“What’s the matter with Kansas?” is a question sure to be asked whether or not the state’s voters decide to ratify Value Them Both on August 2.

The proposed amendment would overturn the 2019 Kansas Supreme Court verdict Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, which Kansas Reflector reporter Allison Kite notes was something of “a state-level Roe.” While among other restraints, “patients seeking abortions must sit through waiting periods and efforts to persuade them against the procedure,” it did reliably guarantee a baseline of access. Though the result was far from laissez-faire, let alone opponents’ fever dreams of state-subsidized abortion on demand, removing it would set the stage for efforts at more restrictive policies up to a near-total ban.

In 2018, Eric Flint took a break from writing an alternate history of the 1630s to foresee that an impending repeal of Roe would not only unleash immediate moves to restrict abortion in “15 to 20 states” but that an equal number would “immediately liberalize abortion back to where it was decades ago before the right succeeded in chipping away at it.” Flint added that the steady liberalization of views on abortion in urban centers nationwide would give the pro-choice side an advantage beyond the relatively even divide between the two at the state level.

A decisive popular veto of Value Them Both would not only reaffirm the right of abortion for Kansans (and for the Missourians who account for nearly half of the abortions in their neighboring state).  It could serve as a model for state-level Roes in other contested states. So could a backlash if Value Them Both’s passing proves to be against the tide of public opinion.

The Garrison Center’s Thomas L. Knapp has noted (“Abortion: No, Dobbs Isn’t ‘Decentralization’,” June 25) that “decisions concerning abortion were largely decentralized to the lowest possible level, that of individual choice … such decisions are now largely centralized into the hands of state legislatures.”

The outcome of Kansas’s referendum could revive Roe‘s decentralization of choice to the individual by decentralizing it to the states.  Then Dorothy and her little fetus too won’t have to travel to Oz.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Pay attention to that woman behind the voting booth curtain” by Joel Schlosberg, Argus Observer [Ontario, Oregon], July 24, 2022

“Recent Supreme Court rulings have threatened the rights of New Yorkers to make decisions about their own bodies and our right to protect New Yorkers from gun violence,” proclaimed New York state governor Kathy Hochul in a statement released from Albany on the first of July.

That New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen struck down New York state restrictions on what items its citizens can carry on their bodies, and that supporters of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision see it as offering protection from violence, shows the inconsistencies in the very divisions entrenched by the Court.

Gerald Ford noted in a 1974 Presidential address that those realizing that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have” are nonspecialists who “are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit.” Giving the Supreme Court outsize power to override the legislative and executive branches of government has likewise been the sort of blunder in political strategy made by the most devoted political strategists.

For partisans aiming to scare their bases into line, nothing beats a Supreme Court balanced like Humpty Dumpty on the edge of the wall of polarization between the red and blue states. The toppling of that balance has cracked what protection they gave to civil liberties on one side or the other of the culture wars. The dissipation of what Clint Eastwood called the “liberal dither over Miranda rights” has been made clear by how ignored their overruling by Vega v. Tekoh has been compared to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And all the efforts of the kingmakers will never unscramble it.

Eric Flint, a science fiction writer whose prognostications are informed by a history of hard-nosed activism, observed in 2018 that the notion that “the Supreme Court is the all-powerful institution in American politics” was disproved by its history.  “Slavery, segregation, slavish obedience to corporate welfare, grossly unconstitutional internment … are gone. Not thanks to the Supreme Court” — whose Justices consistently upheld them all — “but thanks to the struggles of the millions of men and women who fought against these injustices through the various means for mass action in a democratic society.”

The way out of the political disorder that was inevitably going to be unleashed by the Supreme Court’s essentially elitist nature lies in society routing around it, not just via more responsive and local sectors of governance but by expanding the realms of individual choice without waiting for its go-ahead.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “It’s coming from inside the courtroom” by Joel Schlosberg, Reno, Nevada Gazette Journal, July 10, 2022
2. “It’s coming from inside the courtroom” by Joel Schlosberg, USA Today, July 10, 2022
3. “It’s Coming From Inside The Courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, July 10, 2022
4. “It’s coming from inside the courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Sidney, Montana Herald, July 10, 2022
5. “It’s coming from inside the courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, July 11, 2022
6. “It’s Coming From Inside the Courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 12, 2022

The Simpsons have gotten real.

The show’s title family closed its thirty-third season on May 22 with a lengthy sequence acknowledging what has long been pointed out: that the setup in which “Homer lives a comfortable life with his wife and three children and has a secure job at the [Springfield nuclear power] plant, despite his nonchalance, laziness and incompetence,” as James C. Wilson noted in 2015, strains plausibility even in a cartoon.

In the not-roaring economy of the 2020s, Bart Simpson would face even longer odds making a living as a performer than his creator beat making him one of the media icons of the 1990s. Lisa Simpson’s book smarts might get her through college, but not out of paying the ensuing debt.

The Simpson kids face that uncertain future while having access to consumer technology unimaginable at the time of their debut. Indeed, the plot of the season finale itself ensues from Marge Simpson streaming a British series at her leisure on the family’s living room TV, which has been upgraded from the clunky cathode ray tube box like the ones that picked up The Simpsons on the fifth of five channels in many real-life Springfields to a slick flatscreen offering a world of choices in crystal clear high definition.

The shift is explained to be the result of “rampant corporate greed, Wall Street malfeasance and the rise of shortsighted politics” by the Clinton administration’s Robert Reich. This is at odds with the show’s takes on wealthy business owners over the decades, which if anything have softened as Mr. Burns’s unrepentant miser has shared the screen with more charitable successors. Bill Gates went from smashing Homer’s startup in season 9’s “Das Bus” to being in the admittedly small Beloved Billionaires Club in season 32’s “Burger Kings.”

Reich declared in a May 21 Facebook post that “monopolies are only good for the monopolists.” It might have been awkward to note how the firms that dominated the middle of the 20th century could pursue long-term projects like Bell Labs, and offer long-term employment, via the same insulation from competition that made them big. Likewise, to reverse “the decline of unions” Reich should take heed of the advice of labor historians Jonathan Cutler and Thaddeus Russell that “when unions compete, workers win.”

The board game Monopoly originated from the insight of Henry George that monopolization of land rent could explain the paradoxical “increase of want with increase of wealth.” This analysis was extended to areas where monopoly was taken for granted by Bertrand Russell, who observed that “in labor disputes, the employer is the immediate enemy, but … the real enemy is the monopolist,” and Benjamin Tucker, who proposed alternatives to the “money monopoly” over a century before cryptocurrency.  Without Mr. Monopoly’s help, a business as small as Homer Simpson’s “Mr. Plow” snow-shoveling service can cut the economic power of Mr. Burns down to size.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Mr. Burns Needs Mr. Monopoly” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 3, 2022
2. “Mr. Burns Needs Mr. Monopoly” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon [Indiana] Reporter, June 3, 2022