes to be able to say the same.
Chief Justice Roberts will not save you from a Trump presidency or a ridiculous Senate impeachment trial.
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President Donald Trump in his speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, announced, “Today, I’m pleased to announce the United States will join the one trillion trees initiative being launched here at the World Economic Forum.” Why join this initiative? “We’re committed to conserving the majesty of God’s creation and the natural beauty of our world,” added Trump.
Entirely unmentioned by the president is that the primary motivation for the initiative that aims to plant 1 trillion trees is to slow down man-made climate change by removing gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “Restoring, conserving and planting a Trillion Trees by 2030 can deliver massive and urgently needed progress against climate, biodiversity and sustainable development goals,” states the WEF press release on the initiative.
The inspiration for the WEF’s Trillion Tree Initiative was a presentation at the organization’s meeting last year by Swiss ecologist Thomas Crowther who asserted that there is enough land to accommodate 1.2 trillion more trees. Currently, our planet is home to about 3 trillion trees. In July of last year, Crowther and his team calculated in Science that planting a little more than 1 trillion additional trees would significantly cool the earth by sequestering in growing trees about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. Implausibly assuming that human carbon dioxide emissions stopped now, that goal would notionally lower atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations back to about where they stood a century or so ago.
Crowther and his colleagues calculated that there are about 900 million hectares (3.5 million square miles—an area about the size of the entire U.S.) of land that is appropriate and could be available for planting a trillion trees around the world. Most of the land is in big countries like the United States, China, Russia, Canada, and Brazil. For example, in the U.S., the researchers estimate that 103 million hectares (about 400,000 square miles—an area about 1.5 times the size of Texas) could be planted without impinging significantly on farming, urban areas, and so forth.
The U.S. Forest Service estimates that, in 1630, forests occupied just over 400 million hectares (1.6 million square miles) of land area that eventually became the United States. That’s about 46 percent of the land area. In the second half of the 19th century, forest clearing in the U.S. averaged about 13 square miles per day every day for 50 years. By comparison, the recent rate of forest clearing in Brazil is about 10 square miles per day. By 1910, U.S. forest area had fallen to about 305 million hectares (1.17 million square miles). As of 2012, it had expanded to 310 million hectares (1.20 million square miles) while U.S. population has more than tripled.
The upshot is that meeting the Trillion Tree goal would essentially restore U.S. forest area back to about where it stood in 1630.
Is planting a trillion trees by 2050 a plausible goal? The world may have reached global peak agricultural land in 2000, suggesting the more land is being freed up that could be restored to nature. In fact, a 2018 study in Naturereported the happy news that global tree canopy cover increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016. That’s a rate of about 25,000 square miles per year. To plant a trillion trees occupying 3.5 million square miles by 2030—as outlined in the WEF proposal—would require a 14 times boost (350,000 square miles per year) in the rate of global forest expansion. Meeting that goal by 2050 would mean quadrupling the rate of forest cover expansion.
The Trump administration has not yet provided any proposals aimed at fulfilling the president’s WEF commitment to participate in the initiative.
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Dark horse presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) has filed an eyebrow-raising lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for defamation over comments the former Secretary of State made on a podcast suggesting that Gabbard was a Russian stooge.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claims that Clinton’s comments have damaged Gabbard and democracy itself.
“Clinton had no basis for making her false assertions about Tulsi—and indeed, there is no factual basis for Clinton’s conspiracy theory,” reads Gabbard’s complaint. “Tulsi brings this lawsuit to ensure that the truth prevails and to ensure this country’s political elites are held accountable for intentionally trying to distort the truth in the midst of a critical Presidential election.”
In October 2019, Clinton appeared on the podcast Campaign HQ, where she, while not mentioning Gabbard by name, implied that the Hawaiian representative was being “groomed” by the Republicans to launch a disruptive third-party bid, something that would apparently delight the Russian government.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming [2016 Green Party candidate] Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset,” said Clinton on the podcast.
When asked the following day if these comments were about Gabbard, a Clinton spokesperson said, “If the nesting doll fits.”
In November, Gabbard sent a letter to Clinton threatening her with a defamation suit unless she retracted her comments. With no retraction forthcoming, Gabbard is making good on her threat.
Her lawsuit asks that Clinton be made to pay damages, and, incredibly, that the court issue an injunction prohibiting the “publication or republication” of Clinton’s Russian asset comments.
This is not the first unconventional lawsuit filed by Gabbard during her presidential campaign. She also sued Google for violating her First Amendment rights after the company briefly suspending her Google Ads account following a July Democratic debate.
