One Year Anniversary Edition

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Let us be blunt, because there is not much time to lose before midterm elections; Biden, now a year and a half into his term, has abysmal ratings. A Reuters/ Ipsos poll put Biden’s approval rating at 36% in June, just days before SCOTUS vacated Roe v Wade reverting abortion legalization to the states and before the most significant gun control act in 30 years passed in Congress. Seemingly detached from whatever happens in greater Washington D.C., Biden’s ratings just sink lower and lower. The core issue that potential US voters are actually worried about is the economy. A staggering 80% of people polled by the Wall Street Journal said the economy is “poor or not so good”. Whether that is truly Biden’s fault, whoever is sitting in the White House at a given time gets the blame or the glory. In answer to that same poll, respondents said they are not satisfied at all with their financial situation (33%), they have no chance to improve their standard of living this year (46%) and a strong 38% said their financial situation is worse now than in the past few years. Much of the media coverage of the 2022 mid-terms has centered around whether former President Donald Trump is still a kingmaker within the GOP. But, at least as important, and likely more so, is the frank conversation about who will run for the Democrats in 2024 and who has any chance of winning?

“The underlying theory on which Casey rested — that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides substantive, as well as procedural, protection for “liberty” — has long been controversial.”

“Roe conflated the right to shield information from disclosure and the right to make and implement important personal decisions without governmental interference.”

“Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.”

At the start of June, the public and dramatic defamation trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard came to a close, with Depp being awarded 13 million in damages from his ex-wife. The court case was initiated through a defamation lawsuit filed by Depp, over an article written by Amber Heard that was published in the Washington Post. Although Heard never mentioned her ex-husband explicitly in the article, the defamation complaint filed by his legal team argued that “Although she never identified him by name, the op-ed plainly was about Ms. Heard’s purported victimization after she publicly accused her husband, Johnny Depp (“Mr. Depp”) in 2016”. Heard characterized herself in her Washington Post article as a “public figure representing domestic abuse” and by the end of the trial, that was true in a way. She had become a symbol for abuse, but not as the victim.