Obviously the First Amendment’s free speech protections don’t restrict the actions of private corporations. Gabbard’s Google lawsuit, Reason‘s Billy Binion noted at the time, was more about capitalizing on anti-Big Tech animus than making substantive legal claims.
The presidential contender’s lawsuit against Clinton similarly seems to be motivated by political considerations.
Gabbard has made opposition to U.S. interventionism—and the support it has among Clinton-style Democrats—the signature issue of her campaign. Her lawsuit gives her an opportunity to throw some spicy disses in that direction.
Gabbard, her lawsuit notes, is running for the same office that Clinton “has long coveted, but has not been able to attain.” The 2016 Democratic nominee is also referred to as “a cutthroat politician by any account.” (Tell us how you really feel, Tulsi!)
Ironically, for all the injury that she is claiming, Gabbard actually saw a poll bump after Clinton’s remarks. That’s because all publicity is good publicity when you are running a long shot campaign for president. Clinton’s comments got Gabbard’s name in the news, increasing her visibility to voters. The lawsuit seems like a calculated attempt to replicate that result.
Whether her lawsuit has any legal merit is something the courts will have to decide, a decision that will turn in part on whether Clinton was making a factual assertion, or if she was engaging in good old-fashioned political hyperbole.
Regardless of how the legal battle shakes out, one politician sung another over their rhetoric is not healthy. Democracy requires that people can say nasty, even untrue, things about their opponents and rivals without the fear of being dragged into court.
Should that become the norm, courts (not voters) will decide the acceptable parameters of political speech and debate.
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Quite a few of the most important sectors of the global economy are already “in a recession”, and yet somehow we are still supposed to believe that the economic outlook for the rest of 2020 is a positive one.
I am not buying it, and I know that a lot of other people aren’t buying it either.
The global economic slowdown that began last year is really picking up pace here in early 2020, and global financial markets are perfectly primed for a meltdown of epic proportions. Unfortunately, most people simply do not understand how badly the global economy has been deteriorating. For example, global auto sales have now fallen for two years in a row, and even CNN is admitting that the global auto industry has been in a “recession” for some time…
The global auto industry plunged deeper into recession in 2019, with sales dropping more than 4% as carmakers struggled to find buyers in China and India. The pain is likely to continue this year.
The number of vehicles sold across major global markets dipped to 90.3 million last year, according to analysts at LMC Automotive. That’s down from 94.4 million in 2018, and well below the record 95.2 million cars sold in 2017.
Here in the United States, people keep trying to tell us that the economy is in good shape, but last year auto sales fell here too…
Nonseasonally adjusted passenger car sales in the U.S. for 2019 declined 10.9% to 4.7 million units, versus 5.3 million units in 2018, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis.
Sales of trucks, minivans and SUVs for the year totaled 12.2 million units, up 2.8% from the 2018 figure of 11.9 million units.
The overall nonseasonally adjusted U.S. vehicle sales for the period fell 1.4% to 17.0 million units, versus 17.2 million units a year ago.
Very few analysts are expecting these trends to turn around in 2020.
And considering how important the auto industry is to the global economy as a whole, that has very serious implications for all of us…
Recession comes with big ramifications for the global economy. According to the International Monetary Fund, the car industry accounts for 5.7% of economic output and 8% of goods exports. It is the second largest consumer of steel and aluminum.
Meanwhile, we are experiencing a very deep transportation recession in the United States as well. The following comes from Wolf Richter…
Shipment volume in the US by truck, rail, air, and barge plunged 7.9% in December 2019 compared to a year earlier, according to the Cass Freight Index for Shipments. It was the 13th month in a row of year-over-year declines, and the steepest year-over-year decline since November 2009, during the Financial Crisis
How in the world can the U.S. economy possibly be in “good shape” with absolutely horrific numbers like that?
When the amount of goods being shipped around the country by truck, rail and air is steadily falling, that is a crystal clear indication that economic conditions are slowing down.
And one of the biggest reasons why a transportation recession is upon us is because it looks like we are in a “manufacturing recession” too.
US manufacturing took a turn from lousy to worse in December, according to the Manufacturing ISM Report On Business, released today, with employment, new orders and new export orders, production, backlog of orders, and inventories all contracting.
The overall Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) dropped 0.9 percentage points from November to 47.2% in December 2019, the fifth month in a row of contraction, and the fastest contraction since June 2009.
Overall, 2019 was the worst year for U.S. industrial production since 2015.
Across the Atlantic, things are even worse in Europe. The following comes from Zero Hedge…
The manufacturing downturn across Europe deepened in the last month of 2019 according to the latest survey data released on Thursday.
IHS Markit Eurozone Manufacturing PMI lost momentum last month, printing at 46.3, down from 46.9 in November, if modestly above the 45.9 expected. The PMI averaged 46.4 in 4Q, a seven-year low.
When will global authorities finally admit that we have a real problem on our hands?
How much worse do the numbers have to get?
This month, the Baltic Dry Index has been plunging dramatically. For those that don’t know, the Baltic Dry Index is a key indicator of where global trade is heading, and on Monday it plummeted to a nine-month low…
The Baltic Exchange’s main sea freight index hit a nine-month low on Monday, dragged down by falling rates of capesize and panamax segments as world trade continues to slump.
The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks rates for capesize, panamax and supramax vessels that ferry dry bulk commodities across the world, dropped 25 points, or 3.3%, to 729 (according to Refinitiv data), the lowest level since April 2019
This is not what a healthy global economy looks like.
Of course many of those in positions of authority will continue to insist that everything is just fine for as long as possible.
In fact, back in 2008 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke kept telling us that a recession wasn’t going to happen even after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression had already started.
Just like back then, all of the hard economic numbers that we have are all saying the same thing.
Both the U.S. economy and the global economy as a whole have been slowing down for quite a while, and it looks like big trouble is ahead of us.
That means that now is not the time to be spending lots of money, making big financial commitments or going into debt.
Those that are wise will be positioning themselves to survive the coming economic storm, but unfortunately most people are paying no heed to the warning signs.
Just like last time around, most people have tremendous faith in the system, and so they will be absolutely blindsided by the crisis that is coming.
In the end, multitudes will be expecting the government to bail them out somehow, but considering the fact that we are already 23 trillion dollars in debt that simply is not going to be possible.
Adam Schiff Caught “Mischaracterizing” Evidence Day One Of Senate Impeachment Trial
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was caught “mischaracterizing” evidence on day one, Tuesday, of the Senate impeachment trial.
The left-leaning Politicoclaims that Schiff released inaccurate information about a text message between Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas on July 3, 2019, about organizing a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Schiff’s report was sent to House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) last week that summarizes “a trove of evidence from Lev Parnas, an indicted former associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani,” Politico reported.
Watch Schiff make up more fake dialogue
It was bad enough he made up the President’s phone call in the House, now he’s fabricating what the president of Ukraine said (no pressure) in the Senate
The report claims in a text message conversation between Giuliani and Parnas, Parnas said: “trying to get us mr Z.” The remainder of the letter was redacted.
Politico added, “But an unredacted version of the exchange shows that several days later, Parnas sent Giuliani a word document that appears to show notes from an interview with Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, followed by a text message to Giuliani that states: ‘mr Z answers my brother.’ That suggests Parnas was referring to Zlochevsky, not Zelensky.”
A Republican aide told Politico that Schiff’s assumption that “mr Z” is Zelensky is ludicrous.
“The most charitable view of the situation is that [Schiff’s] staff committed the equivalent of Congressional malpractice by not looking more than an inch deep to determine the facts before foisting this erroneous information on his colleagues and the American public,” said one senior GOP aide.
“But given the selective redactions and contextual clues, it seems as though Chairman Schiff sought to portray an innocuous meeting with Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky as an insidious one with the President of Ukraine simply because both of their surnames start with the letter Z,” the GOP aide added.
“Mischaracterized”? Yeah right… It’s Schiff. He’s a liar. Schiff may have mischaracterized Parnas evidence, documents show https://t.co/KaCjfdVbMp via @politico
Sleazeball Schiff busted AGAIN! This dude simply cannot tell the truth. He’s allergic to facts. Don’t trust a word out of his lying mouth. https://t.co/S6XLdX54kK
Schiff has issued false information in Trump-related investigations before.
It was reported in September 2019 that Schiff fabricated the account of a July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, to analogize the interaction to a scene from a mafia drama.
And last month, Schiff said during a Fox News interview that he wasn’t willing to admit wrong in his defense of the FBI’s FISA process: “I’m certainly willing to admit that the inspector general found serious abuses of FISA that I was unaware of.”
Trump responded by saying, “Schiff’s correcting the record memo has turned out to be totally wrong (based on the I.G. Report)! A very big lie. @MariaBartiromo And @DevinNunes has turned out to be completely right. Congratulations to Devin. The Fake News Media should apologize to all!”
Schiff’s correcting the record memo has turned out to be totally wrong (based on the I.G. Report)! A very big lie. @MariaBartiromo And @DevinNunes has turned out to be completely right. Congratulations to Devin. The Fake News Media should apologize to all!
Dark horse presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) has filed an eyebrow-raising lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for defamation over comments the former Secretary of State made on a podcast suggesting that Gabbard was a Russian stooge.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York claims that Clinton’s comments have damaged Gabbard and democracy itself.
“Clinton had no basis for making her false assertions about Tulsi—and indeed, there is no factual basis for Clinton’s conspiracy theory,” reads Gabbard’s complaint. “Tulsi brings this lawsuit to ensure that the truth prevails and to ensure this country’s political elites are held accountable for intentionally trying to distort the truth in the midst of a critical Presidential election.”
In October 2019, Clinton appeared on the podcast Campaign HQ, where she, while not mentioning Gabbard by name, implied that the Hawaiian representative was being “groomed” by the Republicans to launch a disruptive third-party bid, something that would apparently delight the Russian government.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming [2016 Green Party candidate] Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset,” said Clinton on the podcast.
When asked the following day if these comments were about Gabbard, a Clinton spokesperson said, “If the nesting doll fits.”
In November, Gabbard sent a letter to Clinton threatening her with a defamation suit unless she retracted her comments. With no retraction forthcoming, Gabbard is making good on her threat.
Her lawsuit asks that Clinton be made to pay damages, and, incredibly, that the court issue an injunction prohibiting the “publication or republication” of Clinton’s Russian asset comments.
This is not the first unconventional lawsuit filed by Gabbard during her presidential campaign. She also sued Google for violating her First Amendment rights after the company briefly suspending her Google Ads account following a July Democratic debate.
Obviously the First Amendment’s free speech protections don’t restrict the actions of private corporations. Gabbard’s Google lawsuit, Reason‘s Billy Binion noted at the time, was more about capitalizing on anti-Big Tech animus than making substantive legal claims.
The presidential contender’s lawsuit against Clinton similarly seems to be motivated by political considerations.
Gabbard has made opposition to U.S. interventionism—and the support it has among Clinton-style Democrats—the signature issue of her campaign. Her lawsuit gives her an opportunity to throw some spicy disses in that direction.
Gabbard, her lawsuit notes, is running for the same office that Clinton “has long coveted, but has not been able to attain.” The 2016 Democratic nominee is also referred to as “a cutthroat politician by any account.” (Tell us how you really feel, Tulsi!)
Ironically, for all the injury that she is claiming, Gabbard actually saw a poll bump after Clinton’s remarks. That’s because all publicity is good publicity when you are running a long shot campaign for president. Clinton’s comments got Gabbard’s name in the news, increasing her visibility to voters. The lawsuit seems like a calculated attempt to replicate that result.
Whether her lawsuit has any legal merit is something the courts will have to decide, a decision that will turn in part on whether Clinton was making a factual assertion, or if she was engaging in good old-fashioned political hyperbole.
Regardless of how the legal battle shakes out, one politician sung another over their rhetoric is not healthy. Democracy requires that people can say nasty, even untrue, things about their opponents and rivals without the fear of being dragged into court.
Should that become the norm, courts (not voters) will decide the acceptable parameters of political speech and debate.
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Rose Mary Knick, the plaintiff in Knick v. Township of Scott, with her lawyers from the Pacific Legal Foundation. (Pacific Legal Foundation).
My forthcoming article, “Overturning a Catch-22 in the Knick of Time: Knick v. Township of Scott and the Doctrine of Precedent” (Fordham Urban Law Journal, symposium issue) is now available for free downloading at the SSRN website. The article is coauthored with Prof. Shelley Ross Saxer of Pepperdine University, a leading property law scholar. Here is the abstract:
The Supreme Court’s decision in Knick v. Township of Scott was an important milestone in takings jurisprudence. But for many observers, it was even more significant because of its potential implications for the doctrine of stare decisis. Knick overruled a key part of a 34-year-old decision, Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank, that had barred most takings cases from getting a hearing in federal court.
Some fear that the Knick decision signals the start of a campaign by the conservative majority on the Court that will lead to the ill-advised overruling of other precedents. In this article, we explain why such fears are misguided, because Knick’s overruling of Williamson County was amply justified under the Supreme Court’s established rules for overruling precedent, and also under leading alternative theories of stare decisis, both originalist and living constitutionalist.
Part I of this Article briefly summarizes the reasons why Williamson County was wrongly decided, and why the Knick Court was justified in overruling it on the merits — at least aside from the doctrine of stare decisis. The purpose of this Article is not to defend Knick’s rejection of Williamson County against those who believe the latter was correctly decided. For present purposes, we assume that Williamson County was indeed wrong, and consider whether the Knick Court should have nonetheless refused to overrule it because of the doctrine of stare decisis. But the reasons why Williamson County was wrong are relevant to assessing the Knick Court’s decision to reverse it rather than keeping it in place out of deference to precedent.
Part II shows that Knick’s overruling of Williamson County was amply justified based on the Supreme Court’s existing criteria for overruling constitutional decisions, which may be called its “precedent on overruling precedent.” It also addresses Justice Elena Kagan’s claim, in her Knick dissent, that the majority’s conclusion requires reversing numerous cases that long predate Knick. Part III explains why the overruling of Williamson County was justified based on leading current originalist theories of precedent advanced by prominent legal scholars, and by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his recent concurring opinion in Gamble v. United States. In Part IV, we assess the overruling of Williamson County from the standpoint of prominent modern “living constitutionalist” theories of precedent. Here too, it turns out that overruling was well-founded.
This article focuses on the stare decisis issues raised by Knick. Last summer, I published another article that explores the underlying merits of the decision, aside from the the issue of precedent.
Ironically, the article on Knick and stare decisis turned out to be substantially longer than the the piece focusing on the case as a whole! That’s because it took a lot of space to go over all the different major theories of precedent out there, and explain how they apply to Knick’s overruling of Williamson County.
If nothing else, I learned about the various theories of stare decisis in the process of writing this article. Shelley and I also got to consult with many of the leading scholars working in this field, who generously gave useful advice.
Among the many notable works on the subject of precedent, I recommend recent books by Randy Kozel and Bryan Garner, and this article by Larry Solum. In the Knick article, we also discuss major contributions by many other constitutional law luminaries, including the Volokh Conspiracy’s own Randy Barnett and Will Baude, and judges such as Elena Kagan, Antonin Scalia, and Amy Coney Barrett.
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IRGC Commander & “Soleimani Ally” Shot Dead By Masked Assassins On Motorcycle
An elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander has been shot dead by masked assailants in front of his house in southwestern Iran. Crucially, he was a mid-range to possibly top commander of the IRGC’s hardline domestic wing, the Basij militia, and a close ally of recently assassinated Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, reports state news IRNA on Wednesday.
The details clearly suggest that it was an assassination — at this point by an unknown entity or group — given two men riding a motorcycle drove by and essentially executed him in the street.
Reuters has described the slain Basij militia commander, Abdolhossein Mojaddami, as “an ally of Qassem Soleimani”— who was himself assassinated by US drone strike on January 3rd.
US media wing Radio Farda describes: Abdol-Hossein Majdami Head of Basij militia in Darkhoein rural district of Shadegan killed Jan. 22nd 2020.
“IRNA said that Abdolhossein Mojaddami, a Basij commander in the city of Darkhovin in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, was shot on Tuesday in front of his home by two men riding a motorcycle,” Reuters reports based on official Iranian state media quotes. “There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, IRNA said.”
Two gunmen on a motorcycle, armed with an assault rifle and a hunting rifle, ambushed Mojaddami, IRNA reported. Other Iranian media said the gunmen’s faces were covered with masks and that four shots were fired.
During sporadic protests going back to November, when unrest was fiercest inside Iran following a dramatic government gas subsidy cut — which saw economic protests give way to broader anti-regime mass gatherings — hundreds were reported gunned down by Basij militia working in tandem with police.
Tehran authorities defended security services’ use of deadly force, claiming “rioters” were attacking banks, oil facilities, and government buildings.
Interestingly, the Khuzestan region witnessed severe unrest as protesters clashed with police in November, and has since seen sporadic anti-government activity. It’s also considered one of the key oil-producing regions of the country.
Of course, this latest killing also brings up the possibility of a foreign or external intelligence agency operation, though it remains speculation. One likely candidate alleged to enjoy US and Israeli covert backing is Mujahideen e Khalq (MEK), considered by Iran and many other countries as an active terrorist organization. Groups in Iran linked to the MEK have been previously known to be involved in political assassinations.
Essentially a paramilitary cult devoted to overthrowing the Iranian government, the MEK is under the tight control and leadership of the charismatic opposition leader Maryam Rajavi, and is suspected of previously conducting brazen targeted killings of high level Iranian figures, especially nuclear scientists and engineers for years, likely at the bidding of foreign intelligence services. Until a few years ago the MEK was a designated terror group by the US State Department, though delisted under the Obama administration.
